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This past year, I worked in the office of a professor on sabbatical who has an impressive library of queer and gender studies. They openly use the words queer and trans while embracing the question of their own identities, and they write to figure it out. They also have better language than I did then.
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These days, I teach undergraduates far more versed in both queerness and theory than I was then, than I am even now. As a first-generation graduate, I didn’t even know what “queer theory” meant. Unlike many of my peers, I didn’t study queer theory in college. The concept was coined by late Cuban queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz in his 2009 book Cruising Utopia - an iconic work of queer theory I only recently encountered. ***Lately I’ve been thinking about the concept of “straight time” - the way a life unfolds, or is expected to unfold, within heteronormative frameworks: you grow up, go to college, get a job, get married, buy a house, have kids, retire, have grandkids, die. “Language was part of what shaped our reality,” she writes.įor so many of us, it takes a while to find the words. That it’s fluid and indefinite, bending and shifting along with us, never a static thing. In an introductory note to her memoir, Goetsch writes of the importance of language - of both having it for ourselves and our bodies, and understanding that it changes over time. Even then, I didn’t have the language for it. It is like a valley, spread out before you, hiding in plain sight.”Īs someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s - roughly twenty years after Diana Goetsch, in the small-town Midwest to her small-town Long Island - I didn’t even suspect I was queer until I was in my mid-twenties. “There is simply no knowing a thing if it is self-secret,” Goetsch writes, “perhaps because that thing refuses to know itself in your presence. So often it’s assumed that queer folks know the truth of ourselves at an early age and we’re too afraid to come out. “Gender,” she writes, “may be the only category of human experience where what you long to be is what you are.”īut it wasn’t just fear that kept her in the closet. She also spent those years going by the name she was born with, dressing in a shirt and tie, being called “Mister” in her classrooms. She spent those years writing and publishing poetry, teaching English and writing in high schools and prisons throughout New York City and beyond. In her moving new memoir, This Body I Wore, just out from FSG, Goetsch traverses those first five decades of her life - living in the body of a man, knowing she was different, but not understanding how. ***Diana Goetsch came out as a trans woman when she was fifty. What I know now, years later, is that at some point not long after publishing the post, I deleted it. I don’t remember if I responded to his comment. I’d watched so many friends come out, come into themselves, and I was ever stuck in the dust, filled with self-doubt, a late-bloomer who still hadn’t quite bloomed. I felt, as I had many times before, like I was way behind everyone else. What had just seconds before felt like celebration turned to stupidity and shame. It was from an older man, a gay poet I knew only professionally. I felt relief.Īnd then a new message popped up. Emoji hearts and words like “Welcome” and “I love you” and “I’m so happy you’re here” dotted my feed. Immediately after publishing the post, a cascade of support unfurled in real time. It was the first time I’d come out publicly. Some things that grow inside us have very deep roots. Although I was long gone from that life, I was still nervous. I’d grown up in a small Christian town in the Midwest, having for years belonged to an evangelical youth group that, among other things, believed homosexuality was a sin. I crafted the post carefully (what I mean is I probably spent hours drafting and redrafting, wondering if I could even shore up the courage to publish it), still terrified by the implications of writing those few words down.
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I don’t remember what the post said, exactly, but I know I mentioned being queer, a word that for me encompasses both sexuality and gender identity. I’d been out for years to my closest friends, but there were some things I’d never said aloud to other people in my life.