A Queer Conversation: Discussing Self-Acceptance and Solidarity

This week, I wanted to honor Pride month. I am relatively new to the LGBTQ+ community, and still figuring out how I identify (I am at least bisexual, but suspect that I am actually pansexual). Instead of writing about myself, I wanted to talk with my beautiful and inspiring friend, Cailan.

Cailan is one of the most loving and caring people I've ever had the privilege to meet. She's double majoring in anthropology and psychology and does significant work researching and volunteering her time to learn about issues relating to migrants crossing the US-Mexico border. She has an incredible, gorgeous, and badass girlfriend named Deveyn who just graduated with a degree in political science and is on her way to becoming a lawyer. To say the two are a power couple is an understatement. 

Cailan and I met just over a year ago and she's quickly become one of the most important people in my life. She has educated me about sexuality in our time as friends and single-handedly helped me accept myself as queer (and NO, we've never dated. Gay girls can be friends without romance just like straight men and straight women can be!). Who better to talk with me about self-acceptance and solidarity on the 50th anniversary of Pride month? 

Talking about this with Cailan was incredibly fun and enlightening, as we each are able to talk to each other from a place of constant love and support.

Me: Hello beautiful friend! Are you ready to do this?

Cailan: Hell yeah I am.

Me: I was hoping we could start with you telling me a bit about how you first came to realize and accept you were gay. 

Cailan: When I was about 15, one of my friends came out to me as pansexual and told me that meant she liked people regardless of their gender. I thought, "Wow! I didn't know that I had any friends that were gay," and then it turned out that ALL my friends were actually gay because they all started coming out after that. One of my friends came out as bisexual, another one came out as asexual, and then they asked me "Cailan, what are you?" and it was the first time I actually had to think about it. 

Back when I was 12, I used to think to myself, "There's no way I am gay because God wouldn't do that." It took me a while to get to a place where I could accept myself. I initially came out as bi, but since then I've realized that I'm actually not sexually attracted to men, like, at all. 

[Both of us laugh at this, knowing Cailan is incredibly gay]

Now I identify as lesbian, but sexuality is fluid and things can change!

Me: No one should be holding themselves or each other to permanently stick with whatever label we identify with in the present.

I think it's interesting that you've had friends who have different sexualities that you could learn from. Do you think you would've been able to come to the realization that you were queer or been able to come out as soon as you did without them? 

Cailan: No. My friend who identified as pansexual was the one who initially started talking to us about what different sexualities were. On top of that, we all got on Tumblr and that's always how it starts.

Me: Tumblr was the gateway drug to realizing you're queer. 

Cailan: I started being exposed to more gay content about what specific labels mean and other people's coming out experiences online. I thought, "All these feelings I had about girls in the past weren't just, 'She's cool and I want to be friends with her,' they were really crushes on them." All the "crushes" I had on boys growing up were mostly there because I felt like I had to have those. 

Me: Now that I've finally gotten to this point where I'm actively identifying as a queer person, looking back at all the people that I've liked, or thought I liked, I find myself wondering why I liked them. All the crushes I had on girls in high school were a lot more intense and I was very much drawn to them. Whereas with guys, a lot of the time, it was more the first guy I seemed to have a good time with and seemed to obviously be into me I would just be like "Yup! That's cool. Let's do this." 

Cailan: I ended up saying that I had a crush on my best friend, who ended up being the only guy I've ever dated, because other people thought I had a crush on him, and I was like, "Well, if I have to." 

Me: We're not only taught that we're supposed to date guys but also that we're supposed to want to date guys. We end up telling ourselves we want that. 

I think it's interesting because the only kind of coming out story I have is when I told my aunt, who I love very much but I know she was raised in a conservative Mexican household, that I'm bisexual. Her response was "... No you're not" 

She was saying, "I think you're just being influenced by the media and you think you might be bisexual but you're really not." It's funny because to an extent that's true. The only reason I've gotten to this point of being able to actually claim to be bisexual is because of representation in the media and because I've been able to talk about it with friends like you. I've only been able to become comfortable with my own sexuality with the help of other people who have shared their stories. 

Cailan: These feelings people have aren't necessarily new, it's just that now people are finally being given the vocabulary to express them and talk about it. If you're learning a new language, but you don't have the vocabulary to talk about certain things, you either have to talk about other things or try to express your feelings in a different way. 

Cailan holding up a picture of her and her girlfriend, Deveyn, on the left. The author, Risa, on the right.

Me: I feel really lucky that we're living at a time where the language around queerness is more widely known and accepted. That brings me to talking about Pride month. Since this year is the 50th anniversary of the first ever Pride march and the creation of pride month, would you talk a little bit about what Pride month means to you? 

Cailan: I remember when I was 15, it was June 25, 2016 when we gained our right to same sex marriage across the United States. I think that day sticks out to me in relation to that question because my friends were over and we were all super stoked. We all knew that we were gay, and for me identifying as bi at the time, I knew if I ended up with a man I would be able to marry him but the same wouldn't necessarily be true if I ended up with a woman; we wouldn't have the same rights as a straight couple would. For me, that was a really cool day and a great Pride month to be a part of because I had that moment where I realized I suddenly had more rights, which was amazing. I say that, though, a day after Trump rolled back the healthcare rights of transgender people. 

Me: I want to focus on what that day meant to you a little more. For a lot of my life I've been willing to admit that I'm attracted to and like girls but I never let myself think of marrying a girl as a real possibility for myself. For a long time I wasn't taking my own sexuality seriously in that way. Your story of witnessing this Supreme Court decision makes me wonder if that day had the same effect of actually allowing you to see a future with a woman in a way you hadn't allowed yourself to before. 

Cailan: To an extent it did. I had only ever had a boyfriend by that point, so seeing that allowed me to think, "I don't necessarily need to have a boyfriend! I can have a girlfriend."

Me: Had you already come out by that point? 

Cailan: I don't remember exactly when I came out to my parents but I know it was before the Supreme Court decision happened.

Me: What was your coming out experience like? 

Cailan: I was sitting in the living room with my parents, and I was talking to them about my friend who was asexual, meaning she didn't really have any kind of sexual attraction to anyone. She had just come out to her mom, but it didn't go well. I was telling them about this as they were folding laundry and my mom stopped me and said, "So, when are you gonna come out to us?" I froze. I really didn't know what to say. I didn't think I talked about gay rights enough for them to be that suspicious. I guess my overwhelming support for my friends who identified as anything but heterosexual was just like a big rainbow flag to them. 

Me: What an incredible line. 

Cailan: You get it?? Like a red flag?? But rainbow?? so it's gay?? 

Me: Yes I get it, I get it. 

Cailan: [Laughing] Good, I didn't want to let that go over your head. I ended up telling my parents I'm bisexual. My Dad asked what that meant and my mom stepped in and said "It means she's sexually attracted to both men and women," and I was like "Cool. My work here is done. See you at dinner." 

Me: I love that.

Cailan: But at the same time I was genuinely disappointed because I'd been thinking of coming out to them for a while. I wasn't necessarily scared about how they would take it because I knew they were accepting, but I wanted to come out in a really cool and creative way and they robbed me of that! I wanted to bake a really cool rainbow cake that you cut into it.

Me: It's a gay! Like those gender reveal parties when people are about to have a baby? It's like that. 

Cailan: [Shaking her head at me] It's exactly like that. I was robbed and I was genuinely mad about it for a while. 

Me: How did it make you feel at the time knowing you had accepting parents while you had friends who didn't? 

Cailan: I definitely felt bad about it. I knew that was a privilege I had. Knowing my parents will never kick me out because of who I am or threaten to take away my college funding. I'll never have to be afraid of bringing home a partner or have to worry about if my parents understand who I am and how I feel. My parents also tried to be open and accepting to all my friends who were struggling so they could adopt them and give them a safe space. 

Me: That's genuinely wonderful. How do you think your parents being so accepting has shaped your experience with sexuality in general? Do you think you would have explored it as freely if they hadn't been? 

Cailan: Probably not. I probably would've stayed in the closet until college. Even though they were open and accepting, I still had to explain a lot to them. A few weeks after coming out as bisexual my mom asked me if I only liked girls, and I had to remind her no, I was bi. She ended up being right so maybe she just saw that I was heading down this path to being a lesbian before I realized it. Not to say that's okay when people do that to bi people. I think she just caught on that I was only talking about girls. It's been a process of educating my parents, too but because they were so accepting it allowed me to educate myself in the first place and openly process my feelings. 

Me: I'm really glad you had a positive experience coming out. I think more and more people are having that these days. Even though queerness is becoming more accepted and talked about in the media, we're still seeing a lot of transphobia, especially as of late with Trump rolling back protections for trans people in healthcare. 

Cailan: There's even gatekeeping within the LGBTQ community of not accepting trans people. There's a lot of trans misogynists and TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) who try to dictate the gender identities of other people. While that can happen with sexuality too, I feel like people target the trans community so much more. So many people are trying to police other people's bodies, saying if you don't experience dysphoria or if you don't transition, then you don't get to claim this identity. But they're not claiming an identity, that's literally just who they are!

Lately the media has been reporting a lot about trans people dying and misgendering the people in the reports! That's horrible. 

I've also seen people rewriting the LGBTQ acronym, only writing "LGB" or writing "LGBQ" instead. And I've always understood it to be "LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQ+, and so on." You always have the T in there. I'm not a member of the trans community so I can't speak for them on whether they would want to be included in the acronym or not. It still pisses me off when people just forget about the trans community entirely. 

Me: Why do you think it's so important for other queer people to stand with and support the trans community? 

Cailan: Because we're ALL fucking targeted by cis-gendered and heterosexual people. So targeting people who are also queer and non-gender-conforming doesn't help anyone. We're supposed to stand together as a community. 

Me: Why do you think it's important for all kinds of people who aren't cis, straight, white males to stand in solidarity with each other. 

Cailan: It's all tied together. Black trans women are targeted from multiple sides because of overlapping facets of their identities so it's important that we address every aspect so that we can ALL have human rights, rather than just targeting homophobia, because it intersects with race and all other aspects. 

I've been reading about the border and immigration, and how looking gay in itself makes you a target to border patrol agents. If you are a gay person of color, you become even more of a target to the people trying to keep you out. 

Me: It's hypocritical to fight for equality in one way if you're not supporting other people also fighting for their equality. 

Cailan: Yeah, if you're saying that you're a feminist, but you're hurting people's communities in other ways, then are you really a feminist? 

Me: That's something we all have to keep in mind as we try to be allies to all kinds of movements.