I’m sitting across from Alex in stuffed chairs we’ve rolled into the consultation room at Spectrum for our interview. During my time at Spectrum, this space was mostly a storage room and my private interview space. Alex, nineteen years old, is a clean-cut white kid with blond hair and blue eyes. He wears his hair short and spiked and is typically in pressed jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with sneakers. He exudes a hyper energy and talks a million miles a minute. Alex is relatively new to Spectrum, but has been coming several times a week for a few months. Today is the first time I’ve seen him in a while, though, because he was away on a cruise with his family. I’ve not heard any Spectrum youth talk about going on a luxury vacation. This, and that he has his own car, certainly marks him as a class-privileged kid. Alex only came out as gay a little more than a year ago and he’s still trying to learn the ropes, so to speak. He describes himself as a virgin and has never been in an intimate relationship with a man. During our interview I asked him, “When did you know what gay was? How did you figure that out?” He replied:
I [was] probably like thirteen. And . . . it was just more like, my family would . . . once in awhile—they weren’t big on it—but they’d say like, “He’s so gay” or “He’s a faggot.” Stuff like that. And like, all the time that I was agreeing . . . I was the agree-er—but I actually asked, I was like, “What’s gay?” Finally I asked [my brother], “What do you mean?” He’s all . . . “It’s this nasty guy who sleeps with another guy.” That’s all he said. . . . And I’m like, Oh my god. Okay. And I wanted to dig more. So I was like, “Well, what’s wrong with it?” And he was like, “Well, I don’t know, they’re just attracted to the same sex.” And I was like, Oh shit, that’s me . . . a male that is attracted to a male. And I was like, Oh god, I look at males more than I do girls. That makes me gay.
Is it the case that a boy who “looks at” boys more than girls is therefore gay? I learned by talking with Alex that he retroactively pinpointed his understanding of himself as gay to a handful of interactions throughout his late childhood and adolescence where he recognized that when it came to characters on TV shows, pop stars, and in some cases, sneaking peaks at pornography, he found himself to be more interested in males than females. And although Alex learned that to call someone gay or a faggot was an insult of sorts, he did not actually know what “gay” meant. He had to ask his brother—who, in his infinite wisdom, shared that being gay was “nasty” but couldn’t really explain why. By the time Alex and I met, he was most certainly interested in dating men but had not yet had the opportunity, and while he never had sex with them, he had dated girls before. For Alex, who by all accounts is a masculine, white, class-privileged, able-bodied young man, being gay meant having sexual desire for other men, and he learned the very clear message from his family that it was not okay to be gay.
The social theorist Michael Warner, editor of the 1993 essay collection Fear of a Queer Planet, uses the term “heteronormativity” to describe “culture’s assurance [read: insistence] that humanity and heterosexuality are synonymous.”1 His point is that, as long as heterosexuality and the male/female gender binary are understood as ahistorical, fixed characteristics of humanity, anyone who does not conform to that norm is seen as less than human. Alex’s brother cannot articulate why same-sex sexual desire is wrong, just that he knows it is wrong. The act of describing to his little brother that a man having sex with another man is “nasty” functions as a straightening device, or how Sara Ahmed describes heteronormativity:
Think of tracing paper. Its lines disappear when they are aligned with the lines of the paper that has been traced: you simply see one set of lines. If all lines are traces of other lines, then this alignment depends on straightening devices, which keep things in line, in part by holding things in place. Lines disappear through such alignments, so when things come out of line with each other the effect is “wonky.” In other words, for things to line up, queer or wonky moments are corrected. We could describe heteronormativity as a straightening device, which rereads the “slant” of queer desire.2
Heteronormativity keeps the straight body in line. While Alex, at quite a young age, experienced an orientation of desire toward men, the heteronormative policing he encountered—in the exchange with his brother, for example—worked to straighten him out. In this case, it straightened him out enough that he learned to keep his desires to himself and to try to resist them until he was twenty years old. While, as I’ve explained, this book is about queer-oriented young people, it also illuminates the process of straightening that dominates social norms.
I often asked interviewees to explain to me what their sexual identity means to them. As with Alex above, I wanted to know, how did he come to understand himself as gay? In this chapter, rather than try to explain the origin of same-sex desire or homosexuality, using the experiences shared with me by Spectrum youth, I show the various ways that these young people came to adopt their various sexual identities.
The accounts here show how the adoption of a sexual identity is a very pragmatic process that often has little to do with one’s actual sexual behavior. Among their generation, homosexuality—as sexual conduct—is less and less stigmatized, as long as it resembles heteronormative expectations of sexuality and gender. For the youth of Spectrum, it is a “spatially and temporally” queer assemblage, and not simply their sexual orientation toward particular gendered bodies, that defines who they are.3 All of us make meaning of our sexual selves within the context of a patriarchal, heteronormative structural system, in which symbols of masculinity and homophobia, which reiterate the normalcy of heterosexuality, inform identity development. Because Spectrum youth are socially outside the norm, owing to the various marginalized identities they occupy, they are queerly oriented and often excluded from the heteronormative mainstream. The youth of Spectrum are made queer by a straight society. Ahmed states that “queer unfolds from specific points from the life-world of those who do not or cannot inhabit the contours of heterosexual space. After all, some of us, more than others, look wonky.”4 The discussion that follows will show how some youth come to understand themselves as LGBTQ because of the way their conduct violates heterosexual scripts or because of their genderqueerness, while others come to their queer identities in the context of oppressive sexed, raced, gendered, and classed regimes, and finally how identities are formed as a result of discovering and becoming part of a community that validates one’s way of being in the world.
Some youths, when I asked them how they knew they were gay (or otherwise), recounted stories of looking at media as kids and being more interested in people of the same sex as themselves. For example, Alex told me that he did not like himself when he was younger. When I asked him why, he told me this story:
I always knew there was something different about me. . . . I’m not a weirdo—but when I was younger . . . say we were watching Power Rangers, they [his brother and cousins] would always be checking out the girls, and I would be like, “Oh, look at the guys.” Like Britney Spears, I was like, I love her music, she’s pretty, but I love her music more. So I mean I always knew something was different, but I was ashamed kind of?
Fiona, whom I only met once, is a nineteen-year-old woman with creamy white skin, blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, and smiling eyes. Dressed in a loose-fitting flower-print tank top, jeans, and sandals, she sat down with me for an interview one hot summer day. She told me the story of how she got lost trying to find Spectrum the first time she came about a year ago. She had to call her dad for help, at which time he disclosed to her that he knew just where The Resource was because, as a pansexual person, he had been there himself! Fiona also identifies as pansexual now but considered herself straight until she was about sixteen, when she adopted a bisexual identity. When I asked her how she knew she was straight or bisexual, she said, “I don’t think I ever knew I was straight because . . . you know how when you’re young—you’re a little kid—and you’re like, I’m gonna look at porn? . . . I always looked at the women. Always.” Although at first glance it is not surprising that as gay and pansexual-oriented youths, Alex and Fiona, respectively, disclosed that they found members of their gender more attractive than members of another gender, my point is not to examine the origin of their gendered desires. Rather, I am curious about the ways that they learned their gendered desires had a name.
Brian is a self-described “effeminate male” with a mischievous smile. He is warm and friendly and goes out of his way to make others feel at home at Spectrum. He describes himself as having “a bit of both genders of the binary inside.” Although he is “biologically male” and somewhat awkward in the day-to-day, he transforms into a confident woman for Friday night drag shows. An activist invested in social justice, he is twenty-one years old, white, and queer identified. He came out to his parents and started coming to Spectrum when he was in seventh grade, which makes him one of the longest-attending Spectrum youths I spoke with. As a peer-staff member, Brian was welcoming to me from the start, and we have a comfortable, friendly relationship with each other. Similar to Alex’s and Fiona’s experiences described above, Brian shared that he had an early interest in the male body and would sketch nudes of men in a notebook. In the following example, he describes how his behavior with his first girlfriend, whom he was dating when he came out, did not conform to gendered expectations and therefore became one of the clues to his understanding of himself as queer:
We were like, cuddling on the couch in my basement and I remember her being the one, kind of . . . you know, little spoon, big spoon? She was the big spoon of the cuddle kind of. And then she kind of said, “You know, actually, you’re supposed to be like, have your arm around me and whatnot.” And I’m like, “Oh, ok, like . . . that felt more comfortable like, your being the more, you know, dominant one.” So, I think that was another wake-up call for me, you know?
Brian described being aware of how his feelings of desire and expressions of intimacy did not fit society’s expectations, therefore internalizing a sense of being different or of somehow doing it wrong when comparing his behavior or feelings with that of friends or siblings. Yet again, what is interesting to me is how his girlfriend came to understand that being the “little spoon” was gendered female.
Heteronormative sexual scripts reinforce the logic of the sexual order. John Gagnon and William Simon’s theory of sexual scripts is useful here. Sexual scripting theory shows how individuals employ a prescribed set of behaviors (scripts) in their interactions with others, which help people to understand when an interaction is sexual or not. These scripts are learned and socially influenced. These sexual scripts are how we differentiate between an intimate sexual encounter with a romantic partner and an intimate medical encounter with a doctor, for example, whereby the former should elicit feelings of arousal and desire and the latter should not.5 Heteronormative sexual scripts reinforce dominant ideas about sexuality, in which the only acceptable sexual behavior, desires, or feelings occur between members of another, not the same, sex. The young people whose experiences are detailed here are responding to the dominant sexual order as they associate non-normative gender expression and/or violation of heterosexual scripts with proof of their gayness.
Although it is true that more people are identifying as LGBTQ at a younger age, it is not the case that all LGBTQ people adopt this identity earlier than before.6 Coming out at an earlier age is tied to queerness, in particular, genderqueerness.7 In the case of the youth discussed here, identifying as LGBTQ is more often tied to their genderqueer behavior as children and less about a strong innate sexual orientation or same-sex sexual behaviors. In addition, previously unrecognized and/or stigmatized options of various sexual and gender identities are now available to young people, allowing them to understand themselves as LGBTQ sooner in their lives. Many genderqueer young people, because of society’s stubborn conflation of gender with sexuality, may even be prodded or pushed towards a sexual minority identity by parents, peers, teachers, and more, who assume their gender non-conformity to be a marker of their sexuality.
Miguel, a Mexican immigrant who is twenty years old and identifies as a gay man, has only recently started coming to Spectrum. His frame is small—he’s shorter than me—and he is light skinned. Today he is wearing plaid shorts, an aqua blue polo shirt, and slip-on skate shoes. He wears his hair short and neat. Miguel speaks with his whole body, raising his arms and hands over his head, sitting up with one leg folded underneath him. At one point during our interview he became particularly animated as he stood up and walked around the small room. He wears a silver chain around his neck, which he yanks down on and tosses back behind his shoulders as he speaks. Miguel has an exuberant, warm personality, which he expresses by frequently reaching out and touching my hands or legs as he tells me his story. He came out to his friends and father in high school, but he says he always knew there was something different about him. Miguel’s adoption of a gay identity happened in the United States in the context of an urban high school, but the following description is from his childhood in Mexico, where he was marked as a young boy for not being appropriately masculine:
My voice was really . . . high pitched. I did sound like a girl. But that doesn’t mean they had to give me, they used to label me, “Oh you little girl, you little this.” Name calling. Being beaten you know, because maybe the sound of my voice didn’t go with my boy body, you know? And maybe that’s why I got picked on.
Jamil wears a long-sleeved hooded T-shirt he made himself in fashion class. The fabric is black with rainbow colored pinstripes, and there is a pocket for his hands sewn onto the front. Jamil loves music and dreams of being a pop star someday. He is outgoing and friendly, always smiling, revealing a small gap between his teeth. His hair is dark with a vestige of a bleached blond streak at his brow. A dark-brown-skinned, multiracial boy who is seventeen years old, he identifies his sexuality as open or bisexual and had been coming to Spectrum for about nine months at the time of his interview. He was cautious at the beginning of his interview. The verbal assent form I review with each interviewee includes language warning the youth to not talk about illegal activity and suggests that talking about the past can sometimes trigger trauma. I feel that sometimes, after going over the assent, youth participants wonder what they have gotten themselves into, and Jamil appeared particularly overwhelmed at first. But once we started talking he relaxed and shared many details with me about a complicated childhood that involved some quite serious traumatic events involving the adults in his life. Generally speaking, though, Jamil has a loving family and is a happy-go-lucky person. He began identifying as bisexual in middle school. Like Miguel, he also experienced policing of his gendered behavior from his young uncles who pressured him to participate in masculine activities like football, which, he says, “wasn’t ever my thing.” He was also teased and bullied in elementary and middle school by peers for not conforming to a typical masculine gender:
I went through a lot as a kid. I was struggling with . . . depression; I was facing bullying, and . . . being tormented for being the weird kid basically all the time. . . . Elementary school . . . no, middle school was worse. There were some days where people would be nice to me, but there’d always be that kid that would always be, “Oh, you’re fruity and blah, blah, blah, and your voice is really high and blah, blah, blah . . .”
The previous examples show how these boys embody traits that go against gender norms, like having a high-pitched voice or by “acting fruity.” The youths made meaning of the gender and queer policing they experienced by describing them as the characteristics that make them gay or bisexual.
Although it was predominantly among boys that I found gender non-conformance to be a signifier of sexuality, when I asked Zia, who is nineteen, Black, and identifies as queer, if her grandma—her primary caregiver—knows about her sexuality and that she hangs out at Spectrum she said, “When I told her, she just kind of knew . . .’cause I’m butch as fuck [laughs].”
Heteronormativity is reinforced by gender norms—what we understand to be appropriately masculine or feminine. For example, rigid boundaries around femininity and masculinity, like the difference between a feminine- and a masculine-sounding voice, are used to shore up the logic of the sexual order. Others often label persons who violate those rigid gender norms, like men with lilting voices or women construction workers, as sexually deviant; violation of gender norms becomes a (faulty) tool used to predict another’s sexual orientation or identity. So even as heterosexuality is becoming less compulsory, for the young people of Spectrum, the case remains that simply failing to demonstrate normative gender is enough to have one’s sexuality called into question.8 Sexuality is so seamlessly attached to gender and buoyed by heteronormativity that those who come off as genderqueer in behavior, appearance, or affect are quickly policed by family and peers for being sexually deviant.
This is important because ostensibly there are many gay, lesbian, and bisexual (LGB) individuals who do not share this childhood narrative of difference simply because nothing about their affect or behavior led others to question their sexuality. In fact, many people who adopt an LGB identity as adults may not have questioned their own heterosexuality as young people at all, far less had it questioned by others. Yet at the same time, some people who are teased and bullied as children for being queer remain heterosexually oriented throughout their lives. By the time these young people are telling me their story, they are already claiming a gay, bisexual, or queer identity. Thus, when asked to look back on their childhood and consider when they first realized they were gay, many of them identify this gendered difference as being a logical explanation for their gayness.
Surely many, many people experience feelings of desire for, and/or engage in sexual conduct with, members of their same gender. Similarly, many individuals who come off to others as genderqueer or violate heterosexual scripts never experience same-sex desire or sexual conduct. Therefore, neither of these things—same-gender desire nor queer gender—is what makes a person gay. In her book Not Gay, Jane Ward gives several examples of times and places where straight-identified men engage in homosexual behavior, while never wavering in their self-understanding of being straight. Ward explains it is precisely these men’s unfailing belief in their innate sexual orientation that results in them never attaching gay meaning to their experiences with same-sex sexuality.9 For Alex, Fiona, and Brian, something similar happens: The fact of their same-sex desire is the explanation for their gay, pansexual, or queer identity. Desire and behavior are not in and of themselves gayness; being gay or straight is a socially constructed process of identity formation. A process of straightening—social pressure to understand one’s desires through the lens of the dominant norm—creates queer subjects. In the next section, I explore the intersections of sexuality, gender, race, and class.
Travon, a sixteen-year-old boy who has a white mother and a Black father, is an intellectually inquisitive kid with caramel-colored skin and short, curly hair. In his jeans, plain T-shirt, and clean sneakers, he showed no allegiance to any particular scene or subculture. A bright intellectual, Travon appeared relaxed during our interview. Although he didn’t often meet my eyes, instead looking off to the side as he spoke, every once in a while, when he really wanted to get my attention, he’d look me straight in the eye and hold my gaze. Charming in his bashfulness, he seemed relatively comfortable talking with an adult, perhaps owing to his mother, with whom he has “hours-long conversations” with about politics, education, and religion. He explained how he had begun to consider ideas about gender fluidity and queerness, ideas that suggest sexuality and gender exist on a continuum rather than being fixed categories and that they can change over time. When I asked Travon how he sexually identifies, he answered that he identifies as queer:
I did actually do it for a couple of different reasons. . . . I was in the time of my life. . . . When I originally came out I was bi, I came out only as bi. And then I realized I like guys better so I said I was gay. And then I started having reoccurring feelings for women so I went back to being bi and I was like, this is too much work, I identify as queer, it covers it all and it also doesn’t exclude people like trans people and stuff and . . . I felt that it was a lot cooler to include everybody cause I’m not trying to build walls, like, if I like you then I’m going like you.
Travon’s struggle to find an identity that suits him is difficult when the only options are gay, straight, or bi. His experience of his sexuality is that it’s not fixed in such a way as to make those choices obvious. The young people at Spectrum seem to be aware of the fact that naming your sexuality based on the gender of the person you are attracted to doesn’t always make a lot of sense.
A majority of the youths I interviewed identify their sexuality using widely recognized terms signifying the gender of the persons they are sexually attracted to, terms like “gay,” “lesbian,” and “bisexual.” But this generation of youth have proliferated the number of sexual identity terms and now include identities like “pansexual” and “omnisexual” that describe one’s sexual identity beyond the confines of gender. These terms acknowledge that sexual desire based on gender is a limited way to frame sexuality; one can be attracted to a variety of people for a variety of reasons. Some of the youths identify as queer, which quite intentionally distances identity from sexuality and/or gender exclusively and instead frames one’s overall identity in opposition to the normal. In particular, a queer identity is often used by youth as a way to distance themselves from what they perceived to be a white, middle-class LGBTQ identity.
Ernie, whom I first introduced explaining the difference between gay and queer, is a twenty-one-year-old “queer-identified Chicano.” Ernie says others often think his race is a “Black mix.” His skin is reddish brown, and he keeps his dark, wavy hair cropped close to his head. Ernie is a sophomore at a state college nearby, is a leader in the youth community as an anti-racist and immigrant and queer rights activist, and is a longtime Spectrum regular. Ernie’s moods are tempestuous, swinging from reflective to boisterous. As he explains what being queer means, he also talks about his race and class as being important to him:
I like to call myself queer just ’cause it’s . . . more like, fluid, like, it’s very fluid. . . . You’re not set to a standard or anything. . . . I dunno . . . people wanna be like “oh you’re bisexual” but it’s not, it’s like past that, it’s like, another level. . . . It’s more fluid still. . . . I would date a girl, or a woman-identified person . . . and I’ve dated a man, like it just, that wouldn’t matter to me. So that’s one part of it and then just like also being a person of color and then also somebody who’s like poor, and just stuff like that.
Ernie expresses a queer-of-color perspective, in that his sexuality is not the only thing that makes him queer. As the sociologist Roderick Ferguson has shown, “Black subjects in general, and working-class black subjects in particular [are] racialized as pathologically nonheteronormative.”10 Racial dynamics complicate homonormativity by blocking gay people of color from access to mainstream gayness. Combined with other marginalized identities, such as class, body size, ability, and nationality, the youth of Spectrum reveal that the more outside the white, middle-class norm you are, the more queer you are.
When Ernie first started coming to Spectrum three years ago, he says, “I couldn’t identify with anybody else . . . mainly everybody else here was . . . white. It just felt really weird for me, like not being around other brown people. That’s why I didn’t come [often].” Shortly after, César, who is Latinx, started working at Spectrum, which made a big difference to Ernie and his experience. He started coming to the space more frequently and has since noticed that there are many more youth of color attending. Even though Spectrum, prior to César, was ostensibly a safe place for LGBTQ youth, its whiteness made it inaccessible to queer youth of color like Ernie. Another example of the way race intersects with sexuality and gender identities comes from Zia.
Zia, who describes herself as a “big, Black, bull dyke,” is multiracial with coffee-colored skin and wears her hair in dreadlocks that stick out from under a knit cap. Today Zia is wearing a man’s button-up shirt with a tie and vest, along with skinny jeans and sneakers. Her fingers are always wrapped in rings, her wrists in colorful bracelets. Zia has been coming to Spectrum for four years. Like Ernie, Zia describes the alienation of being queer within the lesbian community:
Being weird and queer is probably, fucking, probably [pause] being weird was just hard as fuck. But being Black is just hard as fuck. And then you just add gay on top of that, and some other shit, it’s just fucked. . . . And then it really comes to pressure, like, I can’t be like ghetto and stuff [among white lesbians], and I like being ghetto ’cause I think it’s funny, but it’s like, you know when you’re around . . . I guess sophisticated fondue? Like, “Look at me, I shop at Café Lesbian,” it’s like you have to be so, like, I guess proper. . . . You can’t say like “fuck” or “shit” or, you know, none of that . . .
In addition to feeling like she can’t be “ghetto” around particular white lesbians, she goes on to explain how among particular white, “hipster” activists, she gets accused of not being Black enough because her knowledge of hip-hop is lacking, while similarly, her queer lesbian identity results in her not being Black enough for “my own culture.” While Travon shows how the term “queer” can be used to imply inclusiveness, an expansion of ways of being in the world, Ernie’s and Zia’s accounts suggest how they use “queer” to distinguish their experience from that of an LGBTQ mainstream.
Ferguson explains how patriarchal heteronormativity acts as a form of social control to define boundaries of, not just “normal” sexuality, but all normal ways of being in the world. His queer-of-color analysis “interrogates social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideas and practices.”11 Therefore, in U.S. society, one’s race and class is integral to experiences of inclusion or exclusion. For white, cisgender, middle-class, able-bodied people, queerness—a marker of not belonging—is often limited to non-heterosexual displays of gender and sexuality or out-of-the-ordinary forms of heterosexuality like polyamory, the practice of being involved intimately with multiple people consensually, for example. All of the ways one cannot belong multiply for those who exist outside the middle and upper classes and who are not white, particularly dark-skinned people of color and some immigrants.
Yet simply being queer, as in “odd,” “weird,” or an outsider, is enough to trigger exclusion based on the raced, classed, and gendered aspects of heteronormativity. Jack is an example of a white, middle-class youth who has been marked throughout his life by queerness. An eighteen-year-old transman who identifies as pansexual but “leaning much more toward gay male,” he spoke to me about the social risks of being different, something he referred to as “social death.” Long before he started to publicly identify with LGBTQ identities, Jack understood himself to be different or queer. He says, “Well, I was already that weird nerd that no one would play Magic with. When the D&D nerds think you’re too nerdy to play games with, you know . . .”12 In addition to being “too nerdy,” throughout his childhood Jack was gendered male by others so frequently that his mother was constantly on the defensive asserting that he was a girl. Although Jack grew up with the benefit of both white and middle-class privilege, he was intimately familiar with what it felt like to be queer.
The various ways young people deploy categories representing their sexualities and genders should also be read as a way for them to express all of the complicated ways their other identities, along with lived experience, influence the labels they use to describe themselves. A young person’s choice of identity label says as much about their race, class, and geographic location (to name a few categories) as it does about their sexuality and/or gender.
As homosexuality becomes normalized in U.S. society, LGBTQ people, community, and politics have gained mainstream recognition, but some have argued that this access is limited to a particular kind of LGBTQ subject.13 For example, Lisa Duggan’s concept, homonormativity, describes “an (LGBTQ) politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them.”14 Homonormative politics allows some LGBTQ-identified people to access heteronormative privilege, particularly those most willing to disavow themselves of identity politics and civil rights agendas centered around race, class, and gender. Further, concepts of heteronormativity also raise questions about the existence of queer heterosexualities. Queer heterosexualities are sexual behaviors that aren’t monogamous, reproductive, and generally socially acceptable. These might include things like engaging in bondage, discipline, and sadomasochism (BDSM); being in non-monogamous or polyamorous relationships; and occupying other marginalized hetero identities. Therefore, my argument takes into consideration that among LGBTQ-identified people, there are those who have access to heteronormative privilege and those who, by way of their queerness, do not. Similarly, straightness is heteronormative, but heterosexuality can be queer.
Queer as an identity reflects active resistance to social expectations, categorizations, and institutional control that continue to pit the normal against the perverse. Queer exists alongside other identities like gay and lesbian, not in place of them.15 Yet the deployment of “queer” as a way to describe what is not straight is not simply a matter of self-identity. One can understand oneself as queer, as not fitting the contours of heteronormative society, but others also impose queer onto a subject, leaving them no choice in the matter. Sexuality is just one way people are queered by society. One’s race, gender, class, body size, nationality, and ability can also be queered inasmuch as they exist outside the dominant norm. Those queered members of society are typically not allowed access to the heteronormative mainstream, even if they want it. In other words, there is a difference between self-identifying as queer and being queered by others, although the two can and do occur simultaneously. In the next section I look more closely at how sexual identity is formed in the context of LGBTQ community.
Gabe squeezed into the consultation room with me and the cardboard collection being stashed away for queer prom decorations. Gabe almost always wears a hat and has long brown hair. He sat in a chair with one ankle crossed over his knee, bouncing his foot throughout the interview. Gabe is an eighteen-year-old Latinx who identifies as bisexual and identifies his gender as androgynous. Gabe’s friends use male pronouns to refer to him, and during check-in Gabe typically stated that he had no pronoun preference, so I use male pronouns for him here. Although he dresses mostly in masculine clothing and has a thin beard, his feminine-sounding voice and small stature lends him an appearance that often gets him mistaken for a girl. He describes being attracted to both boys and girls from early puberty, but prior to this moment had only dated girls. It was not until he had been introduced to the idea of bisexuality through his peer group at school that he came out as bisexual:
It kind of start[ed] . . . during the end of elementary school, the beginning of middle school. And so, it’s just, like, in the back of my mind I always thought, . . . “No, this isn’t how it’s supposed go. I shouldn’t be thinking about guys that way, I should think about girls this way only.” And . . . during middle school I was kind of, like, fighting myself on it a lot, but when I started high school and I got a chance to meet a whole lot of new people who were a part of the LGBTQ community, considering [my high school] was filled with so many, it just gave me a chance to just . . . stop and think and . . . be true to myself like, slap myself, “This is reality for you.”
Although, prior to encountering the term “bisexual” and other members of the LGBTQ community, Gabe was experiencing same-sex desire, it was not until he was exposed to the idea through peers that he was able to name his experience, claim it as his own, and then begin exploring intimacy with male-identified persons.
I asked Fiona during our interview if she had any family members or close friends who were identified as LGBTQ. She explained that she was aware of no family members until she was older (as I mentioned above, her father identifies as pansexual), but she did have LGBTQ friends:
In high school and middle school . . . I did start hanging out with . . . the gay kids and all of them. And we actually. . . . I sat in high school—every morning we sat in the same spot—and it became known to the rest of the school as the “Gay Wall,” . . . but that was back when I actually still considered myself straight. But I actually hung out with them. I started hanging out with them in seventh and eighth grade, but I didn’t really know about other sexual orientations until about freshman year. . . . Around sophomore, junior year I started identifying myself as bisexual. . . . They were just so much more fun than everyone else. They laughed. We just had a lot of fun. It was a really entertaining group to be with.
Across the country, the visibility of LGBTQ-identified young people in middle and high schools has been increasing.16 Many middle and high schools today have gay-straight alliances and Pride centers, and youth centers like Spectrum exist in many communities. For some of the participants, it was exposure to other queer-identified young people that opened up opportunities for them to explore their own identities, something that previous generations were not able to do until they became adults, traveled to the geographical places where adult queer communities existed, and joined those communities themselves. As tolerance and awareness of LGBTQ-identified individuals and issues increase, sexual minority culture is validated in ways it never has been before. I saw this happen with many of the Spectrum young people, a group of whom had all attended the same public charter school where being LGBTQ-identified was relatively safe and supported not only by peers but by the teachers and administrators as well. This school, which Gabe attended, was just a few blocks away from Spectrum’s previous location, and according to several of the people I spoke to, a large number of young people attending Spectrum also went to this school.
Both Gabe and Fiona describe finding an LGBTQ community among their peers. It is through these friend groups—with whom they both strongly identify—that they start to form language that better represents their own sexualities and genders. They learn from their peers what it means to be LGBTQ identified.
Anthony is a seventeen-year-old gay male who identifies as Hispanic. He is light-skinned, sometimes mistaken for white, he says, and on this particular day, his straight hair looks like a buzz cut in need of a trim. Anthony wears glasses, a polo shirt, and shorts. He is soft-spoken, yet confident, and exudes a strong sense of character and self-esteem throughout our interview. He speaks matter-of-factly and unabashedly about being gay. He has been coming to Spectrum since he was fourteen years old when his older, straight brother brought him for the first time. Anthony refers to his first boyfriend as a mentor, someone who helped him navigate the “gay world”:
My last relationship that I thought I was in love with somebody, it was with a guy named Thomas. . . . This was back when I first—or not first came out—but like a year after I’d first come out. And he was kind of like, my mentor in the gay world, showing me the ropes, getting me used to it, being my right-hand man as for comfort. So we got in a relationship and we got close. And it wasn’t a long relationship, but [he] practically [became] my mentor in the GLBT community . . .
Miguel, like Anthony, also sought an out, gay boy in high school to date. Although he does not refer to his first boyfriend as a mentor the way Anthony does, his explanation for why he pursued him suggests that he admired this boy for being out and proud about his sexuality and was wanting to emulate that himself:
Mary: Was . . . he out and gay at school too?
Miguel: Um, yeah.
Mary: Were you out at school?
Miguel: Actually no. Oh, this is good . . . this is a good question. I was not out, and he was. And he was like the perfect model of everything that I wanted to embrace. . . . Me dating without having to worry about anybody judging me. And if they were judging me, I didn’t care. And I wanted that.
Mary: Yeah. So he was boldly out.
Miguel: Yeah . . .
Mary: But that was attractive to you ’cause you couldn’t be that?
Miguel: Yeah. And I was like, I want that so bad. I am here hiding myself . . . you know, from myself. And oh, suffering. And he’s living the life that I wish I had.
Later, after Miguel broke up with this boyfriend and met his current boyfriend, the roles were reversed. He was now the out and proud gay boy and his new boyfriend was the one who was shy and afraid to be “out” in public. Then it was Miguel’s turn to be the mentor.
Anthony spoke to me about how much he loves being gay: that his sexual identity is the most important part of his identity, the only part of his identity he says really cares about (compared to things like race or gender). He associates being gay with a particular type of personality or culture:
I guess being at Spectrum, and being around peers that have . . . that are . . . allies to the community and also part of the community, so gays, lesbians, bi’s, and all of them. . . . They’re fun-loving people. So I’ve sort of taken myself as part of that community. So I see myself as a fun-loving, happy person. So that being in my sexuality base is kind of like . . . it’s grown on me. So I kind of like how it feels. So for me being gay is really fun to me.
Anthony’s description of the queer community belies one of the dominant discourses about LGBTQ youth as depressed and suicidal, raising an important point about the counterhegemonic role LGBTQ centers and communities play in U.S. society.
Finding a queer-oriented place like Spectrum was described as a pivotal moment for almost all of the participants in this study. They could finally let go of trying to make themselves fit into a heteronormative culture and instead find a place of belonging that was not only fun but also something to be proud of (a place to be queer). As Ward describes in Not Gay, “I discovered the object of my desire was not a person or even a class of people (like women or men), but queer spaces, queer ideas, and queer possibilities.”17
Ditto, a twenty-one-year-old, biracial Latinx queer woman who identifies as bisexual, told me about how Spectrum was a place where she didn’t feel judged, unlike high school, for example. In school, she said, “There was six weird people that we knew at the school that we were just the weird kids. We had these weird thoughts and everyone looked at us weird even though we were in the middle of downtown.” She described her high school GSA as “mostly drama kids that were all pretending. . . . They were, like, ‘We’re here but . . . I’m just bi-curious,’ but they would never actually be bi-curious.” Ironically, it was while “ditching” a GSA meeting at school, which she described as “the boringest thing,” that she discovered Spectrum for the first time. Describing Spectrum, she said, “The whole space was really colorful and I loved that it was . . . unless you knew someone that knew it, you didn’t know it was there and it was some kind of [a] cool exclusive thing and I got to go and see that there was all these people and I wasn’t a freak.”
At Spectrum, youths are exposed through peers and workshops to ideas about how sexuality and gender exist on a spectrum and to a multitude of ways to identify oneself, including queer and pansexual. They also learn about the history of the LGBTQ rights movement and about queer culture like drag and Pride. All of this exposure validates the way they see themselves in the world, opening up new possibilities for ways of being.
Ernie says:
“I think . . . Spectrum definitely, like specifically César . . . kind of help me shape my sexuality, and where I was more comfortable. Or they help me find a place I was more comfortable in where . . . I’d have conversations with . . . César, about . . . if I date trans men does that make me straight because they’re women? And stuff like that. . . . It shaped me ’cause it was able to put me in a place where I am comfortable.”
César is the current program manager at Spectrum, having taken over for Sid not long after I started volunteering, and is the adult staff member with the most face-to-face contact with youths in the space. A gay Latinx in his mid-twenties, César is without question the most beloved member of the Spectrum community. He has a hip, asymmetrical haircut that often sports a lock of bright blue or purple, wears skinny jeans and high-top Vans-brand shoes, and possesses a bold confidence and brilliant charisma. César also has the advantage of being relatively young, in his early twenties, which means he can relate to the youth in the space in a meaningful way. Many of the kids at Spectrum really look up to him. César is loud and theatrical in the space and can command attention at the drop of a hat. During one sex-ed session, César used his own experience with the gender spectrum to explain his desires and identity. César nonchalantly explained that, while he had spent most of his life understanding himself as gay and only attracted to men, he had recently had moments where he found himself attracted to butch individuals who were not necessarily cisgender men. Therefore he was coming to realize that he was more attracted to masculinity than to men and therefore perhaps he was not as “gay” as he perhaps thought he was. This acknowledgment of fluidity and rejection of biological destiny by such an important Spectrum role model is a revolutionary act. Queer communities, like Spectrum, push the envelope of norms regarding sexuality and gender, so those particular young people, who have the opportunity to learn from mentors like César, form very different ideas about what it means to be gendered and sexual.
As I have shown here, we become sexual through processes of socialization. But this is not to suggest that one “chooses” their sexual orientation. Spectrum—and other communities like it—validates queer orientations. While heteronormativity as a straightening device is powerful, paying attention to the way people find themselves outside of the lines weakens notions of an innate hetero-homo binary. Although the LGBTQ rights movement has gained a lot of ground with bioessential explanations for sexuality, members of the same movement have troubled the waters of binary sexuality and gender for everyone to reckon with. Sexuality—in terms of how it is expressed, labeled, and experienced—is malleable and shifting and resists universal definition.
When I teach survey courses on gender and/or sexualities to students who are new to the subjects, one of the most difficult concepts for them to grasp is the idea that engaging in homosexual conduct does not necessarily make a person gay. They tilt their heads, scrunch up their faces, look around at others in the room for confirmation that they aren’t the only ones confused by this notion. I think that one of the reasons they struggle is due to the success of the LGBTQ rights movement, which has resulted in the normalization and routinization of homosexuality in U.S. society.18 My largely urban- and suburban-dwelling, Southern Californian students are increasingly recognizing same-sex couples and homosexuality as acceptable, and they have learned the proper language to use to identify someone who engages in homosexual behavior, relationships, and intimacy. Of course, many of those students themselves identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer. Among a lot of progressive, liberal-minded people—regardless of sexual identity—it is understood that same-sex conduct equals gay. Often, it is also understood that anyone who engages in same-sex conduct while still claiming to be straight is simply in denial of their gayness.19
Further, there is an underlying assumption at play here that often goes undetected in classroom conversation: that when we talk about what does and doesn’t make a person gay, we seem to more often than not be talking about men. Society is more comfortable with the notion that women’s sexuality is more fluid than men’s, or at least that homosexual conduct among women does not, in all cases, make them gay.20 Men are more vulnerable to the stigma of homosexuality if they engage in conduct that contradicts dominant gender norms. Therefore, not only will homosexual conduct result in others labeling a man as “gay,” but there is a long litany of behaviors and affects that violate masculine norms that will also result in a “gay” label.21
Things are complicated further by the decades-long creep of a discourse that—also often in the name of LGBTQ rights—has successfully convinced many people that humans are born with an innate sexual orientation toward particular gendered others. According to the sociologist Tom Waidzunas, “To achieve a status of normality, the gay rights movement has increasingly conceptualized people in fixed sexual orientation boxes, shoring up a heterosexual/homosexual binary, and the movement has succeeded on this basis in many policy arenas.”22 Within this discourse, heterosexual desire is still considered the normative way to behave, while homosexual desire is likened to discovering that one has a birth defect or genetic anomaly, albeit one that is not your fault. The “born this way” discourse continues to reinforce the difference between heterosexuality and homosexuality, where heterosexuality is privileged. Even as the LGBTQ rights movement has, in many ways, successfully normalized homosexual conduct, gender, as the primary indicator of one’s sexual attraction and identity, still holds sway. Many people continue to be preoccupied with sexual identity and how it aligns with gendered object choice, particularly when it comes to non-heterosexual sexual attractions.
It is an over-simplification to suggest that what makes a person gay is their same-sex sexual desire and/or behavior. While the youth of Spectrum often understand desire to be a key component to the formation of their sexual identities, there are several other factors at play, including failure to reproduce appropriate heterosexual scripts and gender non-conforming expression and behavior. This is important because not everyone who experiences same-sex sexual desire shares this childhood experience of difference. Similarly, not all people who identify as sexual minorities as adults experienced a homosexual sexual subjectivity as young people. Much of the “difference” described by Spectrum youth had to do with genderqueer expression and behavior, which helps to explain why those LGB-identified people who are gender-conforming often go “undetected” or aren’t questioned about their sexuality.
Further, we learn from the youth of Spectrum that there are some who are rejecting identities that are defined by the gender of the bodies one desires. Identities like pansexual and queer allow youth to have a more open, fluid sexuality that is not confined strictly to whether one is engaging in heterosexuality or homosexuality. Queer is also a way to distance oneself from mainstream LGBTQ identities, identities that can be exclusive and homonormative.
Finally, young people described discovering LGBTQ community through peers and LGBTQ centers and beginning to form sexual and gender identities at this time. The youth of Spectrum describe finding refuge in LGBTQ communities where they have mentors to look up to, where they learn about the ways that difference can be valued rather than disparaged, and most important, where they learn that they are not alone in their queerness. By validating difference, Spectrum offers refuge for young people who struggle to find a sense of belonging at school and in their communities. These young people are rejected by, and reject, the dominant norm; they are queer-oriented youth. The next chapter explores how the queer youth of Spectrum negotiate transgender phenomena. Whereas LGBTQ youth centers were once largely populated by kids experiencing same-sex desire and the resulting social sanctions that accompany that, genderqueerness may now be the more defining characteristic of these spaces.