It’s not . . . sketched out for me who I am. I don’t got a guidebook. . . . Who I am is just who I am, and I’m always trying to question that and put it into words. I’m trying to define the indefinable: me. And like, it just, it doesn’t work. There’s a lot of inner, internal conflict with this. . . . I always want to put myself in a box. Society puts you in enough boxes and then I’m sitting here trying to put myself in another one, like, I’m trying to figure out every aspect of who I am as if I’m thinking about myself as if I’m a different person; as if I’m trying to judge or characterize a different person.
—Travon, sixteen-year old, identifies as Black, queer, male
We are facing a sea change in norms around sexuality and gender in U.S. culture. Homosexuality, as a form of sexual conduct, increasingly fails to automatically signify one’s sexual identity or orientation. Mainstream acknowledgment of transgender people is becoming commonplace. There has been a rapid proliferation of sexual and gender identities people may adopt to communicate their desires, orientations, and sense of self to others. Notions of binary sex, gender, and sexuality are giving way to fluidity and pluralism. Given this paradigm shift, we are likely to see a loosening around the categories that make up what we now consider the LGBTQ community as sexual and gender variety and fluidity become more integrated into society.
LGBTQ politics—and, by default, all LGBTQ-identified people—occupy the middle ground of a battle between normal and queer. On the one hand, the LGBTQ movement strives toward social equality for LGBTQ-identified people, while, on the other, the queer critique argues that the very identities that the movement has based its political goals upon are unstable. I have shown how adolescent negotiation of sexuality and gender is rife with ambiguity, confusion, and uncertainty. LGBTQ-identified youth in particular make visible the processes of becoming while simultaneously demystifying the process of naturalization. Teenagers struggle with understanding who they are, not because their essence has yet to materialize, but rather because they have yet to learn the rules of the game. As adults we forget the various processes by which we were socialized to be sexual and gendered beings. But Travon demonstrates in his statement above that young people are not born in a box that will neatly describe them forever; rather, as they grow up, they seek out existing boxes that align with who they feel they are.
Where the negotiation of gender and sexuality is the most visible is in the gray area between binary categories. Youths’ explorations of non-binary sexualities and transgender identities indicate not only a conscious resistance to adopting a binary category but empirical evidence that the recognized identity categories (straight, gay, lesbian, man, woman) fail to encompass the lived experiences of individuals. Sexual desires may be innate to human experience, but our understanding of them as same-sex or other-sex in their orientation is a sociohistorical artifact. The fact that our taken-for-granted assumptions about biological sex—that one is either a boy or girl—are inaccurate renders any natural correlations among biological sex, gender, and sexuality false.1
Throughout Growing Up Queer I have shown how the queer-oriented youth of Spectrum struggle with being othered by a society that depends on normalization as a form of disciplinary power while at the same time finding promise in deviating from straight culture. By paying attention to intersecting forms of penalty and privilege, the experiences of Spectrum youth demonstrate that queerness is not simply a matter of one’s sexuality or gender but is tied to race, class, ability, and other identity categories, making it a mistake to generalize about an LGBTQ subject.2 It’s important that we pay attention to the forces of normalization that sort out members of society, particularly in the context of a white supremacist and capitalist economic and political structure. If normal relies on queer to prop itself up, as LGBTQ becomes the new normal, what becomes the new queer? This is why I stress a distinction between the mainstream LGBTQ community and queer-oriented others like the youth of Spectrum.
In his memoir about having a gay son, Oddly Normal: One Family’s Struggle to Help Their Teenage Son Come to Terms with His Sexuality, New York Times correspondent John Schwartz talks at length about how he and his wife, Jeanne, suspected their son was gay from a very early age. Schwartz explains that, among their peers in a highly educated, well-to-do, liberal enclave in the northeastern United States, one was not disappointed about having a gay child. Schwartz understands sexuality—whether straight or gay—to be natural and biological and “as baked into who you are as eye color and height.”3 While the Schwartz’s story about their son Joseph is compelling and heartfelt, in many ways it is less a story about having a gay child and more about a parent’s desperate search for an explanation as to why his child is so odd. From early childhood, Joseph struggled with succeeding at school, was diagnosed with a variety of learning disabilities, attended therapy, and acted up in various ways. Schwartz describes how Joseph’s trouble at school ramped up in second grade: “As the year progressed, the teacher seemed to get overwhelmed with the daily grind of school, and she had less energy to deal with Joseph’s problems and moods. His anger was close to the surface, and meltdowns were growing more common. Some students made a game of making him blow up, like the boy who would enrage Joseph by calling him ‘Lemonhead’ every time he wore his yellow raincoat. . . . Other kids would hide his sweatshirt at recess, day after day, to see him fall apart when he couldn’t find it. Each outburst humiliated him more.”4 Joseph begins to disclose his feelings of same-sex desire first to his parents but later at school, which results in a humiliating experience and a failed suicide attempt.
Throughout the book Schwartz associates Joseph’s queerness with his latent homosexuality. The story becomes one of hopefulness and survival as Joseph starts to regularly attend a community-based drop-in center for LGBTQ youth and begins to form a gay identity. In my interpretation, it was not the case that the Schwartzes were unhappy about having a gay child. Rather, their struggle was with having a child with a learning disability, who was bullied and disciplined frequently at school, and who was not popular among his peers.
Coincidentally, the same year that Oddly Normal was published, Jack Halberstam published Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, which I have quoted from earlier. Halberstam, an English professor and director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California, describes his own gender as “improvised at best, uncertain and mispronounced more often than not, irresolvable and ever shifting.”5 While Schwartz’s memoir is about his family’s struggle with having a queer child, Halberstam’s book is a call to arms for a new kind of feminism that rejects the category of normal entirely. “Gaga feminism” is described as “a gender politics that recognizes the ways in which our ideas of the normal or the acceptable depend completely upon racial and class-based assumptions about the right and the true.”6 Halberstam is decidedly not interested in creating a place where being gay or lesbian is normal, instead having aspirations that a new generation of young people will grow up with radical ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality, resisting the heteronormative impulse to adopt gay, straight, or lesbian and male or female identities, and as a result, upend the racist and classist harms caused by normalization.
These two artifacts of early twenty-first century culture exemplify the tensions that were reverberating throughout Spectrum, The Resource, the larger LGBTQ community, and U.S. society itself while I conducted this research. On the one hand, being gay or lesbian is more normalized than perhaps ever before, best demonstrated by the recent hard-fought success of the right-to-marriage movement. On the other hand, many LGBTQ-identified people are leading a revolution in terms of shifting society’s understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality in the direction of the queer. The more we learn about sexuality and gender, the less salient identity categories like gay, lesbian, and straight or man and woman become.
For Halberstam, the significance of a Gaga feminism is in its potential to remake society. This vision rings true with the experiences of the young people of Spectrum. The way their experiences as queer adolescents differ from generations that came before them is evidence of a shift in society. Halberstam states, “We do not think about how changes in one sphere create changes in other spheres: and so the momentous shifts in the meaning of gender and sex and sexuality that have allowed for the emergence of transgenders and transsexuals globally have also created massive, if unnoticed, shifts in the meaning of heterosexuality, male and female.”7 These shifts will also have significant effects on the heteropatriarchal laws that govern social behavior as well, as I argued earlier. As meanings attached to sexuality, sex, and gender shift, so will the identity categories that the LGBTQ rights movement has depended upon to maintain its momentum. Can the movement withstand a fundamental shift in the way society thinks about and understands gender and sexuality? Is this a shift away from identity politics?
Yet where does that leave Joseph Schwartz and the “oddly normal” youth of Spectrum who daily are facing institutional sources of oppression whose distinct purpose is to normalize? The pressure is unrelenting upon these young people to figure out who they are as they merge into adulthood. Although Travon resists putting himself into a box, this moment of time as an adolescent may be the only period in his life that he will have the luxury to claim to not know who he is. The institutions that govern society do not allow for ambiguity with respect to identity—whether referring to sexuality, gender, or, as I discuss below, even citizenship status.8 But for society to advocate for the most marginalized among us, it is profoundly important to acknowledge the way that sexualities, genders, and other identity categories are formed, transformed, validated, and contested.
In June 2012, right in the thick of my time at Spectrum, the youth movement to slow the Obama administration’s rate of deportation of undocumented immigrants and to raise awareness about the plight of Dreamers—young, undocumented immigrants whose parents brought them to the United States as minors—reached its pinnacle. As part of the Campaign for the American DREAM (CAD), a group of Dreamers set out in May to walk from California to Washington, DC, to raise awareness about the DREAM Act and immigration reform. In Spectrum’s hometown, young people staged a days-long consciousness-raising event about the issue.
At Spectrum, Miguel (a twenty-year-old gay man) is an undocumented Mexican migrant who as a minor was brought to the United States by his father and was particularly interested in the immigrant rights actions taking place. I arrived at Spectrum one afternoon to find Miguel and Aaron painting a big banner for the protest. Painted in black on a long, white sheet of butcher paper, it said “Stop the Deportations!” Miguel and Aaron had been going to the site of the protest to show their support for the movement, but Miguel explained that it was hard to find the location. He thought his sign could be held out on a busy street nearby, where it would attract more attention to what was happening. He explained to me that the previous evening there had been a candlelight vigil where he had spontaneously joined others in speaking publicly as an undocumented youth. He told me how scared he had been and how his voice quavered as he “came out” as undocumented to the crowd. Even though he was afraid, in the face of all of the young people risking their safety in the name of immigrant rights for all, he felt he had to speak up. That summer, as the CAD walk made its way through town, there were many parallels drawn between the Dreamer activists and the LGBTQ movement’s strategies; both are formerly hidden populations taking a risk by coming out and claiming pride in their identities in the face of potentially severe consequences.
A few days later, Miguel and Aaron showed up to Spectrum in the afternoon. Aaron had just picked Miguel up from his job at a restaurant where he washes dishes. Miguel, normally cheerful and energetic, looked exhausted and said it was really hot in the kitchen at work. It’s remarkable to me how down he looks when he comes from work compared to his usual self. He hates his job and would really like to attend college, but because of his immigration status he would have to pay out-of-state tuition to do so. Since we had last seen each other, the Obama administration had announced an executive order to address some of the barriers Dreamers faced. This was not a passage of the DREAM Act, but it was a temporary remedy, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).9 I asked Miguel if he was happy about the news. He stated he was but that, at the same time, he’d lately had to take a break from Facebook and the news on the matter in general, as it was wearing on him emotionally. In the end, Miguel never applied for DACA status. He felt it wasn’t enough and that he would keep agitating for more just reform.
I use this account of Miguel’s experience as an example of a queer orientation that moves beyond sexuality and/or gender. Historically, undocumented youth in the United States have lived hidden lives where they appear to be just like all of their peers until they graduate from high school and no longer have access to the same paths forward. Some undocumented youths have known about their status for much of their lives, while for others it comes as a surprise as they begin to approach various markers of adulthood like applying for college or getting driver’s licenses and identification cards. Undocumented young people become marginalized in society as they become adults. Vulnerable to labor exploitation and economic uncertainty, unable to access health insurance, unable to travel far, they experience depression and mental health challenges as they lose connections with peers who set off on a path toward adulthood with fewer barriers. Undocumented youth end up on paths that stray from the straight lines that govern so many other people’s life course. Being gay, as I learned from interviewing and spending time with Miguel, is a very important part of who he is, but in terms of his day-to-day struggles, being undocumented is a much bigger barrier to his quality of life. The point is that Miguel is both gay and undocumented, he is not one without the other, so how do we as a society make room for the multiple ways that youth experience marginalization?
The hegemonic power of heteropatriarchy and its racialized, gendered, classed implications are deeply significant to the formation of identity for the young people in my study. Almost three decades ago, Gayle Rubin predicted that some forms of homosexuality would become acceptable within the “charmed circle” of sexuality. But she also predicted that many sexualities would remain banished to the “outer limits.”10 Rubin likened the growing acceptance of some sexualities, along with the continued exclusion of others, to racism.11 But as many have argued, race—and other embodiments and identities—are intrinsic to the boundaries that form the charmed circle in the first place.12 Heteropatriarchy isn’t like racism, it is racist.
Therefore it will behoove us to be careful that efforts to support queer young people are not limited to just sexuality and gender. Marginalization occurs not just to LGBTQ kids but also to children with disabilities, children of color—Black and Latinx kids in particular—immigrants, children in poverty, and those who are not Catholic or Protestant Christian, to name a few. Of course, the more marginalization one embodies simultaneously, the more vulnerable to interpersonal and state violence one is likely to be. Must opportunities for validation and support of youth push them into over-identifying with their sexuality or gender compared to their other identities? Similarly, how might the over-emphasis on sexual and gender identities result in masking other sources of marginalization?
By describing the youth of Spectrum as queer oriented, I have attempted to show how some bodies—both consciously and unconsciously—resist the straightening effects of heteronormativity. I have argued here that not all LGBTQ-identified people are queer, and I have suggested that queerness is about characteristics beyond sexuality and gender. Without negating how some youths self-identify as queer, the use of a queer orientation allows me to move beyond a strictly identity-based conversation about sexual and gender minorities and toward one focused on structural drivers of inequality. I think it’s a way out of the rut that identity politics gets stuck in. Rights-based policies that protect LGBTQ-identified people rely on the ability to be able to accurately identify who is and is not LGBTQ. Yet as we have learned from the youth of Spectrum, this is an elusive subject to nail down. As human rights regimes expand to a global level, the ability to define a category that is socially, culturally, geographically, and historically situated becomes harder and harder to do. If human rights protections insist on protecting LGBTQ people, as opposed to protecting those who resist normalization, then only those people who can successfully pass as LGBTQ will be protected.13 Given that this very individualistic approach to rights is a product of a largely U.S.-centric worldview, the result is an imposition of individualism onto societies that are more collective and cooperative in character.14 It also results in the reification of identity, whereby arguments made against LGBTQ rights are made in the name of rights of straight people. The North Carolina bathroom legislation, for example, uses arguments for the rights of women and children as its defense.
Organizing or providing services under the banner “LGBTQ youth” is limiting both because it requires participants to locate themselves within the context of sexual and gender identities and because it misses the opportunity to amass a broader spectrum of youths who are queer for reasons other than their sexuality or gender. No matter how much access the mainstream LGBTQ rights movement accomplishes with its current liberal strategies, the youth of Spectrum will likely continue to exist outside of its boundaries because of the ways in which they are excluded from and resist the hegemonic sexual order.
It is not my intention to devalue the successful efforts of identity-based rights movements that rocked the second half of the twentieth century. Rather, what I learned from the youth of Spectrum points to a particular way forward, where the spirit of democracy goes beyond formal legal recognitions to include an ethical spirit of honoring and respecting difference.15 It is no longer enough for progressive politics in U.S. society to honor the rights of so-called LGBTQ people on the basis of people having been “born that way”; rather, difference should be honored because it is the right thing to do. What’s exciting about queer orientation is that it manifests a cross-coalitional politics that some have argued went missing with the neoliberal political turn U.S. politics took in the wake of the Civil Rights Act.16 Given that the most powerful criticisms of identity movements and their various movements for social justice are that they are essentializing, queerness as an identity, a theory, and a political movement includes multiple axes of oppression, from anti-racism organizing, to the rise in disability studies, to fat positivity movements, and therefore is inherently coalitional.
Let me be clear that I am neither arguing for a queer-er world nor a world without queerness (where all difference is accepted as “normal”). Rather, what would it mean to honor that which deviates from the normal because it is necessary to our humanity? Sara Ahmed explains it this way:
Queer is not available as a line that we can follow, and if we took such a line, we would perform a certain injustice to those queers whose lives are lived for different points. For me, the important task is not so much finding a queer line but asking what our orientation toward queer moments of deviation will be. If the object slips away, if its face becomes inverted, if it looks odd, strange, out of place, what will we do? If we feel oblique, where will we find support?17
The queer movement has been powerful in that it has not been solely concerned with the rights of gender and sexual minorities; rather, it has engaged in the critique of capitalist, neoliberal politics that results in the marginalization of all queer people. Given the particular challenges that progressive politics face under the current conservative administration, the time is ripe for social justice movements that lead us toward organizing in a way that is less about the liberal political goals of accessing equal rights for various identity groups and more about coming together across difference toward similar goals of democracy, by focusing our efforts on the most marginalized among us.
Two twenty-first-century social movements that exemplify the kind of multicoalitional, queer organizing that I mention above are Black Lives Matter (BLM) and the transgender movement.
Black Lives Matter, which began spontaneously as a hashtag and has grown into one of the most high-profile, international grassroots movements of our time, was founded in 2013 by Black, queer women—Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi—in reaction to the murder of an adolescent Black boy, Trayvon Martin, and the resulting acquittal of his killer, George Zimmerman. Although the name “Black Lives Matter” may appear on the surface to simply be a movement about the liberation of Black people, the mission of what is now a global network of member-led chapters is deeply intersectional, addressing gender, sexuality, ability, class, nationality, and more. As the “Herstory” page on the organization’s website explains, “Black liberation movements in this country have created room, space, and leadership mostly for Black heterosexual, cisgender men—leaving women, queer and transgender people, and others either out of the movement or in the background to move the work forward with little or no recognition. As a network, we have always recognized the need to center the leadership of women and queer and trans people.”18 One of the beliefs that guides the work of Black Lives Matter is that the liberation of all of us is bound up in the liberation of those most marginalized among us: “We work vigorously for freedom and justice for Black people and, by extension, all people.”19
Similarly, the transgender movement, a broad collection of grassroots efforts towards trans* recognition and inclusion, is also inherently intersectional. Recognizing that the most at-risk trans* people are transwomen who are poor and working-class people of color, the movement is simply not just about transphobia but about racism, classism, and sexism, as well. Using the difficulty transgender people face accessing accurate identity documents as an example, in her book Transgender History Susan Stryker explains that “the restrictions on movement in the post-9/11 United States give transgender people more in common with immigrants, refugees, and undocumented workers than they might have with the gay and lesbian community.”20 Both Stryker and Dean Spade—among others—have shown how the administration of gender by the bureaucratic state has resulted in a transgender justice movement that “increasingly involves joining campaigns and struggles that might seem at first to have little to do with gender identity or expression—but everything to do with how the state polices those who differ from social norms and tries to solve the bureaucratic problems that arise from attempting to administer the lives of atypical members of its population.”21 Therefore efforts at addressing discrimination and hate crimes targeting trans* people are intersectional.
Without recognizing and making visible the white heteropatriarchal privilege that bolsters the mainstream LGBTQ rights movement, we run the risk of continuing to reproduce the same, tired bigotry that continues to poison the well of social justice efforts in the United States.
What makes Spectrum so important to the lives of the youth who spend time there is that it validates their humanity. At Spectrum, young people who have spent their lives feeling out of place, unrecognizable, and queer meet others who have lived their lives feeling the same way. Beyond simply finding peers who share their experiences, the youth of Spectrum are validated by adults, too. Adult staff and volunteers not only recognize and affirm queerness but encourage it by, among other things, teaching the proud history of the LGBT and queer movements, passing on the revered drag tradition, and hosting queer prom as a valid alternative to the heteronormative initiation of the high school prom. For queer young people, Spectrum is an oasis of inclusion in a desert of exclusion.
Early in my field research, I participated in a sex education workshop at Spectrum. There were about six youth present along with César and myself. The focus for the module was on sexuality and gender. César began the session by explaining terms we use to describe sex and gender. Sexual orientation is similar to being left- or right-handed. Sexual identity is how you come out to folks. Sexual behavior is “who you do” and can occur along a spectrum with heterosexuality on one end and homosexuality on the other and lots of iterations in between. For gender, he explained that one has a biological sex, which is your genitals, hormones, and chromosomes; a gender identity, again, similar to being left- or right-handed; and a gender expression, which is the gender you appear to be to others, along a spectrum of femininity and masculinity. The point of these definitions is to make it clear to the group that sexuality and gender do not always line up the way folks think they should and particularly not how the heterosexual world wants them to. One participant appreciated this information, stating that sometimes he wakes up feeling manly and sometimes he wakes up feeling “femmy.” Another was vexed by the fact that being bisexual meant people were always telling him he had to choose.
One of the activities involved examining stereotypes about LGB and T people’s sexual behavior. Some examples of sexualized stereotypes the group came up with included things like “lesbian bed death,” gay men using drugs and hooking up randomly with other men, and that trans* people are either assumed to be sex workers or asexual.22 The exercise allowed us to speak honestly about these negative stereotypes, then think about how we are sometimes guilty of reproducing them in our own lives. César asked the group to look at how stereotypes get attached to gender norms. For example, he stated that, among gay men, “straight acting” is really code for “masculine.” He pushed the group to consider how sometimes LGBTQ-identified people reproduce normative gender roles in their sexual and intimate relationships. He then countered this notion by pointing out how LGBTQ-identified people, in many cases, have more gender egalitarian relationships than straight-identified people and how straight people are learning from their queer peers how to do relationships better. César explained that there are so few gay role models for queer folks to relate to, and we questioned whether that was good or bad. I stated that there are too many bad role models for straight people, while one of the youths pointed out that queer people get to write the book, in a sense, because there are no rules. César echoed this comment, that being queer is already deviant, so crossing the line into deviant sexual behavior may be less scary for queer folks. Someone else suggested that queer people are better at experimenting and then deciding if they do or don’t like something. I love the way this conversation shows the promise of queerness and queer youth in particular. It demonstrates that sexualized stereotypes are shifting along with the sexual mores and gender norms that feed them.
At the beginning of Growing Up Queer, I explained that my objective was to explore how teenagers become sexual and gendered today by sharing what I have learned from this very particular group of kids. The youth of Spectrum are clearly products of the LGBTQ rights movement that had its origins in the 1970s. That movement established the importance of claiming a gay, lesbian, or bisexual identity and being out and proud about it. As I have argued, though, the queer movement that became prominent in the 1980s pushed back against the essentializing of identity that much of the mainstream LGBTQ rights movement has relied on. This generation of young people, regardless of their sexuality or gender, have come to understand themselves through the lens of these movements that have liberated marginalized sexuality and gender and therefore have transformed the act of becoming sexual or becoming gendered. They may not abandon identity—in fact, they seem to be proliferating it—but they also seem to be making more room for fluidity and intersectionality of identity.
In much the same spirit as the Black Lives Matter claim that, when Black people get free, everyone gets free, the youth of Spectrum have helped me to understand that when the queerest among us get free, everyone gets free. When I arrived at Spectrum for the first time so many years ago, I expected to find vulnerable young people who needed support and help, albeit not necessarily from me. I expected to be spotted as different and an outsider because of my straightness and cisgender privilege. Yet what I found were young people who hurt, yes, but who also were joyful and excited to be alive. I found a tolerance for weirdos and a community of people that nurtured each other. I learned that all of us at Spectrum were part of becoming together, mutually constituted in the ways we self-identified, attributed identity to each other, and explored fluidity and ambiguity. I learned about the ways that queer culture has an influence that makes the mainstream better: better at doing family and better at pushing the envelope of representation. Yet Spectrum is no utopia. Within the Spectrum community, boundaries are still drawn and domination still occurs, but it has tremendous potential to imagine and manifest something better. This is what gives it so much promise.