By Jen LaBarbera
Which version of my coming-out story do I tell?
I could tell you this first version: that when I was seventeen, I came out to a circle of unsurprised friends as I confirmed a classmate’s assumption that I was queer. I could tell you that I came out to a mostly supportive father and a reluctantly supportive mother on my way to an Ani DiFranco concert. I could tell you that, when my mom asked/accused, “Is this because of what happened to you?” I quickly denied it, maintaining the party line that sexual orientation is innate, is not a choice, and that being a sexual abuse victim/survivor and being queer were two entirely separate identities.
I could also tell you this second version: that when I was seventeen, I made a conscious choice to confirm that classmate’s assumption of my queerness. I chose to say yes, not necessarily as a decision to “finally tell my truth,” as the typical story goes. When I chose to say yes, I chose to step into this space as an act of honesty, as an act of resilience, as an act of resistance, as an act of survival. When I chose to identify and embody my (always evolving) queer sexuality, I chose to use my queerness as a tool for surviving the gauntlets of oppression, as an opportunity to find and build a new, safer world for myself and to embody a queer space of my own making.
Both of these stories are true, but one is truer than the other.
I lived those two coexisting and contradictory coming-out experiences almost fifteen years ago. Now, my queer brown femme survivor* body moves through the world and navigates various gauntlets of oppression, marginalization, and violence (homophobia, misogyny, racism, and gender-based violence, for starters) with an agency and a power earned in part by actively choosing these oppressed spaces of queerness and femmeness. That is, framing these identities—queer, femme—as things I actively choose rather than things I was passively born into allows me a degree of reclamation and ownership that is vital to surviving the violence and danger that accompanies being a queer brown femme survivor.
There are so many stories I could tell about the violence I’ve survived. I could tell you that I was sexually abused for most of my childhood, emotionally abused straight through to adulthood, sexually assaulted as a young adult, and involved in exploitative and toxic relationships as an adult. I could tell you that, when I finally started to talk about each of these things, the fear was like an anvil inside my chest. When I finally made that choice to break that silence, it felt like wading through chest-deep mud that was nearly impossible to push through.
The sexual violence that punctuated my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood often intersected with or was a result of my queer femme identity. At age nineteen, I was at a party when a woman I had just met started to flirt with me. I drank glass after glass of champagne, poured by her boyfriend, and, after a few, I let her lead me upstairs. Her boyfriend wasn’t invited, but he followed, and I acquiesced, thinking that I could control the situation this time.
“Are you sure you’re really gay?” “Why don’t you just try?” “Just let him. You’ll like it.” “Just relax.” “You’re too pretty to be gay, anyway.”
Together, the two of them pushed past every line I tried to draw, every boundary I tried to set, gently enough that I almost didn’t realize what was happening. There was an explicit “no” at some point, but by then, even I didn’t believe that would matter. When we descended the stairs to a series of winks and high fives, I pushed it all down. By that time, I thought I knew how to survive sexual violence. By that time, I thought I could take sexual assault in stride. After all, behind this one moment of violence lay years of survival.
I know that, statistically, queer and transgender youth are more likely to experience violence of all kinds, including sexual violence.1 Within the LGBTQ community in the United States, the lifetime prevalence of sexual violence victimization is the highest for bisexual (47 percent of bisexual men and 75 percent of bisexual women)2 and transgender (47 percent)3 people. Studies have postulated explanations for these higher numbers, such as that LGBTQ youth are already socially isolated, which puts us at risk for exploitation, and that our queerness and gender nonconformity (to any degree) make us particularly vulnerable. Maybe these explanations are true for me, too. But when sexual violence, abuse, and violations start so early, it feels impossible to unlink my gender and sexual identity from my abuse, let alone parse out cause and effect. Maybe my tomboyishness—that gender nonconformity, that queerness—made me vulnerable to abuse. On the other hand, maybe my tomboyishness was a coping mechanism for the abuse I wasn’t yet able to talk about. Maybe that flirtation with defying gender norms and expectations was actually what made me feel safer in my own skin and in my own home, which had both been proven unsafe. Maybe my home was unsafe because I flirted with defying gender norms and expectations. Was my sexual violence caused by my queerness? Was my queerness caused by sexual violence?
Queer Brown Femme: Reclamation
“Brown women are so beautiful, don’t you think?”
“Mixed people are just prettier, you know?”
“Oh, you look so exotic.”
“Where are you from?”
“No, really, where are you from?”
“No, I mean, what are you?”
“Damn, girl.”
“Girl, you should smile more.”
“I’d like to [insert explicit sex act here] to you.”
“Are you sure you’re really gay?”
My queer sexuality and my femme gender identity are intricately and inexplicably tied up in each other, in my race and ethnicity, and in my identity and reality as a survivor of sexual violence. Walking down any street or sitting on any kind of public transportation means walking through gauntlets of gender-based harassment, usually intersecting with race and sexuality. As a woman, this is an everyday reality, and as a femme—especially as a brown femme—this harassment takes on a very particular flavor. Recounting all of these instances would be impossible, not least because this level of violence has become almost unremarkable. Walking through Dupont Circle, Washington, DC, hand in hand with my masculine-of-center girlfriend, a man passing by made no effort to hide his visual assessment of me, then made a remark that I had trained myself not to hear. My girlfriend at the time spun on her heel, ready to chase him down and chew him out. I pulled her away. “It’s not worth it. It happens literally all the time.” “Really?” she asked, genuinely incredulous. “Does this really not happen to you?” I responded, equally as incredulous. As a masculine-presenting woman, this was genuinely not her reality. As a brown femme, this harassment came with almost every hour of every day. The combination of sexist objectification and racially motivated harassment—the intersectionality of my identities—amplifies the impact of the violence, with my queer brown femme survivor body at the very visible and center.
Intersectionality, as defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, refers to overlapping identities, particularly oppressed or marginalized identities.4 The intersectionality of my identities informs my experience as a queer brown femme living at the intersection of various oppressions and privileges. For example, racism interacts with exoticization, homophobia, and misogyny, which is evident in verbal assaults and experiences as represented in the quotations listed previously; in physical and sexual assaults; and in smaller microaggressions that are harder to pinpoint, such as experiences that are intended to make us shrink/lessen ourselves and the palpable energy that accompanies side-eyed, appraising, objectifying, or disparaging looks.
These acts are not just coming from those who only experience privilege either; even in queer spaces, toxic masculinity and white supremacy still creep in. A former date insisted that, because of their working-class status and their masculine-of-center agender identity, they didn’t experience white privilege. They boasted about their feminist bookshelves and claimed to love and admire femmes, “especially brown women.” When their misogyny, biphobia, and white supremacy exploded, I was caught in the crossfire as it was directed at another former (queer brown femme) date of theirs. As a “good femme date,” I was expected to listen to their anger and support them through their process. As a queer brown femme, though, every word they hurled at their ex-girlfriend seared into my skin, every tongue-lashing they dished out about her felt like a blow to my chest. I felt it in my heart, in my gut, in the burning of tears behind my eyes, in the pounding of my heart.
I survived. And in that survival, I resisted. Audre Lorde said, “It is better to speak, knowing we were never meant to survive”5; survival, on its own, is a form of resistance. Simply surviving is inherently a statement of resistance—to the normative body, to the expectation of brokenness, to that denial of safety. After having that space taken away with violence (be it invisibility, manipulation, degradation, exploitation, abuse, or assault), simply surviving those gauntlets of oppression is the first step. And I have survived. I survived the violence of sexual abuse, of growing up brown in a white town with a half-brown family desperate to assimilate to whiteness, of the humiliation and degradation of constant harassment, of exoticization, of sexual assault, of exploitation, of emotional abuse. This survival hasn’t been graceful. This resilience hasn’t been pretty and hasn’t always looked like resilience. And this survival hasn’t been simple or short-lived; it happens in cycles, daily, hourly, sometimes by the minute.
When I made the choice to talk about these violences, I made the choice to step into and actively carve out a new space for myself. At first, I clumsily taught myself how to be a survivor, by which I mean I folded and curled myself around a narrative of someone else’s choosing: a narrative of linear healing, of becoming a capital-s Survivor, of clear victims and perpetrators—that is, a black-and-white assault, treated with therapy, that eventually leads to reintegration into the world and becoming a Survivor. I stuffed myself into this ill-fitting suit, barely breathing; this was what surviving should feel like, I thought. Over time, I shimmied and contorted myself out of that ill-fitting suit and settled myself in for a longer, more complicated journey of nonlinear healing, of a survival that contained multitudes.
I had cognitively understood what healing might (or should) look like for a long time, and I could intellectually theorize about my queerness, my identities, my self/selves, but those years of cognitive understanding didn’t help me feel settled in my skin. Thinking things through and intellectualizing my experiences and emotions was familiar territory, but feeling my body was an unfamiliar and profoundly uncomfortable proposition. I was so sure that I should be able to just reason my way through that linear process of healing—therapy to talk about the trauma, survival by becoming another productive member of society. I successfully avoided or side-stepped any kind of somatic therapy until my mid-twenties, when a therapist gently forced me out of my head and into that uncomfortable territory of acknowledging and feeling my body, including the ways that my trauma, my gender, my sexuality, and my brown skin made their twisted way through my body.
After a few years of awkward silences and fumbling through the language of describing my embodied experience, I was able to identify the ways that my body experienced trauma, depression, and anxiety. My breath might catch in my throat, become shallow or short. My lungs and heart might feel like they’re being squeezed by a strongly clenched fist, unable to take full breaths. My fingers might lose sensation or feel prickly, distant from each other when I try to touch fingertip to fingertip. When I feel most settled in my queerness and femmeness and confident in my brown skin, my breath lengthens and deepens, my lungs release and fill, my skin radiates a comforting warmth, my fingertips can touch and connect to each other. This isn’t to say that this kind of healing space is a final endpoint that I’ve reached; instead, survival can be more like a rest stop that I reach more and more regularly. I’m still teetering on the edge of a cliff, but survival can feel like reaching back for solid ground instead of leaning forward over the edge.
Surviving is its own form of resistance. And this survival, like the experiences of these violences themselves, has been explicitly wrapped up in my queerness, in my femmeness. In addition to the more typical tools of survival, this therapist pushed me into actually feeling the trauma in my body and contextualizing these feelings using her explicitly feminist, social justice–oriented framework, yoga and breath work, and meditation; I found my way back to my body through my queer brown femme identity. Specifically, I found my way to queer/brown/femme communities and queer sex, which were made up of consensual, fearless, fierce, negotiated, powerful connections that don’t shy away from my trauma.
Healing from and surviving these and other violences has required this explicit connection to my queerness, to my femmeness. Making this connection feels dangerous. The religious right has claimed this connection as validation for their harmful “conversion therapy” practices; their rationale is that, if one can choose to be queer or if sexual abuse is a cause of non-normative sexuality or gender identity, then by extension, the identity can and should be “corrected” back to a normative (heterosexual, cisgender) one. In response, and in an attempt to open up this conversation, I echo and agree with Ann Cvetkovich: “But why can’t saying that ‘sexual abuse causes homosexuality’ just as easily be based on the assumption that there’s something right, rather than something wrong, with being lesbian or gay? As someone who would go so far as to claim lesbianism as one of the welcome effects of sexual abuse, I am happy to contemplate the therapeutic process by which sexual abuse turns girls queer.”6 Jennifer Patterson, too, claims queerness as a savior of sorts: “Sometimes it feels like my queerness was always there but I was too shell-shocked and splintered by violence to see it. When I finally did? It saved me. Opening up to my queerness saved me.”7 As for me, I will gladly claim my queerness as a welcome effect of sexual violence, and I will honor with reverence the role that queerness and coming into my femme self has played in my survival.
Queerness as a “welcome effect,” queerness as therapy, and queerness as choice are all powerful frames of resistance to the violences that we face as non-normative bodies in the world. Opening up to queerness as a therapeutic choice and as a way to survive trauma and build an embodied self becomes a remarkably powerful and empowering tool. There is immense healing potential in choosing to be queer and to reject normative expectations of sexuality, of gender. This is part of the resilient potential inherent to queerness. This is part of the resilient potential inherent to being femme. There is power in being queer, in being femme, in embracing my brown skin. Queer and femme communities are constantly engaged in world-building, in constructing our own relationships and families and homes; my queer brown femme world can be built to accommodate this nonlinear, spiraling experience of healing. My queer brown femme identity, too, can be constructed and reconstructed every day.
Choosing to be queer and femme feels safe. Claiming it as a choice reclaims a level of power and control that has been denied to so many of us, and in that power lies (an illusion of) safety in our built and chosen communities. Ultimately, though, even these community and family spaces are decidedly unsafe. Being a queer brown femme survivor opens me up to a wide range of violences, and choosing or claiming to choose those identities does not offer any inoculation against these gauntlets of oppression, violence, and marginalization that I face in my everyday existence—even in specifically queer, person-of-color, survivor, or femme spaces. It offers power and healing, but these embodied feelings of reclamation, safety, and agency exist only within a limited self-defined context and still coexist with the lived and embodied experience of my particular intersections of privilege and systemic oppression. Choosing queerness and femmeness, then, settles me squarely in between these spaces of empowerment and oppression; framing this as a choice means that I inhabit this uncomfortable space of my own free will.
This uncomfortable place, though, is where the truth lies. In the tension between “choice as survival/resistance” and “choice as vulnerability/reopening wounds,” lies an authentic settling into my skin. Standing atop these joined pedestals of queerness, of femme fierceness, of being a survivor, of being brown, I am able to acknowledge and honor my agency in choosing or choosing to embrace these identities. There is comfort in the settling into my skin, and there’s fragility, too. Maybe it’s that fragility that makes this powerful. Maybe the power lies within this willingly chosen vulnerability.
Embodying this space feels dangerous. There’s danger here, in this space I’ve chosen to walk into; my reality is full of hypervigilance and fear. Embodying—specifically, choosing to embody—these dangerous and vulnerable identities means hypervigilance and that heightened awareness and fear of my surroundings. It means that sometimes my skin crawls, my hair raises, my heart rate soars in public spaces, and my stature shrinks in on itself at times and expands to form an energetic shield at others. It also means that, in spaces where I’m feeling empowered in this queerness or this femmeness or my full queer brown femme survivor self, my heart feels bigger, my skin feels warmer, my feet feel more solid on the ground, and the internal spinning of my constant trauma-based anxiety slows down enough to feel settled into the earth.
Framing this as a choice—to be queer, to be femme—provides opportunities to push back against and to be resilient in the face of these gauntlets of oppression. Reclaiming the power to name my own self as queer, as brown, as femme also makes space for a reclamation of power and self-determination over my trauma, over the everyday experiences of oppression, and over my own experience of healing.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991). doi:10.2307/1229039
Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.
James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi. The Report of the 2015 US Transgender Survey. Washington, DC: National Center for Transgender Equality, 2016. www.transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS%20Full%20Report%20-%20FINAL%201.6.17.pdf.
Lorde, Audre. “A Litany for Survival.” In The Black Unicorn: Poems. New York: Norton, 1978.
Patterson, Jennifer. “These Bones.” In Queering Sexual Violence: Radical Voices from Within the Anti-Violence Movement, edited by Jennifer Patterson, 104. Riverdale, NY: Riverdale Avenue Books, 2016.
Walters, Mikel L., Jieru Chen, and Matthew J. Breiding. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS): 2010 Findings on Victimization by Sexual Orientation. Atlanta, GA: National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2013. www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/nisvs_sofindings.pdf.