Not Gay

I have to write this carefully so y'all understand what I mean here: ie. there's NOTHING wrong with being gay.

As a trans* masculine femme/queer person, sometimes cis gay men come up to me and ask me how long I've known I was gay. And either they know I'm trans* or assume I'm cis. Either way, the blanket identity of "gay" just bothers me at this point in my identity. I am totally the most fabulous queer ever but I am not gay the way cis men have traditionally defined it. I am so much more than just "gay."

And sometimes my knee-jerk reaction (because I identified as a gay woman for so many years) is to just blurt out some answer but then it's like WAIT. LET ME EXPLAIN. I'm not gay. My identity/sexuality is so not as simple as "gay" makes it sound. Why does being femme and painting my nails and saying "fabulous" a lot and getting along with women automatically just make me gay?

Idk. Maybe it's just the way 'gay' has been used by the cis men around me lately that just turns me off. Please don't assume I'm gay just because I'm femme. There's no way that 'gay' (as used by cis white men) could ever cover who I am.

I think this is also a commentary on how a lot of cis white gays just assume that identities are black/white. You either are or you aren't. But in my queer trans* poc experience, I am and am not all at once. My life and identities are perpetually proving that. So I prefer the term queer and I love to see Latin@ because the @ for me, stands for something different--a possibility beyond a/o pronouns/genders. I am simultaneously both male, female, and neither. Queer is the closest I can come to expressing that.

(You know what too? Most of the time people ask me this because they want to know who I date. It's like that's all you wanna know? Jeez. I don't date cis-men. What does that make me? I could go on...)

Sketcher.