Moving Hands

When I was a teenager, I began to figure out my sexuality. I wanted guidance but couldn’t find any real-life help, so I began to read memoirs written by queer adults. One thing that struck me as a teenager about the memoirs was that they were written by adults who had mapped out a certain narrative of their lives a long time ago. Basically, what these adults were doing was writing a history of their lives and, in the process, fitting events into a neat framework.

Before I go any further, I should explain that, as a teen, I distrusted the discipline of history in general. A sudden transition from fundamentalist Christian school, with one way of narrating the history of the world, to college-level AP history with a radically liberal version of the world’s narrative, led me to believe that the act of writing history was a lot like writing fiction: you strung together a bunch of lies to make a coherent and entertaining story. Seriously, going from “Jesus and God blessed this United States of America to serve as a model of Democracy and Freedom” to “Our Founding Fathers were probably atheists or, at most, Deists. Oh, and they owned slaves,” was a huge thing. I didn’t regain my trust in history until much later, when I began reading things like bell hooks.

Back to queer memoirs. A lot of the time, the authors would point to an incident that happened in childhood and then link it to their adulthood. For instance, I remember reading this narrative by a lesbian who said that she realized that she was a huge dyke because she liked softball as a kid. At the time, this method didn’t satisfy me primarily because I felt like the straight world had created this set of stereotypes – things like “lesbians like softball” – and queer people were relying upon those stereotypes to construct a narrative of their lives. Basically, I just felt that there had to be a more nuanced version of the story than that. So I essentially thought that queer adults were making up fictionalized versions of their lives.

In my eyes, queer adults who wrote memoirs were betraying their younger selves by jamming their histories into a neat little package to present to the world. It felt to me like they were distorting their histories by filling in the gaps of their lives with stereotypes. What I perceived as a stereotypical rendering of one’s life to neatly fit a framework bothered me. I wanted to read about queer people who didn’t fit in the accepted narratives. So, at the time, queer memoirs didn’t really help me figure out things.

Fast-forward a few years later. I am now, more or less, an adult. I’ve become more comfortable with moving about in the world as a bisexual man.

I now have a more complicated relationship with stereotypes now than I did as a teenager. Back then, I saw the issue as more black-and-white: “Stereotypes are bad because they are grotesque caricatures.” But now, I think it’s a more murky issue than that. Who am I to say that the lesbian who played softball as a kid is wrong? Maybe she’s the most stereotypical lesbian on the planet Earth. And that’s okay; her narrative is no less valid than a queer person who steps outside of the box.¹

And, guess what? Sometimes I find myself looking back at my younger years and saying things like, “Oh, yeah, this is where it all started.” I now find some value in exploring my past that I didn’t when I was a teenager. It’s not like rewriting my history – it’s more like filling in the blanks of a crossword puzzle. For example, I recently saw some old pictures of myself as a child. I looked at them and was amused because – let’s put it this way. I probably could have submitted them to the blog Born This Way. Honestly, it was pretty validating because looking at old pictures made me feel that I could trace the roots of my present identity to a young age.

Still, it’s a tricky line to toe. Sometimes, I do find myself rewriting my history. I end up talking about total shit like how I felt about sports as a kid. And then, later on, I say, “Wait a minute – what the fuck was that all about?” I mean, yes, I would sit and read in the outfield when I was on the team instead of playing ball. That is a fact. But did I really hate sports because I was secretly a gigantic faggot, or did I hate sports simply because I found reading to be a more enjoyable activity than sports? For me, the latter explanation rings more true.

I’m not interested in writing a memoir anytime soon. But sometimes I do look back at the events in my life and try to make sense of them. So I feel that, while doing this, the key is to ask whether I am preserving the integrity of my former selves. In other words, if the person that I was then met the person that I am now, would he beat me up? I would hope not. Now, I have changed and evolved, which is a good thing. I wouldn’t want to be exactly like my former self because that’d just lead to stagnancy. Still, I feel an obligation to get my past self’s story right. The last thing I want to do is betray him.

1. It’s more visible, which can be an issue if it takes up so much space that it crowds out the narrative of a less mainstream queer person. But that’s another topic altogether. [↩]