Shadows to spectrum: reclaiming the rich tapestry of my queer identity

I am a queer, trans* nonbinary, non-disabled, middle-class, neuro-divergent, White British immigrant (to the USA). I was labeled male at birth (AMAB) and, as such, I have been socially conditioned as a boy/man. I was not always able to say these things. Either because I did not have the awareness, or because the language was not available, or because I was scared of claiming these identities. I was born in the UK in 1973, five years after the Sexual Offences Act was passed which decriminalized homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age in private in England and Wales, and one year after the first-ever Pride rally took place in London. While it was a time of social uprising and legal reform it was also a time when homophobia was alive and well – especially at home. Back then, we were a few decades away from the word “queer” being reclaimed as an empowering aspect of homosexual identity and it was often used by my parents, friends and teachers to put me down and remind me that I was not acceptable. In 1981, when I was aged nine in middle school I recall a teacher calling me out in a whole school assembly as having been entered into a girl-only designated sports team and commenting, “Probably because he thinks he is a she and wants to wear a gymslip.” Urgh. My head span. My eyes filled with tears. I was used to being humiliated at home by the parents who physically and emotionally abused me, but this was the first time I felt it at school. Now I had nowhere safe to be. I took the only choice available to me and laughed at myself along with all the other kids who joined the teacher in shaming me. Looking back now I wonder if this was the beginning of my appropriated hate of myself.

A few years later, in the mid-1980s, the AIDS crisis was being talked about in the UK, with the death of Rock Hudson, leaflets being posted through letter boxes and television adverts of falling tombstones that had the acronym “AIDS” inscribed on them. None of us knew what was happening but thanks to a New York Times article that referred to the disease as “Gay Cancer” we all knew who was to blame. People like me. I mean, I was not even sexually active, I had not come out to myself, let alone anyone else, but I internalized the fear, panic and concern, and prayed to a God that I did not believe in every single day to make me find girls attractive and to stop me from taking furtive glances at naked boys in the locker room at school. It did not work.

I was 15, already scared and full of shame, when Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced Section 28 in 1988, which banned local authorities from promoting homosexuality or publishing material to promote homosexuality or promote the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship. As if there were not already a million reasons to hide myself away, with this act coming into law, I was no longer willing to entertain the possibility of being gay. The stakes were too high. All I really wanted was to be loved and to feel loveable, but with the possibility of rejection on all fronts – at home, at school, in my so-called friendship group – I firmly denied my Self to myself and others and spent the following six years trying to be straight and making up excuses for not having a relationship to keep the bullying, ridicule and suspicion from family and friends at bay. From the straight men and boys in my life who I perceived as being popular, I learned how to “be a (straight) man” by displaying anger, by hiding my feelings and by putting down women. All the time, my self-hatred built as I continued to exile the parts of me that carried the shame of being different.

I remember a moment at high school when someone was arranging a house party while their parents were away (remember, it was the 80’s, kids were left home alone all the time). A bunch of the (straight) boys were talking about which of the (straight) girls they were going to “get off” with. There was one particular girl who was apparently willing to fuck, be fingered and give blow jobs to any boy who asked. This was my chance to prove that I could fit in and be accepted as normal. I plucked up the courage to approach her and ask her if she would “get off” with me at the party. She looked at me dead in the eyes, laughed in my face and said “You’re a poof. You are going to die a virgin.” In that moment I wished the ground could swallow me whole and take me to my virginal death. This was not the first (or last) time that I wished I were dead.

Leaving school at age 16 and going to college was an important transition for me. I was introduced to a whole new group of people who had no history of me and, for the first time in my life, I met people who openly identified as gay in some way. From these people, I learned how to be gay, not in an out-loud way, but in a homonormative way; a way of being gay that was palatable to others, that was “right and proper.” This meant getting really good at reading the room and being adept, and knowing when it was safe to camp-it-up and when I was required to butch-it-up.

During college, when I was 17 or 18 I got into the illegal rave scene that had grown out of the Acid House rave movement. At ecstasy- and amphetamine-fuelled raves and after-parties I felt like I had found my people. Sex, gender and sexuality did not matter, but love and acceptance did. I started frequenting clubs that had door policies that excluded anyone who looked too pedestrian or who had not made an effort. Whether it was the influence of MDMA or simply being surrounded by other “ravers” who were loved and accepted by others just as they are, I flourished. I began to integrate the lost and exiled parts of my queerness – and I began to want to live.

Leaving college at age 21 and entering the capitalist corporate world of work, I was met with the same oppressive forces I had experienced at home and at school. I was repeatedly told by bosses and colleagues to tone it down, to be less gay and to speak differently. These comments have continued throughout my career, even until today and remind me that we live in a straight world. As a result, I made an unconscious decision to retreat from my gayness and to show-up as straight-acting-enough so that others (usually those in power) would look favorably upon me when assessing for promotion or career advancement opportunities. Once again, I had forsaken my identity so that I could be successful and win the praise and adoration of my abusive parents. I even eschewed Pride celebrations and avoided queer gatherings for some time, claiming that, “The longer we say we need a voice, the longer we need a voice.” Today, as a 50 year old critical sexuality scholar and sex therapist, I can look back on this and understand my turning away from my queerness as a sign that I had (re)appropriated the homophobia I had witnessed over the years. Sometimes I am down on myself for not pushing back against those in power and for capitulating to the micro- and macroaggressions. At other times I recognize that I was – and am – just doing the best I could to keep myself safe from violence, ridicule, shame, harm and exclusion in a world that values normativities over nuanced positionalities.

Being White, middle class, straight-acting-enough, the-right-type-of-gay and with as yet undiscovered and unclaimed queerness and neurodivergence, meant that I was able to navigate the world fairly easily and, aside from regular homophobic comments (the word “fag” was regularly yelled at me) or acts of violence (I remember around the age of 30 walking along Whitehall in London and being showered with McDonalds milkshakes thrown at me by a bunch of lads riding a London bus), I tried to convince myself that I remained relatively unharmed and unaffected by the legal and political structures that worked against me and my people. As a White AMAB person, the systems of power and privilege were for sure working in my favor and I have been able to lead a relatively successful and happy adult life, even finding love in a long-term relationship with my husband David. This all changed on January 20th, 2017, when Donald Trump was inaugurated as president and the LGBT rights page on the White House website disappeared. I felt like I had been deleted. The feelings of shame and anger from my youth came flooding back. How! Fucking! Dare! They! The people in charge are meant to protect and look after their subjects, no? I look back on this pivotal moment as the time when my ambivalence about being gay and the extent to which I needed to live out loud in my gayness switched to activism. I registered to volunteer at the San Francisco LGBT Center and began the neverending process of educating myself about the systemic and systematic oppression of women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, and the LGBTQIA2+ community in the Global North.

Fast Forward to 2018 when I “began” training as a psychotherapist at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. That I even needed to do the training marked my non-belongingness as an immigrant; I had been working as a trained therapy clinician in private practice in the UK for six years before moving to the USA and was informed that my credentials and experience were meaningless here and that the only way I could get a license was to go back to graduate school. On the one hand, this felt like a bureaucratic hoop-jumping frustration. The prospect of having to pay tens of thousands of dollars to receive an education that I had already received in order to perform a role that I had been performing for years in the UK was preposterous. On the other hand, it turned out to be an experience that rocked me to the core by revealing the gaps in my knowledge and experience about the ways in which intersectional oppression occurs. My education at CIIS opened up new avenues of understanding about my social rank and elucidated the ways in which I hold spaces of privilege and oppression within my mind/body. The world that opened up to me within the walls of CIIS and the people that walked the halls, who taught me, who learned with me gave me conscious and unconscious permission to aspects of my queer trans nonbinary self to emerge. I adopted they/them pronouns, I began to wear nail varnish and I adopted a new non-gendered name (DDS) to distance myself from the scared person I was.

Which leads me to today. I am still a little scared to wear clothing and to adopt a gender expression that matches my trans nonbinary gender identity, but I am getting braver by the day. Recently I bought a skirt that I am daring myself to wear over the top of some jeans or leggings. I have always wanted to wear something that I can twirl in! I draw strength from the love and acceptance I feel from David, from our besties, and from people who share similar views about the pointlessness of the gender binary.

In November 2023, after nearly a decade of being a lawful permanent resident, I naturalized as a US citizen. Since I was 12 years old (when a Texan girl visited my school for a term) I had wanted to be an American and live in America. Looking back on this now, I wonder whether my dreams to be someone and somewhere else were driven by a need to escape the shame and ridicule of my youth. America is the land of the free and the home of the brave, after all. I have since learned that this line of the Star Spangled Banner is true only for some, for the ones who look and behave correctly – nevertheless, my desire persisted.

Renouncing my allegiance and fidelity to any sovereignty of which I had been a citizen (a requirement of the Oath of Allegiance) and being told by a USCIS officer that I was now an American was a wonderful moment and I cried with joy. Now I could participate in this “democracy” by using my vote and now I would not be ejected should Trump (or another politician with extremist tendencies) come into power. But I had also sworn that I would bear arms and perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces if required to do so by the US government. Some of my British friends earnestly asked me how I could live in a country that showed its disdain for queer people by legislating against drag performances and trans people using a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. More asked me how I could choose to become a citizen of a country that claimed to protect the children, but failed to legislate against the biggest killer of children – guns. Great questions. Sometimes I think that this might be internalized and appropriated homophobia and transmisia, but mostly I recognize that “there” is no better than “here,” after all “there” was the place of tear-filled assemblies, embarrassing coming-of-age moments, abusive parents and milkshake dousing. I also recognize that wherever there are people trying to hold power and dominion over others there will be hate. Hate that is directed at the people who are different and the people who refuse to get in line.

In reflecting on my journey, from the struggles of self-discovery to the complexities of navigating societal expectations, I find solace in the resilience that has shaped my identity. The scars of discrimination and internalized hate are etched into my past, but today, as a 50-year-old critical sexuality scholar, I stand with reclaimed pride and the courage to defy oppressive norms. From the painful echoes of schoolyard taunts to the euphoria of embracing my true self, I have learned that authenticity is both a radical act of defiance and a profound journey toward self-love.