Claiming my complicated identity in the wake of Orlando
When my best friend said “there was a shooting at a gay club in Orlando”, I didn’t gasp in shock, or turn to look at her, eyes wide; I didn’t offer up a murmured oh my god. My mouth closed. My jaw clenched. I halted my steps, let my head tilt back, and took a long, slow breath. Above me, the sky was a clear perfect blue.
I’d be the first to tell you I talk too much, but I haven’t said much about Orlando. I pride myself on my ability to articulate my emotions, yet every time I part my lips to give way to the roar inside my skull, I end up talking about something else. I felt similarly after Charleston, though I had a lot more to say about that. But certain thoughts, then as now, sidestepped my vocal cords and turned to ashes on my tongue. I couldn’t place the emotion I felt then. I almost didn’t place it now.
I’m afraid to talk about Orlando. I’m afraid to talk about how hard it hit me, afraid to talk about how much I hurt, afraid to open my mouth and give my full voice to the sorrow and anger and heart-stopping terror that just the name of a city now evokes. I’ve avoided confronting my fear because doing so will confront the uncomfortable truth of my existence. I am not straight, and I am not white.
I have had difficulty explaining even to myself how intertwined these identities are. For most people, race and sexuality are whole and distinct facts. For me, they are question marks. I'm bisexual. I'm queer. I'm biracial. I say them out loud sometimes, testing whether I believe my own declarations, gauging how much unease I feel when I make it a statement, rather than a question. Asserting my blackness hasn’t always gone well; I was once told after revealing that my Grandfather was black and my Father was biracial that I was “only a quarter! That doesn’t count.” This is a person I still consider my friend, whom I admire greatly, who is one of the best people I know. She dismissed my identity with a wave of her hand, and instilled a lifetime understanding that the very fabric of my being was subject to approval, that what I looked like was the greatest determining factor in who the world decided I was.
While my formative experience of erasure is unusual, it is far from unique. Erasure of interracial people has a long and documentable history, particularly in this country, where the words for my racial makeup and appearance are “quadroon”, “high-yellow”, and “passing”. But as a white-presenting person in predominantly white spaces, I am insulated from confronting these realities. Interestingly, it is stories of bisexual erasure that have resonated the most with my own experience. Being told “oh honey, you’ll get there”, being asked “wait, I thought you were a lesbian?” overhearing, dismissively, “he’s gone straight”. In all of these experiences, the common narrative thread is the total absence of belief. The refusal to acknowledge our experience as valid, our narrative as truth.
I hesitate to say our. I hesitate to include myself in these communities. I wrote on facebook “your anger is valid, your existence is valid, you deserve more.” I have family in South Carolina, with skin much darker than my own. I reached out after the Charleston shooting to ask how they were, offer my support, my love. In the wake of these all too frequent tragedies, I offer an endless litany of yours and yours and yours. The grief is never mine, never ours.
My self-exclusion stems less from fear of outside judgement than it does from judgement from within. “Who is this white girl trying to to co-opt our suffering? Who is this straight girl trying to champion a cause that isn’t even hers? Who does this bitch think she is?” I wouldn’t fault you for thinking so little of me. The world is full of well-meaning white women speaking on behalf of people who can damn well speak for themselves. Faced with the fact that the ongoing suffering of my people is not my lived experience, I have willingly consigned myself to allyship. It never occurred to me that I was taking the easy way out.
I’ve never had to come out. I’ve spent my life surrounded by communities where it was just a non-issue. The closest I’ve come is telling people I’m polyamorous. Yes, I have multiple partners, yes, I’m happy, yes, I’m marrying my fiance, no, we are not (are never) breaking up. I have been supremely lucky, and profoundly privileged.
I have been operating under that assumption that my blonde hair and my boyfriend exempt from violence. Not sexual violence, because misogyny is such a given that it hardly bears comment, but racial violence? Hate crimes? Those are things that happen to other people. Things that happen to queer, brown people, not queer-adjacent white girls.
And I could so easily make this true. I can opt out. I can choose to let my skin do the talking, point to my frilly dresses and fiance and let people draw their own conclusions. Like Eliza before me, I can erase myself from the narrative, and I’d never have to look back. It would be so easy to wrap myself in my privilege, in my assumed straight whiteness, and be silent.
There are 49 queer black and brown people who did not get to choose. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of voices that are silenced not by choice, but by the choices of others. There are people at this very second that do not feel safe in their neighborhoods, their homes, the places they carved out where at last they can be unafraid. I, who have spent my life holding hands with girls in public, I, who have kissed women in broad daylight without a thought, I, who spent 6 years as the only white girl on my street and wanted so badly to have my father’s red-blonde afro, what right do I have to choose silence, to choose complacence, to choose fear?
I am under no illusions that claiming my identity as a queer black woman is going to go smoothly. The act of choosing blackness is painfully fraught at best; choosing your sexuality cuts to the very heart of what the queer community has fought so long to discredit. It would be much simpler to deny my identity than be forced to defend it. But my identity isn’t simple, and it never has been. No longer can I use my skin as a security blanket, no longer can I use my boyfriend as a buffer. I have spent my life tentatively occupying spaces of queerness, living alongside people of color while allowing my appearance to hold me apart, knowing I’d never be a target of police brutality and believing that meant I was safe. An automatic rifle doesn’t care that I have a fiance. A lone gunman in a black church might shoot the man next to me and leave me alone or he might call me a race traitor and execute me on the spot. I cannot continue to live in these spaces, to love these people, to call them my friends and family, and pretend that I am exempt from their struggle. That I am exempt from danger. I am not.
I am still afraid. Afraid that I will face rejection on all fronts. That I will be told I have no right to my bi-racial heritage by black and white people alike, told my bisexuality is invalid, inauthentic, a phase. I am afraid to discover what I have long suspected, that I belong nowhere. That I am too other, too alien, to claim any place, any people, as my own. I am afraid I will be told that my identity was never mine to begin with. At these lowest moments, I repeat to myself the words of Nelson Mandela, a man far braver than I will ever be: “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.”
If you were here beside me, you would see me shaking. You would see my eyes red from crying, welling up yet again. You would see the tension in my shoulders, hear my shaky breathing. The truth is, I have never had to be this brave, and I am not ready.
But the time has come for me to start living the truth of my complicated existence, ready or not.
