Dear Reader,
I’ve come down with some kind of summer cold, so I hope you’ll bear with me if I start wandering off into fever dream territory. I’m feeling a little loopy.
M and I were at Electric Forest last weekend, which was its own kind of fever dream experience but all in a good way. Even the sweltering hot dusty days and the exciting and soggy Sunday afternoon thunderstorm.
It was interesting to see the variety of people and all the ways those people found to express themselves. For some people, that self-expression seemed to involve a lot of recreational substance use. The thing that always strikes me when I’m around people describing their altered-state experiences is just the reinforcement that, yep, my brain does not work quite like other people’s brains — because other people’s experience on drugs sounds an awful lot like my baseline experience of the world all the time.
And that’s not a complaint. I like my brain. I like my experience of the world. But it’s not without challenges. Four days immersed in an intense sensory environment, with a soundscape of music clashing with other music, sticky with heat and dirt, people everywhere, and everywhere bright lights and artistic visions, and competing smells of sweaty festival goers and cannabis, fresh pine needles and food vendors, port-a-potties and dusty earth — it was a lot.
So now I’m back to real life, and of course I’m not exactly thrilled to have a cold, but also I don’t mind too much. It seems like a fitting sort of hangover, a mundane consequence of a pretty otherworldly couple days.
(And a few minutes ago, M brought me a lunch tray with soup and tea and a vegetable spring roll, which just goes to show that I am actually the luckiest person in the world.)
Before the cold set in, I also had the chance to catch up with my best friend from college, who I shall call Mandolin. She had arrived in town while I was away but luckily was still around one more day when I got back. I did warn her that I might be a germ factory, and she pointed out that not only does she work with kids, but also she’d just spent the last few days packed into conference rooms with a few thousand fellow librarians.
Amidst the catch-up we spent a fair amount of time talking about the challenges faced by queer kids in her community. She lives in an area with demographics and cultural norms that are much more like the small town I grew up in than the metropolitan area I live in today. And while I typically think of access to queer communities on the internet as a potentially life-saving resource for LGBTQIA+ kids who feel isolated, it was eye-opening to hear some of the toxic side of kids falling down the wrong internet rabbit hole, enabling some self-destructive coping behaviors.
I’d like to think that every queer person going through a hard time with their identity can be helped by knowing there are others out there like them, and people who care, and that there’s space in the world for them in whatever shape they choose to express themselves. But queer people, like straight people, are also just people, with the same mix of being well-meaning and selfish, thoughtful and thoughtless, compassionate and careless. Queer teenagers are likely to get fired up the way all teenagers can get fired up, bringing all that youthful zeal and earnest passion to the cause that captures their attention. Queer adults are fallible the same way all adults are fallible, and hoo boy, do some adults take unkindly to having that pointed out.
And straight cisgender kids are also discovering their identities. We don’t typically put it in those terms, of course. Heteronormativity tells us that it’s a normal part of growing up for boys to discover girls and to start doing boy things to impress girls, and for girls to discover boys and to start doing girl things to impress boys. But those are unique journeys for every straight kid as well.
When I was a kid, I didn’t have a hard time fitting in because I was queer. That wasn’t even really on my radar. Rather I was weird, proudly and unapologetically. I wore weird clothes, and I liked weird movies and books and music. I wasn’t afraid to speak up in class or to embarrass myself in front of other people, which was definitely weird. (In fact I’ve always had a hard time with the question, “What was your most embarrassing moment?” because mostly I don’t find embarrassment memorable. I can come up with mortifying experiences, but those don’t really make fun anecdotes.) And in hindsight I stand by my identity as a weirdo. I wasn’t acting out a queer identity that I didn’t know how to express — it just happens that I’m queer and weird. Being an oddball is not a prerequisite to LGBTQIA+ identify; I know plenty of gay and bi and trans and nonbinary people who are very conventional in their tastes and interests.
I think this is part of what can be so confusing for kids figuring themselves out. A lot of queer kids hit a sort of funhouse mirror corner where society has defined “normal” one way, and where they themselves feel “normal”, and yet somehow there’s a gap between those versions of what normal is. For instance, a gay friend of mine once told me that as a teenager, he was really stuck on the idea of wanting kids that were biologically his own, and in his teenage brain that necessarily meant marrying a woman. Knowing he was attracted to guys came second in his mind to the normative nuclear family life he’d envisioned for himself.
I don’t know where I’m going with this except that growing up is messy, and it’s important to know that you’ve got allies in your corner.
What else is new? I had a chance to read Cat Sebastian’s new release, We Could Be So Good, which was just excellent. Once again, Sebastian does a remarkable job creating a rich sense of time and place in her depiction of 1950s New York. I love this developing vein of queer historical romance that creates space for unsung queer history. Mid-20th-century America was a more hostile time for queer people, yet people still figured out how to live out their lives and find loving relationships. That’s an especially strong theme in this book as relates to Nick, the up-and-coming reporter who has a lot to lose if he gets exposed or arrested. Andy has a lot more privilege, coming from a background of wealth if not familial warmth, but he’s still faced with the interesting crossroads of a bisexual awakening and fumbling his way through figuring out how to pursue the relationship he wants with Nick. It’s a great story, and it really made me want to up my Italian cooking game.
That’s it from me. Now I’m going to go take a nap with my cat. Hope you’re well.
Love,
Beas
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