898 words (~4 minute read)
when i was a toddler, i was attracted to colorful and shiny things (as i think all kids are?). i've also been told i liked sequins and wearing my mom's heels. my parents asked our close family friends (endearingly referred to as our gay uncles, or guncles) if i was gay. they said no, kids just like colorful things.
fast forward to now, and i'm pretttttty sure i'm queer. you know how it is. pansexual, queer, something else—not straight. who knows. i'm open.
i also like painting my nails and wearing color. i strongly dislike wearing all black (in tension with my liking techno).
straight men typically do not paint their nails; if they do, it's probably black, and it's probably on their pinky. but that's not because straight men don't like color (even though you'll mostly see them wearing white, black, gray, and blue). presumably straight men don't wear colorful nails because it's feminine, and that may conflict with their sense of gender identity and signal to others that they're gay, which would be undesirable.
but i don't feel like i paint my nails as a signal. i'm extremely aware that it sends a signal, and of course i know how others may interpret it, but that's not why i do it, and i often feel conflicted knowing it's transmitting potentially incorrect information. like straight men, i don't want those i'm potentially interested in thinking i'm oriented away from them (even for a second). ideally no one reads into it beyond some vague awareness that i'm different from the apparent masculine. this isn't too big of a deal, because anyone that gets to know me pretty quickly discovers my preferences, and if i'm interested in someone, i will surely make sure they find out. while it could prevent someone from approaching me, likely it will encourage the right people to approach me, so, again, not a big deal.
now, i'm (relatively) comfortable living in the ambiguous. it feels much more genuine—human—than pretending binaries or extremes are real. so i paint my nails anyways. the thing is: it's very apparent to me that my liking colors and having a flexible sexual orientation come from unrelated places. it's my freedom to express those qualities that seems deeply related. it really feels to me that i like painting my nails because (1) they're boring being skin color, (2) i experience aesthetic joy when looking at a color that i like and goes well with my skin, and (3) it's a societally accepted place to put color on the body (like, i could paint all my skin because i like color, but that would be too far outside of some perceived acceptable boundary, so i don't). and i guess i aesthetically don't like colored hair on myself—not sure why.
so it seems that identifying as queer offers me this freedom. i'm pretty confident that if i still believed i were straight, i would not paint my nails. i didn't paint my nails before my semi-recent queer transition period, likely to fit in with men, and only once i stopped caring about fitting in with men did i feel comfortable painting my nails and also identifying as queer. while i know some straight men who paint their nails occasionally, it's not common, and nowhere near the rate at which i do it now. i hadn't yet adopted any queer labels until after i started painting my nails, but i did feel weird identifying as straight for a while, and it was all part of the same transitory period. so my queerness feels less about not being into women (because i am still mostly into people who were born female) and more about rejecting the limits applied by heterosexual masculinity. i feel like a man, i guess. biologically, definitely. spiritually, it's pretty irrelevant. and i'm inclined to think the true essence of me is my energy—my life force that i connect with when i meditate—not my body. of course my body and life force are connected, and all is one, but still: there's a pretty big difference between the energy that powers my being and my penis.
notably, i'm also quite uncomfortable in very straight-dominated spaces—think bars with a lot of monogamous straight-presenting people. not because i feel unsafe—i just feel out of place and somewhat uninterested in engaging.
what does all this mean?
romantically, i'm almost exclusively into feminine-presenting individuals (which tend to be women and female-born non-binary people). that being said, i have not yet been very close with a fem-presenting queer man / male-born non-binary person, so the jury is very much still out.
sexually, i'm extremely open.
it feels like i'm allowed to express my allegedly feminine traits because i'm comfortable identifying as queer.
it also seems that queerness is not restricted to having a "divergent" sexual orientation nor gender identity. i mean, i still feel that male is an accurate term, even though i have always had the feminine leanings that i have now. and it feels very possible (and even likely) that i will discover i have no romantic interest in men, without diminishing how far i diverge from the restrictive notion of masculinity we've been given.
it feels like identifying as queer simply offers me the freedom to ignore externally-imposed norms and express my own, while using similar labels (like man). what the fuck?