Queer as a Safeword

It started in third grade.

Setting: the playground outside that old brick elementary school tucked between patchwork quilt acres of corn and soybeans, rolling hills cross-crossed with bland asphalt and straight railroad tracks. Open grassy fields, playground structures from the 1960s, the obligatory basketball court and hoop.

Characters: (them) all oversized for their age, sharp teeth, preformed fists, insults at the ready. (me) small, new, defenseless.

Act I (third grade)

Them – “Lesbo.”

Me – [cries]

Act II (fourth grade)

Them – “Dyke.”

Me – [cries less]

Act III (fifth grade through high school)

Them – “He, she, it thing. Queer.”

Me – [angry, cold, detached] “That the best you got?”

End

Those words were never mine. The first time I heard them was in their mouths, full of anger and rage, defining me, telling me where I did not belong, reminding me that I’d find no home near them. I knew I wasn’t safe being myself.

Their vocabulary expanded as we grew up together, as they heard new (terrible) things at home being said about “people like me.” It was late elementary years when the playground erupted in “Smear the Queer,” the iconic childhood game taught and condoned by our own gym teacher (and by many, many others like him). And while I desperately searched for a way to distance myself from those hateful words, I knew I could not outrun them. They permeated the air in the school bus around me. They were written on my locker in permanent marker. They followed me down the halls, into the classroom, even into the whispered perimeters of Sunday school at church. There was no Jell-O salad big enough to hide behind. I was caught out.

I was The Queer.

Go on. Tell me about sticks and stones. I’ve heard that one. It never helped. Those words did hurt, and it was largely because they were in the room before I walked in. I couldn’t go anywhere without those labels finding me.

They were my definition of being.

On my locker in high school the year I finally left that state to head west, as a parting gift in the last months of freshman year, one of my classmates wrote in big letters across the door of my locker a phrase that I won’t post here. It’s definitely NSFW. And I bet you know how this story goes. I knew who wrote it. We all knew. You could follow the snickering line of faces down the hall to any one of the culprits who had tortured and bullied me (and all the other queer kids) for years. But I was the one in the Principal’s office explaining why my locker was covered in vulgar language. I was the one targeted by those words over and over.

So many of those words should have been mine instead. Would it have been different to tell them who I was? How would it feel to own those words and declare them joyfully? It would be decades before I could comfortably do that.

Maybe you feel the same way.

Do you whisper when you say the word Gay? Do you feel like Lesbian is a secret thing that shouldn’t be said out loud? How does Transgender feel coming out of your mouth? What about Queer?

This thing where we say Queer now with an edge of pride in our voice, that’s new. And it’s beautiful. It makes me wish I could go back in time and give that word to myself and every other queer kid in the world as a gift of self-love and freedom. When I hear it now, it is the sound of a community around me, of many voices coming together, of support and joy and hope.

I did not see pictures of queer or trans joy when I was a child. Who would I be now if I had?

Who would you be?

Who will our children get to be because of this change in our language and our reclamation of our identity?

And yes, I know, there are loud, angry voices saying awful things. I hear them, too. They were those kids writing hateful things on my locker. They were the teens who beat me up.

But today we get to take these words and make them into something new and beautiful and complex, and they are entirely ours to determine. We can say them with pride. We can whisper or shout, we can paint our bodies in them, we can use them as flags of safety to find our communities, and we can gather together under their shelter.

The word QUEER feels like home to me now. It is cozy and sweet and full of amazing people who are all so different and yet so much the same, and many of them are you. If I could go back in time, I would take a five-gallon paint can of rainbow colors to paint over every public school locker I had. I would be loud and silly and full of joy over being different and beautiful for it.

I would love myself for being queer.

Queer is our word. Queer is my word. Queer is your word. Take that out to the streets, siblings.

Your trans friend,

Robin