Maritza Baptiste, Staff Writer
I overheard a conversation recently in which a bisexual, fem-presenting woman spoke openly about wanting to do a queer costume with her straight boyfriend. She claimed it was the only way for her to be visibly queer on Halloween. The conversation pushed me to think about the ways that our desire to make our queerness visible can sometimes be inauthentic or a form of costuming. However, the woman I overheard is only a victim of the standards of visibility that we place on ourselves and the entirety of the queer community.
For many queer people, Halloween is not a time where we can put on a costume of our identity — it is a time when we can embrace our identities wholeheartedly, because every day of the year we are visibly queer. Some less visibly queer people treat the holiday as an opportunity to express a part of themselves that is not always visible. Neither experience is inherently more authentic, but when visibility is a badge of legitimacy, we are creating barriers to belonging in a community where no one should have to prove their identity through appearance.
In wanting to preserve and protect queer spaces, some members of the community uphold an idea of queerness that they feel is essential to the identity. You will see it in the way a cishet-seeming person will be treated or eyed at a gay club. Pointed glances follow them with the question: “What’s he doing here?” These glances are rarely followed up by actual questioning of their identity.
That is not to say that queer spaces should be overrun by straight people, but we often forget that queerness can come in many forms. We should not need to have micro bangs and line art tattoos to enter queer spaces. If we begin to quantify queerness based on presentation, we leave ourselves vulnerable to appropriation by straight people. Queerness cannot just be one thing.
There is a longstanding tradition of queer people wanting to find community with each other by signaling their queerness in various ways, including hairstyles, mannerisms and clothing. The lesbian community has largely co-opted carabiners as a way of signaling. Methods of signaling, while useful tools in community building, are just that: tools. We should not be using our historical methods of visibility to claim who is and is not queer enough.
There are queer people who do not fit neatly into our preconceived ideas of what a queer person should look like. True liberation requires acknowledging that queerness can present itself in myriad ways, many of which might not be immediately recognizable to others. We must make room for the straight-presenting man at the gay club and the bisexual woman with a boyfriend. Someone finding comfort in a presentation that others perceive as heterosexual is not a disservice to the queer community, nor should anyone have to alter their appearance to make their identity more legible to others.
Instead, these experiences remind us just how vast and multifaceted queerness can be. We cannot demand freedom from society’s restrictive expectations of sexuality while imposing our own. If queer spaces are meant to offer refuge from a world that constantly makes assumptions about who we are, we must be willing to challenge the assumptions we make about one another. Queerness should not require a uniform, and belonging should not depend on looking the part.