LGBT Archives - The Toast

I’m Not Cis, and I Don’t Want to Be

Emily Sommer LGBT Aug 11, 2015

I take a seat at a neighborhood dive my best friend and I have never been to. I told her on the way there that we should have an exit strategy. She asked me why I’m so afraid. I consider my perspective as a trans woman versus hers as a cis woman. I explain, abstractly, how self-abnegation of one’s gender identity may lead to vulnerability, that the ethos of transmisogyny leached into me like a virus and even when I learned to value myself I was left with the small, irrational fear that a mere verbal attack could blink me out of existence. And then I realized that at some level she is right and I understated by saying, “It’s my goal to not give two fucks. I’m just not there yet.”

The bartender asks what we ladies would like. While she made our drinks I played down my inner exuberance at being gendered correctly; but in actuality it was like snorting self-esteem off the bar.

One time, someone raising donations outside a supermarket gendered me correctly and I nearly gave a donation in gratitude before catching myself: gendering is free. Gendering is a common courtesy. Did you know that you’re more likely to be gendered while involved in a transaction? Gendering gives a sales associate a statistical edge. Or perhaps, it’s that our terms of respect (ma’am; sir, miss) are tied to the gender binary.

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Times I’ve Faked Being Straight

Mikaella Clements LGBT Jul 24, 2015

Previously, Mikaella Clements terrified Toast readers with If Gwyneth Paltrow Were Your Girlfriend.

Most of the time I don’t even think about it. It comes out, surprising me as much as it doesn’t surprise my audience. I’ll be rattling along, cheerfully enjoying myself and talking too much about The Iliad or Taylor Swift or how much I hate the British Problems meme, and then the conversation turns and suddenly my girlfriend, the prettiest girl in the world, is a boy.

More often than not, I don’t fake straight to protect myself. This isn’t the same as when I carefully cultivated a crush on an inaccessible boy in high school so I could point to him if anyone asked who I liked, nor is it like all the times I was firmly and fix-lippedly silent about my sexuality when my cranky grandfather explained how gay marriage would inevitably destroy the Catholic Church. I don’t even do it to prevent the double-take from others, in which I usually take a sort of savage pride.

If it sometimes falls into the category of attempting to make casual conversation a little smoother, more often it is because I’ve decided to try another life on for size. Not through any dissatisfaction with my own, but from an indefinable curiosity, a sudden urge. It always just happens — I’ll be having a normal conversation, and then, all of a sudden, I’m someone else.

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Father-Daughter Dance: On Coming Out and Going Home

Amy Deneson Family, LGBT Jul 22, 2015

When my cousin invited me to her wedding, I couldn’t bring myself to repeat any of the auto-responses I’d stocked up over the years to get out of going home. Instead, I blurted out: “I’m super happy for you, but sick of pretending like I’m Single in the City — like the love of my life doesn’t exist — for the sake of other people’s feelings.”

“So…” she said, “who is he?”

“She,” I choked out. “Her name is Melinda.”

Silence.

Then, to my shock, my cousin exclaimed, “Bring her! I can’t wait to meet her. Seriously, it’d mean so much to us if you both—” She cut herself off. “Wait. Do your parents know?”

No. That was the problem. I hadn’t yet figured out how to break it to my conservative, Christian parents and older brother that they were related to a homosexual.

My parents knew of Melinda as a girl I’d met in college. They thought we were girlfriends, as in the kind Grandma envisioned when she asked how many I’d invited over for potluck. Melinda and I had been friends for ten years and a couple for three. I was touched by my cousin’s response, but wasn’t sure I was ready to make my lesbian relationship a family affair.

When the formal wedding invitation arrived, addressed to both Melinda and me, I had a change of heart and resolved to attend. I was nearly thirty. I was in love with the kind of girl you take home. And according to the hand-jotted note beneath the calligraphy, my aunt would be pleased as punch to meet Melinda, if we both decided to come. “The colors are black and white!”

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“Mano Po”: On Family, Religion, and Rebellion

Tenny Mari LGBT Jul 21, 2015

There are many traditions in my family that have never been fully explained to me. When I ask why we observe them, the answers I get often amount to little more than “that’s just how it is.” On Christmas, we eat sotanghon — a sort of Filipino chicken noodle soup. On New Year’s Eve, my mom tells me to jump up and down with coins in my pockets so I can get taller and richer. We place round fruits on the windowsills for luck.

My mother is obsessed with the idea of luck. It’s lucky to have a laughing Buddha in your house; if you rub his belly, it’s good luck, she says. But you never buy your own Buddha statue — that’s bad luck.

Hers was a modest upbringing; she was raised by two strict disciplinarians. Their family was centered on education and religion. My mother always abided by her parents’ governance; respect for your elders is an unspoken eleventh commandment in our culture. There is even a tradition unique to the Philippines, in which younger relatives must seek their elders’ blessing by asking them to touch our foreheads as a show of esteem. Instead of saying “hello” or “goodbye” to your older relatives, you are supposed to say “Mano po,” while bowing. But I was never one to genuflect.

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Why I Want an Arranged Marriage

Rohin Guha LGBT, Relationships Jul 16, 2015

Rohin Guha’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.

BRB, setting up my biodata

Tick tock tick tock.

There is no technicolor line of cousins and relatives lined up and dancing at my wedding to bombastic bhangra. We are Bengalis; our weddings are somber affairs.

That’s not why, though.

The cousins and relatives who exist in my periphery–and seemingly only when there is a wedding or a funeral that brings us together–don’t know I’m a queer person. Or, if they do, they don’t understand what that means. I could be a number of things to them: A Western corruption, a deviant, someone to avoid at parties–but never really a human who actually imagines himself tying the knot and settling down.

Yet I’m not too torn up that there are no “Maahi Ve”s in my future.

***

I grew up only ever knowing the idea that a man’s family and a woman’s family meet–they are agreeable to their children marrying–and then there’s about a week of ceremonies, food, and loud aunties cackling about something absurd that happened in their childhoods. I grew up viewing marriage as a prism through which we crossed over from youth to adulthood: To be married was to be a grown-up; it was to position yourself to cross the next arc of your life, as defined by the purchase of increasingly large homes and a growing litter of kids. Marriage was a milestone that acknowledged you had done all the things you needed to do as an irresponsible kid–and now you were beholden to carrying out your family name, to spawning another generation.

My parents’ marriage is a beautiful, glorious partnership. It is glorious in how long it has lasted and how much adversity it has weathered. Like many Indians of their time, my parents got married, bid goodbye to their homeland and settled anew in America, where, with time, they would become experts in American customs–all so they could will a better world to my brother and me.

***

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Beyond Scoring Goals: On Building a Life

Molly Priddy LGBT Jul 13, 2015

Previously by Molly Priddy: My Secular Patron Saints

In February 2002, when I was a junior in high school, a house burned down in Missoula, Montana.

Houses can do that, burn to the ground – it’s not entirely uncommon here, especially in the winter when heating systems can go awry. But in our city, considered to be the liberal, blue freckle on an otherwise very red state, even more important than the ashes was what arose from them: The house belonged to a lesbian couple and their toddler son, and was torched intentionally. The little family was forced to crawl out a window to escape with their lives.

The flames came only days after the couple – Adrianne Neff and Carla Grayson – had filed suit against the state university system, seeking the same employee benefits heterosexual partners enjoyed.

The community rallied around the couple, but the arsonist was never captured. For a while, a theory floated around that the couple had burned down their own house. To me, a then-16-year-old coming to terms with her own sexuality, the terror in the arsonist’s message mixed with the community’s reaction was oddly reminiscent of what I’d always heard growing up in church pews: Love thy neighbor, but all sinners can burn.

***

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The Years That Answer: On Christianity and Coming Out

Gillian Chisom LGBT, Religion Jun 22, 2015

“There are years that ask questions and years that answer” –Zora Neale Hurston

1.

The three years I’ve lived out of the closet have all been question years. I’ve marked them with my own rituals: around March first, my “official” gayversary, I reread The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which wasn’t my first gay book, but rather the first gay book I read after I started to believe I could be gay. March first is an approximation, of course, extrapolated after the fact. I didn’t start telling people until later, but coming out to myself has been the longest and hardest part of this process, and so it’s the milestone I mark. Making one’s own rituals carries a certain power, and mine have helped me take ownership of the person I’m becoming. The shadow side of that act of creation, though, lies in the recognition of the rituals I no longer own, either because I’ve left them behind, or they’ve left me.

2.

I haven’t gone to church regularly for many months now; I’ve lost count of how many. For me, this has meant a profound departure from my life as I lived it before. It took me a long time to admit that I hadn’t just stopped going because I wanted to sleep in, to acknowledge that I just didn’t want to. It took even longer to figure out why.

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Dispatches from the Society for the Preservation and Promotion of Sapphic Social Mores

Maggie Cee & Rachel Kahn LGBT Jun 15, 2015

Our friends at The Toast have been so kind as to allow us to use this platform to share some of the wisdom contained in our forthcoming publication A Lifestyle Compendium for the Modern Sapphic Socialite— wherein we seek to provide framework for addressing and conquering a plethora of modern lifestyle challenges, be they ethical, sartorial, romantic, or artisanal.

A note on the inevitable ambiguity at the commencement of the courtship process.

It is not unusual, in circles Sapphic and otherwise, for a lovelorn individual considering first approaching the object of their affection to take a moment to wonder “is this [redacted] queer or not?”

This is a question that has evolved over the past half-century as, in days of yore, a labrys adornment was all one needed to determine Sapphic inclination. Fashions came and went, but an eye for simple symbolic jewelry– perhaps obtained from the local health food co-op or wymmmyn’s craft collective– remained key to discerning the sapphic inclination, or lack thereof, of a potential paramour.

If one’s potential paramour identifies or presents as butch, genderqueer in the boy band mode, or androgynous, they may have historically found the strategy of visual Sapphic identification sufficient, although, of course, there are always exceptions.

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