Finding My Queer Joy
The Wonder of Defining Your Own Queerness
Queer and Here
The radical hope of Harvey Milk was the insistence that the queer life be not just a life of fighting, but also a life of joy. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. About Harvey and his refusal to hide or be silent, about his unbridled love for queer people and his joy. I’ve been thinking about this in part because he was the major inspiration in naming our long-tailed project focused on youth LGBTQ+ mental health over at Hopelab, and partly because the journey from queer shadow to queer joy is a path I’m working my way down as well.
I’m 26 years old and I’m queer. It took me a really long time to figure that out. Growing up, I was picked on A LOT for being “different,” But I never in my life had the language to describe what about me felt so different from the kids around me. As someone who inhabited mostly white spaces, identified as Latina, and wasn’t sure if guys were “it” for her, I often felt alone and out of place. Sure, I had always thought about girls in a loving way. I had thought about being with women in a romantic and emotional way. But I always kept those thoughts to myself. I kept those urges hidden.
It feels uncomfortable writing this as if I am committing my identity to paper, even though I’ve learned that our sexual and gender identities are ever-changing. I’m capturing a moment in time for myself — a threshold moment.
Finding Community
When I joined Hopelab, I remember being in a state of awe and admiration for the number of openly queer people I got to work with. It’s not often you find a place where half of the working staff identifies as a part of the LGBTQ+ community. When we first started exploring the landscape of queer youth mental health, I had just recently admitted to my boyfriend that I was having feelings and attractions towards women that I wanted to explore, and this project felt like a weird click. The universe was giving me an opportunity to sink my teeth into the work and wonder of defining my own queerness.
I am still learning how to comfortably share my identity with people. For a long time, I thought that in order to be queer you had to look, act, or be some sort of way, but I’ve come to learn there are a million and one ways to be queer; helloooo, we are canceling binaries this year. I now understand that the box I was trying to shove myself into had nothing to do with me, and rather the environment I was being subjected to, from Catholic school and so much more mainstream hetero-conditioning.
Stepping into Queer Joy
When I reflect on “what it means to be queer,” I haven’t quite come up with the perfect answer for myself, but I know this much is true: many people in the LGBTQ+ community have fought and died for me to have the right and ease to express my authentic self. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around where I “fit” in the queer world, and how to honor the people who’ve made it their life’s work to fight for LGBTQ+ rights. There’s a whole lot of imposter syndrome, the feeling of not being “queer enough” or “bisexual enough” to take up space in the community. What does it mean to be a beneficiary of something that so many people have fought for? What do I do with all this privilege?
The answer for me right now is to step into joy. I’m listening, learning, and prioritizing the queer community through history and celebration.
Celebration to me looks like my coming out story on paper, sharing it with the colleagues who have been nothing but supportive in my journey. Celebration also looks like honoring queer icons like Harvey Milk, who wanted so badly and advocated so fiercely for young people to be able to explore our identities without persecution, in our own space and time. Harvey fought for hope, and I want to fight for hope too.
My hope is that after 26 years, I finally feel safe and loved enough to explore and express my identity, that other young people get the opportunity to explore this at an earlier age within a safe environment with what we’re building. We’re working together to build a bridge — keeping each other safe, loved, and informed. In attempting to help with the creation of this product I’ve come to embrace my own identity and my fears around what I may discover. And I just wonder what my life and the lives of other young people could be like with access to these tools and this research. I’m learning to find my queer joy, hby?
