Gay, Trans, and Queer Joy Saved My Life
Mercy will be taking on the writing responsibilities for PKR for the next few entries, while I work on a few other projects. For those in the US, tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which can be a fraught holiday for so many reasons. But it never hurts to reflect on what we’re grateful for. I think this is such a fitting entry for this week. — Sir Quill
When things are going well and it seems that life is flowing, the stars are aligning and everything is opening up in opportunistic ways, it’s extremely easy for me to be proud of myself, who I am, and what I stand for. But even in those moments when things are going well, I have found myself in a constant state of waiting for the floor to drop out from under me. Brené Brown says the hardest emotion for us to actually embrace is joy, because even in the midst of joy, we find ourselves wondering, what if it goes away or transforms (like all emotions do). For me, joy is an incredibly hard emotion to feel because of the childhood suffering I experienced. I am actually not sure I ever had an example of a joyous adult around me growing up, and it absolutely impacts the way I still hesitate to embrace true joy in some scenarios.
For years, I’ve been painfully aware that I embrace the “suck” much easier than I embrace the joy of life. It makes sense: it’s what my parents did and their parents did and so on and so forth. Growing up in Appalachia, I spent the majority of my life barely surviving this world, and I was influenced by my regional culture to move in anger, despair, and fear more often than happiness, fulfillment, and possibility. I grew up in what is now the “ground zero” of Trumpism, in a state that was, and still is, chronically underfunded and under-resourced. People had to figure out a lot of things independently of the “outside world,” thus creating a little microcosm of poverty mixed with religion and hopelessness, driving people into a cycle of fear and “othering” people as scapegoats for why all of our problems existed.
At 22, I moved to Michigan. The culture shock made it feel like I had moved to another country. People moved with curiosity instead of fear. I remember the very first time I saw a pride flag, blowing in the wind on a church steeple. My understanding of the world began to crumble. Wait a minute … there are religious people who actually do embrace gay folks?! Raised in the Southern Baptist church, I had been a youth pastor at age 20. While many behind that pulpit preached that being gay was the worst thing you could be, I never once believed that. My best friend came out to me when we were were around 17 years old, and I told her that I loved her no differently than the day before. She continues to be my ride or die until the end, and is the reason I am a complete menace as an adult. She taught me what love could look like, as well as how deeply cruel the world could be. She made me realize that people generally couldn’t think critically, especially about love.
As time passed, I started realizing my own journey of discovery. I had always thought certain women actors were incredible, and maybe had been enjoying them a little too much. I thought back about how I used to be glued to the TV when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on. Buffy was so badass. This ordinary girl was chosen to battle vampires, demons, and supernatural forces … and she did it in LEATHER. I used to rewatch episodes of Charmed religiously because three HOT witches were saving the world and looking SO FINE while doing it. I look back on all of this as the witchy, queer, kinky Switch I’ve become, and these experience now make so much more sense to me.
In Michigan, I was exposed to, and welcomed in, communities in which I didn’t even know I belonged. This is where I first recognized the expression of JOY the LGBTQIA+ community embodies. It was the first time I ever felt like I could actually explore aspects of myself that had long been repressed. This was the first time I recognized I had a complicated relationship with joy, and this was the first time I really got to experience the joy that exists in the LGBTQIA+ community for myself. Learning about joy from a community that was a target of unwarranted hatred made my realization all the more powerful. The joy that existed in this community did so in spite of the hardships, oppression, and active hatred against it. This power came from its depths.
It was the queer, trans, and gay communities that took me in, taught me valuable lessons about being authentically myself, and gave me permission to just simply BE without the rest of the chatter. I was surrounded by powerful, confident, expressive people; people who were highly educated, affluent, and embraced everything they were. It flipped everything I had been taught on its head. They showed me the joys that exist within my own sexuality. It was truly the gay, trans and queer community that saved me from a life of nonconsensual limits that had been imposed on my psyche by my upbringing.
I began deconstructing the idea of what happiness could be and reframed the spaces in which I could thrive in joy. I could never experience joy by being terrible to myself, or denying my own authenticity. No amount of religious indoctrination from Appalachian Christianity would ever bring me any of the joy I wanted to embody. It never gave me anything positive or empowering.
I have spent my adult life learning that joy and happiness don’t always come from external things or stimuli: they come from within. They come from BELONGING and feeling cherished and loved for the innocence of who I actually am. They come from holding and sharing in a collective experience that not everyone understands; and in being courageous enough to feel my authentic joy as it is. I don’t struggle as much with the fear that it will disappear and never return, because every time I walk through the doors of my home dungeon, or play spaces, or cons, that joy always … ALWAYS washes over me.
That joy is a byproduct that our community produces by being our authentic and unadulterated selves. The freedom to express who and what I am in these safe spaces gives me the strength to enter vanilla spaces with more confidence and ease. While I know I will never fully fit into those vanilla spaces as my most authentic self, I still walk with a deep sense of belonging and acceptance from my kink community; and that brings me a balance that is hard to achieve alone. The more I am in safe queer spaces, the more radical my joy becomes in everyday life; and the more I actually embrace joy itself because I know exactly where it comes from in me and how it touches and transforms all aspects of my life.
I cannot be mad at my younger self for what she believed. She was a product of her environment and nothing more. However, I can recognize the immense growth she so bravely endured, the community that alchemized the pain she had carried into something useful, and the lessons of queer joy I continue to live today.
Gay, trans, and queer folks saved me from a miserable outlook on life …
Gay, trans, and queer folks saved my life.