confessions of a dykey fag.
It’s time for me to come out.. again.
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Growing up, I never felt totally comfortable hanging out with boys. On the playground as early as I can remember, I preferred to play with girls and any shared space rigidly divided by sex—especially the locker room for gym class—was a deeply uncomfortable place for me to be. Sharing a hotel room with three boys on a high school band trip to Florida sent my anxiety spiraling. One of the things in that locker room and hotel room didn’t belong, and that thing that didn’t belong was me.
I’m sure a lot of queer people can relate to this experience. It’s one that’s so common, I’d guess, that it almost borders on cliche to even mention it. But a part of my identity that I think is less common among my fellow queers is how, after I first came out as gay over 20 years ago, I also never really felt like I belonged or felt totally comfortable hanging out with gay men.
This is not how it’s supposed to go, all the queer pop culture I’d digested to that point in my life—and many, many, many since!—had told me. As a gay man, the unspoken rule is that you’re supposed to hang out almost exclusively with other gay men, with casual romantic connections growing and eventually fading over time and, at some point, most everyone in the friend group has hooked up with everyone else.
But it was never that way with me and, especially because it was never a conscious choice of mine, I always wondered why most of my friendships with gay men as I grew up tended to remain pretty surface level. This has continued to be the case even as I’ve gotten older.
A few months ago, I had a conversation with my incredible friend Annie Hex that made everything click into place. If you know Annie, you know that in so many ways—and she will tell you this herself—she is very much a gay man trapped in a queer witch’s body. “I’m a faggy dyke,” she told me one day. “And you’re a dykey fag. That’s why we get along so well.”
This was my aha moment. The thing that pop culture had failed to warn me about coming out was that it, essentially, is like starting your childhood all over again. Suddenly, while coming of queer age as an undergrad on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, it was like I was back on the playground all over again. And, once again, the other gay guys and I just didn’t tend to click at all.
I remember during my junior and senior years of college, I was getting heavily involved with building LGBTQ+ visibility on campus, helping to lead a queer student organization that ran monthly LGBTQ+ dance parties at the Memorial Union as well as organizing events as a student staff member at UW’s LGBTQ+ Campus Center. Basically it was my first taste of being a Professional Gay.
I got to meet so many incredible human beings during this time of life, and at one point, some of them were pushing to organize a UW chapter of an all-gay fraternity. Although many of the gay guys I was friends with at the time were joining the chapter and I could have easily followed in their footsteps, I just wasn’t interested. Hanging out in spaces that were exclusively male and reinforced the false gender binary just wasn’t a priority to me—then, or now. Having experienced more than my fair share of the incredibly toxic world of Greek nightlife, I also couldn’t fathom becoming aligned with that world.
I’m sure those who did join the gay frat had solid reasons to do so, and I really do hope they had good experiences, but my decision not to join was viewed as some kind of rejection of their worldview and many of those friendships suffered. Meanwhile, my many friendships with the queer women I’d met on campus were flourishing.
One of my dearest circles of friends from my college days were a group of queer women I befriended while on an LGBTQ+ leadership retreat on a Wisconsin camp group my sophomore year. While I wasn’t welcomed to stay in one of the cabins with the gay guys who held more social capital among the group taking part in the retreat, I was welcomed to the camp’s Eagle Cabin. There, it was just me and one trans man who were the lone male-bodied individuals among a sea of lesbians. I was in heaven. I’d found my people, and they were almost entirely lesbians.
Once back on campus, my Sapphic Renaissance continued. I spent a lot of time listening to Ani DiFranco and Tracy Chapman with my queer female friends and I’d cry every time my friend Abby came over and played the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine” on my couch for what we affectionately called the Lesbian Folk Hour. I’d eat lunch and watch “Snapped” at the campus center with Jhani almost every day. And I followed my roommate Diane pretty much everywhere she went. As a baby gay, lesbians essentially raised me.
I rarely dated gay guys in college—somehow I just couldn’t find a guy who was interested in watching The L Word with me, and I didn’t have much better luck my first year out of college, which I also happened to spend living with two more incredible queer women in Andersonville and going to the neighborhood’s lesbian bars at the time—the long-since-shuttered T’s and Stargaze.
It wasn’t until I met my now-husband Stefin, who it turns out is very much also a fellow dykey fag, that I found a romantic link that made sense. Over the years, I’ve also come to accept my nonbinary identity, another marker that has helped me make sense of the ways in which I don’t fit into this box or the other. I’ve come to accept that the Sarah Paulson lesbian party bus remains my vision of the ultimate happy place.
All of this is to say that if you’re reading this and you don’t feel like you’ve found your people or your place in the world that makes sense yet, please know there are infinite possibilities for you. There are billions of people on this planet and endless ways to be queer, or not queer, or a secret third option that hasn’t even been fully understood or described yet.
Or maybe all you need, after all, is your faggy dyke bestie witch to see you like you’ve never seen yourself before.
P.S. I think right now is a time when people are feeling overwhelmed—by grief, by politics, by our warming planet, by end-stage capitalism. And it can be so easy to lose sight of who we are and how we connect to the community around us in those layers of heaviness.
A friend of mine shared an Instagram post the other day titled “What to Do When Community Is Nowhere to Be Found” and I think the post, from author Ndeye Oumou Sylla, contained some truly vital advice. It’s so important that we continue to be vulnerable, to create and to share with each other—or even with ourselves—even when the people in our lives don’t have the capacity to show up for us in the same way they normally would.
That’s why I write these essays and publish these zines. They’re as much for me as they are for you, but I also hope they inspire everyone and anyone reading this to follow your own arrow, to cozy up with the people and things that get you through these days, and to know that you’re never, ever alone.
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SONG OF THE RIGHT-NOW
The song that I can’t get out of my head at the moment is Cain Culto’s “KFC Santeria” featuring the insanely talented Sudan Archives. Is it too late to appoint this the song of the summer? Do we even get a song of the summer this summer? This track is electric and oozing with “fuck you” queer, left energy and that’s the kind of wavelength I’d love to see more folks tapping into at this present moment.
Fuck Trump, fuck ICE, Free Palestine
I'ma say that shit again free Palestine
It’s American dollars funding genocide
But the people waking up, we got open eyes
👌✌️🤌🤙
This explains so much... I imagine many will resonate 💜