It’s Pride month, and fittingly, I got a text the other day from the person I half-jokingly credit with making me queer. We’re in touch semi-regularly, so this was no earthshattering communiqué, but it made me smile nonetheless. They wanted to let me know they’d brought me up recently in a conversation about “first serious crushes.” My phone screen cast a glow on my face as I read the text, but I was also glowing inside – who doesn’t feel flattered by being someone’s first serious crush?
Admittedly, I was also glowing because this person was my first serious crush, too – my first, at least, on someone attainable, someone I could conceivably kiss (and did). It’s been 12 years and they still sit gilded in my heart like a bust on a mantel: immortalized in lust, limerence, and the lyrics of the many, many songs I wrote about them, before, during, and after our flash-in-the-pan fling.
This person had been on my mind even before they texted me, because it’s Pride month and I’ve been thinking about my queer crushes. The girls whose strong fingers and tanned forearms I’ve stared at across lecture halls; the enbies whose boots and swagger I’ve eyed in bars and cafés. The girl who fingerfucked me in the alley behind a pizzeria, the girl who blushed when I told her I’d like to flog her, the enby who took me over their lap after a tense game of Scrabble. The queer sex in closets, in sex clubs, in my imagination. These thoughts cloud my mind with societally-unsanctioned ardor.
I’ve been thinking lately, too, about how even my relationships with men have sometimes felt queer to me – because I’m queer, and my attractions are. Almost every man I’ve ever dated has felt disconnected from his masculinity and attached, instead, to something softer and less defined. Some have confessed they’d like to be born again as women, born into a better fit; others have enjoyed toying with feminine names, pronouns, and clothes sometimes, just to try, just to see. I went out with an old beau recently, and when I mentioned I’m most often drawn to masculine people, he scoffed – all broad shoulders, bulky beard, and beer in tow – and said, “I’m not exactly masculine.” I hadn’t seen that before, but I saw it now: a softness, a low-grade flamboyance, a genderlessness under the outward trappings. I felt such tender fondness for him, as I always do when someone slips into my heart who strays from the beaten path. I take pleasure in seeing everyone’s nuances instead of flattening them into a monolith, dim and small.