A Queer Kid in Kentucky
- Pants
- Feb 13, 2023
- 11 min read
How I always knew I was queer, even if I tried to push it away, and why it’s important to teach kids about orientation and gender from an early age.
(As a quick preface here, I use the word “queer” interchangeably when referring to sexual orientation and gender identity. I like “queer” as a term because to me, it feels like it covers everything. I also love my micro-identities (graysexual pan-demiromantic agender here) but using “queer” is just a lot easier to say.)
That said, let's dive in :)
CW: Religious trauma, homophobia, transphobia.
“I don’t think I want to be a girl”
When I was in kindergarten, I went up to my older brother one day and declared to him “I don’t think I want to be a girl”. Excited at the prospect of having a younger brother (this was before my little brother Max was born), Harry quickly gave me some of his clothes, tucked my long hair into the back of my shirt, and tried to teach me to talk and walk like a boy.
“But what if I have to go to the bathroom? Won’t people notice?” I asked.
Harry paused, thought for a moment, ran off, and came back with a rolled up pair of socks.
“Put these in your pants.” He instructed.
Voila, a bulge. There I was: a boy.
But… This didn’t feel right. I remember thinking to myself “I don’t want to be a girl… but I don’t think I want to be a boy either…”
The boy-look lasted about 10 minutes before I switched back to my standard pair of overalls, a loose fitting shirt, and my backwards cap. Funnily enough, it was a closer style to my current aesthetic than the “boy” clothes Harry had loaned me.
The truth is, my queerness has been a part of me since my earliest childhood memories.
This is just one of the many instances of my early youth that should have indicated how queer I was. I used to think that I had no idea I was queer until I was in my mid-20s. Growing up, being queer was not an option for me and so all of the queer experiences of my youth were largely ignored, repressed, or shrugged off as “huh, that’s weird”. The truth is, my queerness has been a part of me since my earliest childhood memories. Sometimes in relation to my gender identity, other times it was who I would develop crushes on. Regardless of the ways it manifested, it was always there.
There are a lot of anti-queer bills popping up in states all over the country. There’s one going to full senate in Kentucky soon, SB150, that effectively prohibits queer students from existing privately and peacefully in schools. Kids will be misgendered, outed to parents, and education on sexuality and gender will get severely limited if this bill were to pass. The people pushing these homophobic and transphobic laws often say things like “kids don’t know who they are or what they like until they’re older” or “kids are too young to know what being queer is” and even worse things that I don’t feel comfortable repeating here. It’s extremely frustrating to me, a queer person, because maybe, just maybe, if we taught kids at an earlier age what it means to be queer, then maybe there would be less kids out there feeling confused, anxious, and struggling with internalized shame like I did. Maybe there would be less kids out there who think they’d be better off unalive than living as a queer person because all they know is what the church tells them.
Being queer for myself, and I’d wager a majority of other queer folx, was something that I always felt, but never understood. At first I didn’t have words for what I was feeling, and then as time passed, I only knew to be scared of it. But even though I didn’t accept that I was queer until I was an adult, I was always queer throughout my entire life.
Being Gay in my Early Days
Back in 1993, when I was but a wee four year old Pants, we had a tiny VHS tape of the movie “Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland”. It was one of Harry and my favorite cartoons to enjoy. It was weird but imaginative. Scary, but not so much that we couldn’t enjoy it. And, to my best recollection, it is also the earliest memory I have of experiencing a queer crush.
The character of Princess Camille was rude, spoiled, and bratty. But I kind of loved her for it. She was also strong and didn’t take shit from people. Her commanding presence compelled little me. I kept thinking of how much I wanted to be in the role of Nemo so I could be the one who ended up with her as her future partner. I remember at the tender age of 4 years old having a dream where I rescued Camille from the Nightmare King. At the end of the dream, it wasn’t Nemo that Camille kissed, but me. I woke up the next day confused. That couldn’t be right, could it? I kept thinking that I should have wanted to kiss Nemo, not Camille.
Yet, it had happened. And in the dream, I was happy, peaceful, and loved.
I couldn’t talk about it to anyone. Even at that early age I knew it wasn’t something that I should talk about. It was just a dream and dreams weren’t real. Nothing to discuss.
I didn’t want to be Belle, I wanted to be her rescuer. The one she kissed in the end…
These queer instances continued for most of my childhood. In 1994, it was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (a film that remains my favorite Disney animated feature). I remember playing pretend in the living room of my family’s house in the backwoods of Kentucky. I was the Beast, rescuing Belle (my teddy bear) from wolves. As I played, I recall thinking “maybe I should play Belle instead…” but I never did. I didn’t want to be Belle, I wanted to be her rescuer. The one she kissed in the end…
In 1995, my grandmother had a VHS tape of The Nightmare Before Christmas. I loved this movie, particularly the lead female protagonist Sally, the love interest for Jack Skellington. Sally was kind and sweet, someone who wanted to do the right thing and be free. But she was also alternative and different from other female lead characters I’d seen in children’s entertainment around that time. I thought she was pretty, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. So, there I was one night after watching the movie. Another dream, another kiss, another morning waking up feeling confused and ashamed.
At this point, I had begun hearing and remembering anti-gay rhetoric in church and on TV. I knew very early in my life that I was never to talk about these strange confusing dreams. I felt that I had to ignore these feelings completely, and join in when people would talk about how being gay was bad. I thought that maybe if I kept parroting those things enough, that perhaps I’d change.
When I was sent to a month-long all-girls summer camp in the mid-90s, I was again put to the test. Each day, we had an hour of free time to do whatever we wanted. My cabin and I thought it would be fun to play house together as a group. Everyone was assigned roles, and I was given the role of “dad” because I was the most “tom-boy” of everyone there. One girl was given the role of “mom” and everyone else played the roles of sister, cousin, aunt, etc. I became rather close to “mom” and we loved playing the game together. But at some point, I noticed all of the other girls were staring at us. The next day, the girls started calling me a lesbian and telling me to go kiss “mom”.
Like a lot of closeted queer kids, I flipped the script. It wasn’t me being weird, it was “mom”. I lied, saying she wouldn’t leave me alone and that she was the one being gay, not me. The rest of the girls turned their vitriol towards her. We didn’t speak again for the rest of the month. The other girls still didn’t like me and on top of it, I’d lost the one person at the camp that I actually got along with. I still feel shame for that choice.
A Queer Adolescence
As I got older and started having close friends, particularly around Junior High, the dreams shifted from kissing movie characters, to kissing the dream versions of my same-sex friends. In my dreams we’d walk together, holding hands, and then eventually kiss. The fantasies were always tender, loving, and serene.
When I’d see my friends in real life, I knew I couldn’t talk to them about these dreams. I didn’t want to be weird. Plus, by this point, all of the Christian churches I attended were full-on telling those of us in the youth group that being queer would send you to Hell. I specifically remember one instance where I had gone to a weekend church event called “Love 101”. For three days, myself and youths from all over the state met up at the church and learned all about “romantic love”. During the big service, where the hundreds of pre-teens met together in the sanctuary and listened to the speaker of the day, some dude whose name I don’t remember, we were given the opportunity to ask questions.
I went home that night with a rock in my stomach, feeling confused at the guilt I felt. I hoped to justify my homophobic actions by reading the Bible.
One girl, someone I didn’t know from another city, bravely raised her hand. She asked if her “friend” was a sinner if she had a crush on and had kissed her other friend, who was also a girl.
The speaker replied, saying that yes, it was a sin and that “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!”
The auditorium of pre-teen Christians and their adult chaperones laughed and applauded. The girl sat down. I couldn’t see her face, but her head was lowered.
…I cheered too… I went home that night with a rock in my stomach, feeling confused at the guilt I felt. I hoped to justify my homophobic actions by reading the Bible.
As the years progressed, I often tried to rationalize my dreams and feelings. I told myself that the dreams were just dreams, that they didn’t count in the real world so I shouldn’t worry about them. As for the feelings I got when I saw my crushes– er, I mean, my “super close BFF gal pals”-- we were just friends! Lots of people probably felt strongly towards their same-sex friends. Besides, there were boys I liked too! Maybe I didn’t get the same butterflies when I saw them, and maybe I was obsessed over them because I needed to have an opposite-sex relationship to prove to myself that I was not queer, but it was totally normal!
This was also around the time that I tried really hard to present more femininely. I’d wear the clothes mom would buy me, even though I hated most of them and really wished I could wear cargo shorts and boy shirts, and I even started trying to learn how to do make-up. I was, and continue to be terrible at it. But I had to do everything in my power to show that “Yes! I am a normal, heterosexual, cisgender teenage girl! Nothing queer here! No going to hell for me!”
It wasn’t until High School that I started realizing that being queer wasn’t something that made someone bad. In choir, there was a boy who was desired by most of the girls in class. I remember really hating him for this because he would also reject every girl who confessed her love to him. I was convinced that he was a chauvinistic asshole who got his rocks off at hurting women. But I think part of me was also jealous at the attention he was receiving while I was trying hard to just exist without feeling like a complete goober all the time. He eventually came out of the closet and I remember feeling sudden compassion and understanding for him. I thought to myself “I don’t like the idea of this person being a sinner or going to hell just because he’s gay.” Unfortunately, I was still heavily indoctrinated in the Southern Baptist Church, so I largely just conceded with the crappy ol’ “love the sinner, hate the sin” mentality.
Coming Out in College
It wasn’t until early College that I finally let go of that toxic mantra . There was some drama in our church where my mother, who was on the board of directors, had voted along with the other members to let go of the youth and college minister. While I had nothing to do with this, I was given the cold shoulder by the entire college ministry folks on campus, a lot of whom were members of my church. Plus, the ex-minister’s wife was the campus ministry coordinator. I went from having a happy gang of church buddies to hang with on campus to being entirely ostrasized. It was devastating, but it opened me up to the idea that maybe, just maybe, the church wasn’t right about everything. Maybe “love the sinner, hate the sin” did more harm than good. Maybe, just maybe, being gay wasn’t a sin after all…
Still, I was desperate to find another group of churchy people to be friends with. I ended up going to a bible study with one of my friends at his small Baptist church. For some reason, I had got it in my head that I wanted to be the most confident badass person at these bible studies. Partially because I didn’t know anyone there and it was a perfect time to reinvent myself a little. It was a good time to embrace my inner confidence because it gave me the strength to stand up to a church leader for the first time in my life. One night, when the group leader started talking about how being gay was a sin, I realized that I had had enough. I felt enraged by this, but also brave enough to stand up and say that it wasn’t okay. I called him out saying that the statements were wrong and harmful to the queer community. I left, and never came back.
It would be a couple more years before I came to terms with my sexuality, and even longer to realize I wasn’t a woman (stories for another time involving Jay). College has that effect on a lot of people, I think. There's a lot of time away from childhood and adolescent pressures to really learn about one's self. Still, I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had learned early on that I didn’t have to be a boy or a girl, that agender was an option. Or that I wasn’t wrong for dreaming of kissing girls and holding their hands.
Always There
Being queer or knowing you aren’t the gender that you were assigned at birth isn’t something that just suddenly happens to people when they hit puberty. Deep down, I knew I was queer from the moment I felt butterflies thinking about Princess Camille, even if I repressed those memories to keep myself safe. Deep down, I knew I wasn’t a girl well before I came up to my brother and told him I didn’t want to be one, despite my adolescent attempts to embrace a femininity that simply wasn’t there.
There’s a lot of people out there that truly believe that if you teach a child what it means to be queer, you then have to tell them about the act of having sex too. But we don’t have to tell kids about sex when we show them Little Nemo and Princess Camille kissing, or Jack and Sally serenading each other in the snowy moonlit night, or Belle dancing with the Beast in a beautiful ballroom. Love isn’t something that has to be sexualized.
Those out there trying to pass harmful anti-queer bills, like SB150 in Kentucky, don’t have any real interest in protecting children or educating them. They are terrified that if students have access to sexual education and queer-affirming policies that their kids will turn queer. It’s homophobia and transphobia pure and simple. However, teaching kids about orientation and gender isn’t going to suddenly make them queer or trans. If someone is queer, they’re queer. No amount of education or lack there of will change that. But what a proper education and queer-affirming policies will do is help them understand that they aren’t alone, that they don’t have to be ashamed, and that they aren’t sinners for feeling completely natural things.
I can’t go back in time and explain these things to my younger self, but I can let go of the shame and self-loathing.
Interested in fighting SB150? Here's something you can do below!
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