Member-only story
Every Day, I Dress Up as a Straight Girl
How my closet keeps me closeted in other people’s eyes
My queerness is quiet. It struts into the room unannounced, ambiguous, cloaked in girlish garb. I match my skinny jeans with loose sweaters (never graphic tees), tasteful pairings of necklaces that shouldn’t match but do, and booties with a pointed toe and slight heel. My curtain of hair is twisted into a messy bun like every other basic white chick. I pull it up top Ariana Grande–style when I’m really feeling myself or leave it dangling to my waist when neither of the former options is workable.
There are no flannels in my closet, no practical shoes. I own a pair of canvas sneakers that I bought for a job I hated. An inspector would conclude that my closet was that of a decidedly heteronormative, straight girly girl who does not like girls. The ultra-feminine attire would satisfy them enough that they would never delve deeper to find the skeletons, which are tucked away at the very back.
My journeys with style and queerness are intertwined. Both have been a means of exploring my truest self, a gradual increase in permission to be who I want to be. I wear the clothes I wear because they feel like me and look like me and convey what I want to project: put together, minimalistic, pretty but with a slight edge, unboxed. My outfits have grown bolder over the years as I have cared less what people think.
Moments like this remind me how quickly I could isolate myself by simply being my authentic self.
When I first recognized, at age 15, that I was definitely not straight (I would have arrived at this conclusion much sooner if I hadn’t grown up in rural, conservative small-town USA), I was too timid to think about being gay, even in the sanctuary of my own mind. Since then, I have come out to my closest friends on five occasions, each time paying a little less heed to the suggestions that I recede into the closet, pray away the gay, or commit to a lifetime of celibacy in order to maintain their approval. I’m not yet 100 percent comfortable with being open about my sexuality, but I am slowly and surely moving toward it.
