Out & About
How a tragedy in the queer community helped me come to terms with my gender and sexuality.
On June 12, 2016, a little less than six months after my partner and I moved back to Florida after leaving in 2008, 49 lives were taken at Pulse. Hitting so close to home and being a terrorist attack of such a scale, it left us shaken. As we processed things, talked to those who knew the victims, and attended a vigil at our alma mater in Orlando, things felt dark. It didn’t help that the upcoming election kept painting a grimmer and grimmer picture of the country’s future; one that, unknown to us at the time, would involve more mass shootings and a lot more deaths and murders in the queer and trans community. In the few days that followed, I struggled as I processed all that had occurred, jotting my confusion down in a post and beginning another piece on the pervasive nature of gun violence in this country. But while many of the issues that arose in the aftermath of the Pulse shooting remain large and systematic, something personal began to take place as well.
I’m better at remembering images and scenes than feelings. But a number of moments stand out to me when I think back on the past and the times where I sat in my head and tried to parse out the feelings and confusion of being young and lost. One, in particular, occurred as I walked between buildings in high school, heading to the parking lot to catch the bus. I don’t know how the scene begins or ends, but the idea of masculinity was on my mind. As was the case for as far back as I can remember, I felt ashamed that I didn’t feel the way I thought I should. When ideas of the masculine or manly were brought up, when talk of what makes a boy into a man emerged, I felt apprehensive. There was a disconnect, between who I was told I should be and who I felt like. Media, society, peers, family, everything I knew said I should look and act and feel a certain way. When I didn’t measure up to these standards, I wrote it off as me being different or weird or artsy or in touch with my feminine side.
As I got older, I came to wear it as a badge of honor. Sure, I was a straight man, but I was also comfortable enough to not be defined by those things when it came to how I acted and dressed and thought. There’s dozens of little moments throughout my life where these ideas came up. Where I questioned things or worried over things or felt out of place, but because my experience and knowledge and even peer group where limited in many ways, I never fully explored them. Sure, I found more than just women attractive, but I’d never been with anyone but a woman, so didn’t that mean I was straight? Yeah, I didn’t feel like ‘man’ or ‘masculine’ described me, but didn’t trans mean you explicitly wanted to be a woman, which didn’t fully match how I felt? I didn’t know any better, and so I defaulted to the commonly accepted notions of queer and trans, of sexuality and gender.
It would take years for me to slowly gain all the knowledge I needed to explain how I felt, and a lifetime of internalized shame prevented me from ever pulling the thread too much. I’d dabbled with it in art and fantasy, but when it came to interrogating my own identity, I never pushed too hard. In a way, it’s ironic, as I’ve spent my whole life questioning everything I have ever been told is a given, but the deepest parts of me remained off-limits.
As is often the case, trauma can cause us to reassess even the most seemingly intrinsic aspects of ourselves. Though the Pulse massacre wasn’t trauma I directly experienced, it was traumatic. It was shocking and horrifying, and it made my mind race. I mean, how would I feel if I was in a supposedly safe space, dancing with my friends and community, and hate and violence exploded into that sanctuary.
It’s one of the ways the human brain works that in hard to comprehend situations, we try inserting ourselves. Maybe it’s a survival tactic, to know what we’d do in the same situation. Maybe it’s empathy, connecting with our fellow humans in a moment of tragedy. I loved to dance, and favored queer clubs as places where there were less hangups over moving and living authentically. What if I had been there? What if this happened somewhere else? Another big gathering, a happy place. What if I had to fear for my life just because of who I was. As a white person, I had plenty of safety from that fear. But what if I was targeted for my gender or sexuality? I mean, I was a straight man, right? I had never really known that fear. I had the armor of privilege, something I had been working harder and harder to understand over the years.
Despite the years of telling myself the same thing, however, the intensity of the moment, with my emotions running high, betrayed the lie. It wasn’t just that I could have been at the club; there were things about me that made me just as susceptible to bigotry. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but somewhere in the fog of confusion that existed in the few days after the attack on Pulse, I woke up.
It’s been three years since I first admitted to myself that I was a trans nonbinary person, and was likely genderfluid, and that I was also pansexual. Many of the things I discovered in the immediate aftermath were new to me, others were ideas that came flooding back to me from moments in the past. Some were dismissed at the time, like when I first heard of they/them being used as singular pronouns. Others intrigued me, like when I read about the idea of a third gender in college and came dangerously close to an epiphany a decade sooner. But, as I said, I pushed away many of those ideas. Now, I was feverishly consuming everything I could.
After a couple of weeks, I felt confident that my realization was true (though, that didn’t stop the doubt that I was wrong and pretending). I told my partner, who was not only remarkably nonplussed and supportive, but confirmed that my secret identity was only slightly more convincing than a pair of glasses and a bumbling reporter persona. From there, I essentially kept things to myself, feeling that I still hadn’t earned a right to enter the queer community and take up space. After all, I’d passed for straight and male my whole life and benefited from it. It took time for me to work through the doubt and accept that I was as valid as anyone else. Of course, it hasn’t completely gone away. But I gained the courage to come out to a few close friends, testing the waters for the big reveal.
I didn’t know it would be my 34th birthday that would also serve as my coming out day. I flirted with the idea on a number of other occasions, but as Pride approached, as the third anniversary of Pulse drew near, and as I faced down the start of a new year in my life, things felt right. But to be honest, it wasn’t until the afternoon before that I finally got the courage and began writing the email that I would send. As I awoke on June 4th, I was officially out. I made posts on social media (to make it truly official). The night before and the morning were full of bouts of anxiety. I feared that I would trigger another episode of depression and panic attacks, neatly mirroring the 2015 birthday that kicked off my worst mental breakdown yet.
Instead, the dreary morning literally gave way to blue skies and sunshine, as emails, texts, phone calls, and comments of support poured in. Though I haven’t heard back from everyone and received some confusion and push back, the overall response was one of support and love. My mom, the most important person to me besides my partner, was especially supportive and understanding. I let out a mental sigh of relief. The work wasn’t over, the journey was far from done, and a new world was only just beginning, but I felt like a huge weight had been lifted. I didn’t have to live a lie anymore, or be someone else.
I share all of this so that not only will people close to me have a clearer picture of what I’ve been through—I have a tendency to keep things to myself and am not great about sharing personal information—but also in the hopes that someone else out there who is in a similar situation will find inspiration in my story. Whether it’s discovering more about your gender or sexuality or something else entirely, it’s never too late to completely redefine your understanding of yourself. It’s scary and hard, but completely worth it.
It feels strange for so much of my story to be wrapped up in a tragic event, but I hope that it means beautiful things can be born out of catastrophe. It doesn’t erase the pain or make the trauma worthwhile, but it proves that life and love continue on. The violence against queer and trans people, especially those of color, has felt as if it’s only grown since Pulse. But the community has also grown and evolved and become more powerful. There’s still so much work to do, however, as the most privileged members of the community need to start speaking up for the most marginalized. And the same goes for allies. I hope the same love I’ve been shown will be extended to all the LGBTQIA+ people out there.
To those who have shown me support: I love you and am grateful for you. To those just finding out: I hope you found this illuminating. To those questioning or waiting to come out: I see you; you’re valid and enough. It took me a long time, but now I can finally say: I’m Math Erao and I use they/them pronouns. I’m proud to be nonbinary. I’m proud to be trans. I’m proud to be pan. I’m proud to be queer. I’m proud to be who I am.
