Proud Enough: On Queer Self-Caricature and Conformity
“You know, you can just loosen up your screws around here.”
The last thing you would expect from your first day at a new job is to be gripped by an existential fear caused not by an alienating company culture, but rather by a throwaway comment from a co-worker about your sexuality.
Yet there I was.
I am gay. And make no mistake, the company I was joining in late 2023 and am still working for as of this writing is not homophobic.
In fact, if we’re going by the textbook definition of homophobia, my workplace is the furthest thing from it. I never exactly did a survey on this, but a quick glance at the office would reveal that it is at least a comfortable enough space for two of the loudest teammates who are openly gay to not shy away from the fact of their sexual orientation. (to put it very mildly)
Bolstering its queer-friendly credentials, the company views a person’s sexuality as an irrelevant variable in its professional equation. As far as everyone is concerned, it is the perfect work environment, especially if you are an out-and-proud queer person.
So given this gay-capitalist-utopian setting, only an ungrateful asshole would have the time to be (I’m loath to use this word) triggered by a well-meaning — if thoughtless — comment from a co-worker and whine on Medium about it, right?
Right?
Maybe.
Maybe it makes me an asshole. But I can’t seem to stop thinking about it. For the record, I am hung up less on the verbal stone hurled at me by that catapult of a mouth on my co-worker, than I am on what it reveals about how the majority culture as defined by the heterosexuals views queer people and how, in turn, us queers have mostly chosen to respond to it.
Let’s take a look at that comment again:
“You know, you can just loosen up your screws around here.”
For context: On that first I day, I was being introduced to the entire office by a friend who’d already started working there a couple of months earlier, when this person materialized out of nowhere and made that off-the-cuff remark in my presence, if not directly to me.
I spent a good deal of that first month dissecting and thinking about the meaning of that seemingly harmless sentence. On its face, the comment might have represented my co-worker’s good intention to welcome and encourage me to be myself at work, as she probably saw me as the newest gay hire that I obviously was. In that case: Thank you, ma’am.
But there’s another layer to it — a near-imperceptible depth that consumed me the moment I noticed it, which was almost immediately after she uttered the last syllable of her remark, embedded in this particular part:
“… loosen up your screws…”
Where I am from (hi, any fellow Indonesian who might be reading!), an increasingly common expression to describe the overt appearance of queer — but especially gay — individuals is “loose screws”. I am no linguist, but if I were to venture a guess, the metaphor is derived from how certain gay people carry and present themselves. Think all the classic visual and verbal signifiers you can think of when the word “gay” pops up: The limp wrist, the inexplicable “voice”, the physical dexterity of voguing, the “yasss”s, the “slaaay”s, the “go girl”s… You get my point.
To the majority culture, these attributes might suggest a certain degree of looseness and fluidity, contrasting with the more rigid presentation and lifestyle of straight people seen through the lens of the traditional masculinity and femininity. Therefore, if the heteronormative society is represented by an anatomically-accurate human dummy with all of its screws tightly placed where they should be, the queer people are analogized by the same dummy with all of its screws loosened.
The problem with this lies not in the queer signifiers themselves, but rather in how these signifiers form a single-minded definition of the archetypal Queer Person in the popular heteronormative imagination.
See, in the eye of the Straight Person, any Queer Person who fails to behave in the aforementioned loose-screw manner must be hiding their true self beneath all of that pathetic performance of straight-ness. So the typical response from the Queer Person would be to live up to the Straight Person’s expectation by creating an exaggerated persona of themself (a Queer Self-Caricature, if you will) so as not to disrupt the Straight Person’s understanding of the Queer Person and, therefore, to be accepted as a valid Queer Person in the heteronormative milieu.
In other words: I, a gay man who has been given the verdict of “not loose enough” by the Gatekeeping Court of the Straights, is therefore deemed invalid until I cartoonize myself and conform to the stereotypical mental image of the Queer Person.
I can write an entire essay about how queer culture, for all of its inherent radicalism, has been subsumed by the mainstream pop culture for mass consumption. But for the purpose of this piece, allow me to do a speed-run on the topic.
The initial showcases of overt gayness in mainstream media were rightly hailed as revolutionary, as they offered the heteronormative public a peek at a culture so far from, yet so close to their own. This kind of representation also boosted a sense of pride among the queer people ourselves, having previously been starved of even a suggestion of queerness in mainstream media for decades.
However, as the media continues to recycle the same queer archetype, it becomes the only thing that the general public sees, shaping their conception of queer people and culture. Consequently, the Loose-Screw Queer Person has come to define all queer people, including those who may not necessarily liken themselves to the stereotype.
If in the past the viable survival mechanism for queer people was to hide their queerness, today it has become to flaunt it — but only within the safe parameters of the majority culture’s comprehension. Between now and then, one thing is clear: the Queer Person has always been curated by and for the Straight Person’s gaze.
There is an all-too-obvious paradox in all of this. To paraphrase an iconic line from Jurassic Park: The gays created culture, gay culture dominated pop culture; pop culture killed the gays, the gays created a self-caricature to survive.
Of course, myself being myself, I refuse to create a straight-friendly persona for the sake of conformity. That said, I do not fault anyone — like those two loud gay teammates I mentioned at the beginning of this piece — for engaging in the practice in an effort to fit into their heteronormative surroundings.
For them, and for any fellow gays out there, I hope there is still room beyond that performance to be proud enough of yourself.
