Homecoming
What moving to NYC taught me about my queer, Southern identity
The first thing to know about me is that prior to three years ago, I’d lived in Alabama pretty much all my life.
Every time I think of Alabama, it’s summer. The sun cooks the air so hot I can smell it, burning asphalt or car leather mixed with the scent of cut grass hangs around like a fog. My sweat sticks to me like a second layer of skin, and it’s almost as if my parents never emigrated from that island nation near the Equator. Maybe that was the point?
I spent a lot of my childhood stamping out the fires of any Southern accent. It’s important to emphasize this because in-person most people can’t tell I’m from the South. Growing up, I tried very hard not to pick one up because even at a young age, I could tell it was not a good thing to be seen as a native of the Backwards South. Even more interesting, I placed this as a higher priority than fixing the immigrant English grammar inherited from my parents.
I joke that my life through Alabama followed the Civil Rights Trail — Selma to Montgomery, and then Birmingham. I think the civil rights parallel is interesting because so much of my life in Alabama was spent yearning for a place where I could be myself free from fear of my identity as a queer person of color.
In Selma, I spent my early years at a school originally founded in 1965 as a segregation academy. (That school admitted its first black student as recently as 2008.) My mother enjoys telling the story of how I came home from my first day of kindergarten and reported, “Mom, no one looks like me.”
At middle school in Montgomery, I fell in love with a white girl. We kissed for the first time in the bathroom. We went to the same Catholic church and attended Sunday school together. She would later break up with me via Facebook through a message her sister ghostwrote while I was on a family trip to the Philippines.
I spent high school in the Closet™. In small towns like Montgomery, everyone knows everyone. You keep your secrets safe by hoarding them and trusting no one. I attended prom with my then-boyfriend. Years later, we learned we were both closeted.
When I hear others tell me about their gay high school experiences or see younger generations get to be out (my former high school now has an active Gay-Straight Alliance club), I’m filled with a tiny hint of happiness, but mostly feel melancholic jealousy that these experiences are not mine.
Queer media often focuses on the phenomenon of yearning. It’s a feeling of desire combined with, at its best, daydreaming, and at its worst, impossibility. Forbidden.
In Birmingham, I spent the majority of my time in college wishing I was elsewhere. I’d vowed to never kiss white girls again. As a result, my dating pool shriveled to a puddle. Every girl I was with was either closeted or just experimenting. Women told me over and over again that they would date me had I been a guy. (Or as I understand it, passed for a man in public.) From regretting my university choice but not having the guts to transfer despite pouring hours into researching other schools, to begging the heavens for just one sexual or romantic experience in hopes of validating my queerness, I passed some of the so-called “best years of my life” dreaming of greener pastures.
The urge to escape a place I’ve called home my entire life did not come all at once. The seed planted itself in my brain on a high school Model UN trip to New York. I met people who were so loud and out about being gay, being people of color, being themselves that I cried when I had to leave them. And like any good yearning, the taste of what could be rooted itself so deeply that when I returned to the South, the idea bloomed into heartache.
For years, I wanted to get away, and every second I couldn’t leave turned into one more drop of hate toward the South. Getting called a “motherfucking chink” and told “go back to China” in the parking lot? Typical white rednecks! Guns sold in Walmart with a Confederate flag flying? Yup, welcome to the Backwards South!
Every time I think of New York, it’s winter. There’s been no sun for days, and everything from the sky to the ground and the air in between is white. My breath leaves me too quickly; sometimes I ask why I ever moved here to be in this ungodly cold. Hot beverages chill before I can put my wallet away and my gloves back on.
I moved to the city three years ago, where I found myself once again grateful the accent didn’t root itself too deeply. While nearly everyone in New York is at some point a tourist, then a transplant, both of these words are thrown around almost like an insult. And what screams “out of place” more than an East Asian person with a Southern accent in a big Northern metropolitan city?
But at last! I had made it! I could FINALLY start living my life, and now all my problems would be better problems on the sole basis I was now in New York!
While I came out in the latter half of college to all my friends, since moving here, I’ve gotten to experience exclusively queer spaces, more so than I had in Alabama. More accurately, I became hellbent on making up for the lost time. I downloaded all the dating apps there were to offer, excited by the plethora of choices I’d have on each of them. Despite my hatred of bright lights, dancing, alcohol, and loud music, I insisted on going out to lesbian bars. Showing I’m not just gay or Asian, but gay AND Asian AND loud and proud became a daily ritual of shouting from the rooftops to no one in particular.
It was exhausting performing identity like that. In this liberal, diverse bubble free of more overt discrimination, I felt I was somehow “behind” in my understanding of Asian and LGBTQ+ discourse. Because the discourse centered itself in personal identity, my weak grasp on the political implications of who I was, who I am, began to poison my initial yearning into regret and insecurity. All the queer people had this [insert seemingly common gay experience here] except me. Even with the knowledge that told my brain identity isn’t quantifiable, the exclusion made me feel I wasn’t enough, that I didn’t reach this invisible, unseen threshold. I realized that it wasn’t about fitting in, whether I lived in the South or North, but perhaps something more internal like I’d been trying to wear clothes that don’t fit me.
Moving to New York City confirmed the lack of diversity I knew I had been missing without ever experiencing it in the first place, like phantom pain. Growing up means recognizing that all parts of the United States have their flaws (as the United States itself is a fundamentally flawed country), moving somewhere else will not solve all, if any, of my problems, and that thinking one part of the country is superior is unproductive.
Northern liberals are quick to point out discrimination in other places to hide how subtle they are with their own. I would never go so far to say that I love Alabama, but I can feel neck hairs bristle when a Yankee who’s never been to the South wants to talk about life below the Mason-Dixon line.
I find that when I often reveal I’m from the South, specifically Alabama, the reactions can be boiled down to a couple of categories:
- “What was that like?”
- “I would never guess that about you.”
- “Is it really like it is on the news?”
It’s bold of Northerners to parody the South when the city is segregated and so unaffordable that the places we queer, people of color, or QPOC used to call home and headquarters are now either gentrified or non-existent. The North as this “liberal” bubble is a physical, geographic manifestation of Get Out’s iconic, “I’d vote for Obama a third time” line. Danger hides in plain sight under the camouflage of liberalism. I prefer seeing a sword come at me than a knife in the back.
While I can dream of alternate timelines where I had been supported instead, where I don’t struggle to communicate my deeper feelings with loved ones, where my immigrant parents don’t carry an extra layer of misunderstanding (Why is our one and only child, the one we left everything we knew behind for, sticking her head out even more?), despite how hard it was growing up, I feel the need to defend it. I make fun of and complain about the South often, but I get upset when others who aren’t Southerners do it — a sense of indignance, as in, why are you joking about an identity and experience that isn’t yours? It’s a weird blend of home and hard times, like visiting a generational family home that’s kind of fallen into disrepair.
For more unlearning of what I’ve labeled as “regionalism” (preconceived notions against parts of the United States that actively erases the progress and lives of marginalized identities, usually directed at the South), please check out my friend Odion’s amazing infographic here.
