Will the Real (Queer) You Please Stand Up?

A Prism & Pen writing prompt

This flag was popular when the Q is LGBTQ was more generally taken for “questioning” than “queer.” I am shamelessly repurposing it.

Who the hell are you?

Do you ever ask yourself that when the lights are off and the voice in your head goes still? If you CLOSE your eyes and look into yourself, who do you see?

• Or maybe I should ask, who do you see first? This prompt could be about intersectionality. As a man who identifies as both Black and queer, Joseph Coco wrote in P&P last week, “there are many who not only fail … to understand intersectionality, but the very nature of being itself.”
• For some trans people like our editor Artemis Shishir, who’s working on a story about feeling like a man, gender identity might beat as the heart of the question.
• For a cis/gay man like me, why is my “gay” so self-defining when I’ve been so many other things in life — like friend, francophile, co-worker, fiction writer, business owner, or American of Irish Catholic ancestry?
• If you’re one of P&P’s ally or family-member contributors, does this prompt speak to you? Do you ever think about who the real you is? Do you think answering might be different for you than for queer people?

Will the Real (Queer) You Please Stand Up?