Queer Privilege, Heteronormativity, and the Rejection That Exposed Them

Toxic sexuality devastates far more than relationships: a case study.

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There was moonlight seeping through the shower window, peaking around my elbow. I stood naked over the toilet, pre-occupied. Defeated. Nothing was coming out. After a few minutes, bargaining with my bladder, I gave up. I slipped into the hall, tip-toed on the creaky wood, and opened your door. You were stepping through the holes of your underwear. I stared at your legs as you bent, the muscles in your tall, broad back flexing into little craters. You looked at me over your shoulder.

I walked to the center of the floor, picked up my underwear, then asked if you wanted to do this — If you were able to commit to a relationship. It was abrupt. I waited.

You said, “I don’t know what to say.” I said, “I need an answer. I can’t keep getting together like this.”

“O.K., then I don’t think I can commit to this. I’m sorry.”

That’s fine. I just needed an answer. I said good night, opened the door, and left.

Queer people shouldn’t wear chinos. Or like country music. I think that’s what he believed. Chinos and country music upheld the toxic binary: a music genre all about nuclear families, a pant that was remarkably dull. (Yes, that’s what he said.) I indulged those straight pastimes, instruments of hetero dominance, partly for the irony, partly because I wanted to be right — about what, I don’t know. Part of me insisted on straight identifiers because I grew up with them.

And I thought they turned him on.

I dramatized that night to paint a picture of my retribution. That romantic fracture became the genesis of my reckoning. The culminating evidence. The center of gravity for a vast orbit of memories, stretching from here through millions of subtle moments to when I was psychologically born. On the stand now is my sexuality, my queerness then, the one he witnessed. An indictment of the heteronormativity I purported through my young adulthood, then brushed aside for years.

My existence was a consequential fiction.

I dragged him in — the one who denied me — in snow-white Calvin Kleins, to reconcile my insistence that the culprit of our finality was his and his alone: his family, sexuality, other romantic interests. The reason needed to be something else. Anything but me.

I confess that through all my foundational gut twists, gay hookups, fluid musings, career switches, and complicated relationships, my toxic tools endured: flannel, chinos, domestic beer, a skepticism towards interior decorating, voice manipulation, body bulking. Every trepidation places my reckoning in his bedroom that night. Post-coital, standing bare-skinned with my heart on the floor.

The steel on the chopping block waits patiently. It knows the case is airtight. It only waits for me to make it impenetrable.

My past, where the case against my heteronormative queerness begins as unconscious offenses, has been told before. I grew up a socially comfortable over-achiever, in a typical upstate suburb. I played sports, did theatre, chorus. I drank Keystone, spent hours on Xbox, threw eggs at houses, got girls. I deferred sexuality until college when I told a few friends I thought a boy was cute. Junior year was still electric from laying hands on a man for the first time months earlier when he stepped into the frame. The first encounters were electrifying. Terrifying. I always saw him in those tight Calvin Kleins. I always wondered if we’d be in love.

Yet, as queer buds blossomed, the roots of my boyhood habits dug deeper, but the two evolved peacefully for a time. As a white, cis-presenting, queer man, I plucked the vines of both heteronormativity and queer expression. I enjoyed the inclusion and progressivism of lgbtqia+ circles while exploiting masculinity there and everywhere else. My privilege — white, male, and cisgender — afforded ubiquitous opportunities.

But dues eventually needed paying. A network spanning finance guys and actors demanded savvy code-switching. When my voice would rise or sit forward, I pushed it back down for the sake of maturity and masculinity. When I leaned into a laugh or gossip, I swatted the hand away for the sake of mystery and security.

And while stiffness is hardly sinister, the cruelest transgressions were hidden. At least, I presumed. Under the crafty character changes, my authentic self clanged beneath the surface, like a hostage muffled in the trunk, begging for release. Synchronized with the rumbling in my bones, the disparity between myself and those without my sex or skin or upbringing slowly peeled away the rosy lens over my senses.

I began to recognize the precarious prerogatives that, while inherited, were no less responsible for my complacency. And the more I engaged in dichotomous worlds, leveraged privilege, the more I paid the price. My voice became foreign. Fortified walls surrounded me to keep out strangers, then friends. I declined jobs, lost motivation, and eventually, on that fateful night, lost him.

The inner battle raged. Desperate with everything to lose, I couldn’t stop it: the cracks split, the clangs accelerated, and finally my true queerness reared its unapologetic head.

The relevancy of this evolution should not be understated. In his bedroom that night, my repressed queerness lay deep undercover, hostage, where suspicion marred any vestige of safety. Then, almost a year later, his name dropped into a chat with a good friend. Suddenly, the topic of conversation became how I dressed. Then, what others thought about how I dressed. We eventually hung up, and as I prepared dinner that night a question slowly materialized.

The nail in the reckoning coffin.

Was I not gay enough?

Though it rose from my own thoughts, the question made me stumble through the rest of the night stewing: he would never go so far. My mind raced. Conforming to prescribed queer behavior wasn’t the only way to define queerness. Queer expression could be more than glitter and gay clubs and yass, more than Queer Eye and Drag Race and We Were Here, more than Grindr or CRJ or poppers. These in no way encapsulated an entire culture, a diverse and ancient history, so why couldn’t queerness be chinos and country music, or Labatt Blue and finance boys?

Perhaps it can be. For someone else.

Because the man who spoke in a monotone and danced like Pulp Fiction Travolta spat on authenticity. And like they haunted me, those rigid dance moves and that straight-guy fashion haunted him, too. Where I saw irony he saw privilege. When I thought simplicity he thought orthodoxy. I felt at ease if he felt excluded. I know this because he said so.

My speculation may be gratuitous. Fallible. Perhaps I lacked a standard of looks. Maybe I was obnoxious and unable to handle unreciprocated admiration. “Passing as straight” may have nothing to do with it.

Yet, the whole made up of these disingenuous parts sketched more than just a dimming romance. Conformity defined my person. In fact, the two were the same. Khakis and beer and country music were not objective evils but represented both my chosen identity and subjective self-deception. Costumes. Disguises. Veils. I suffocated my sexuality with unassuming tools, threatening others, threatening him, with pseudo-masculinity. Conformity was culpable. I was culpable. I was a queer man deeply afraid of embracing his authenticity, stifled by indicators of heteronormativity that alerted a mainstream world: Don’t worry, I am still one of you.

So when his waning gravity finally snapped, I couldn’t understand. Someone rejected me, despite my attractiveness and intelligence. Despite my talent and charisma. Despite my kindness to others. Despite what I believe equates me with anyone else. I may be pretty, intelligent, ostentatious. Fine. But I lacked an essential ingredient: truth.

I crawled so far to the other side of the ring, so far from him, my queerness slumped around unrecognizable, shadowed, even envious. Queer books and films he recommended gathered dust. I assumed my understanding of queerness was enough and dismissed the weight of endless survivors and victims who lacked the privilege I had because of them. Treating queerness with such heedlessness was beyond reproach. It was cruel, poisonous, hurting everyone involved.

I refused to love myself. Reality sought refuge on the edge of the void to make room for a pernicious lie. I failed to understand that one cannot love another while simultaneously rejecting himself.

Case closed.

I dwell on that night to exhume the young man I forced myself to be. To thrust the light back towards me. A man who changed his voice for other men and puffed out his chest to women. A man who believed sexuality went only as far as whom he slept with. A man who hid physically and emotionally to appease straight strangers and acquaintances who would never grant the same grace and submission.

I envisage him because I am still letting go. Because I miss feeling him next to me. Because my heart tore, and I didn’t know what to do. Each time the scene plays, I spot new clues: a break in eye contact, a hesitation. I still fail to grasp what it is he wanted in those pre-dawn hours or in the four years we existed with each other.

There were clues in other scenes anyway, outside his room, when I listened rather than touched. There was one time we discussed Hugh Everett’s Many-Worlds Theory. I expounded my agreement, and he countered with an existential tangent. That nothing right now would be different whether humans were alone or manipulated by a cosmic, omnipresent penguin. And he said that looking for answers about oneself is the same. Questioning is pointless. Just live.

I hope to. Much more than I did before.