How to Be Queer in Ten Easy Steps

Step 1: Find a Spot at the Lunch Table

The people I sit with at the middle school lunch table have an unsettling obsession with trying to deep throat bananas. I only have a passing understanding of the concept, and with a gag reflex so strong I sometimes struggle putting in a mouth guard, I don’t participate – or at least, I don’t participate well.
One friend says she won’t talk to me until I tell her who I have a crush on; won’t believe me when I tell her I don’t have one. My best friend and I are so close our friends have given us a “ship-name,” but saying her is out of the question because she’s a girl, and besides, I don’t think I like her quite in that way. There’s a boy in my class who’s obsessed with Ozzy Osborne and wears all black. I want to be his friend, so I lie and tell her that it’s him, killing my chance at keeping her as a friend by trying to explain it further, how I don’t want to kiss him or hold his hand. I just like that he has bat facts at the ready and that he likes to read too. She accepts it, barely, but I’m on thin ice. I cry to my mom, asking her what’s wrong with me. She promises me I’ll get a crush eventually – grow into liking boys when I grow up.

Step 2: Lean into the Touch

I am fifteen years old when the friend who sits behind me in history class brushes her cool hand against the base of my neck, skin bared by the dip of my collar. She compliments the muscular definition in my shoulders. I’ve been stronger since starting martial arts classes, more comfortable with how my body moves, if not with how I feel in it, but until that moment, I hadn’t considered my body with anything more than ambivalence. And for the first time, I feel like something worthy of being admired. In that fleeting moment, it doesn’t hurt as much that the delicate lace shirt my mom bought me no longer fits right over the changing topography of my shoulders and biceps. Behind the flash of elation, I wonder if the soft brush of lace against my skin is what pretty feels like. I think (hope) the praise feels just as nice.

Step 3: Worry

The popular girls on my school bus compare the cock sizes of their boyfriends, brandishing fresh-out of the package number two pencils; and warm tubes of Gogurt as visual aids.
I don’t understand ­­­­what she means when she says she can still feel the shape of it hot on her tongue, but I don’t ask. I’m not a part of the conversation. Gossip hasn’t been available to me since the topics of discussion switched from Blue’s Clues to boys, and not for the first time, I wonder if I’m broken. When it was that I broke.

Step 4: Think That It’s Your Fault

We meet when I am eighteen. I rest my head on her thigh and want to want to be loved more than anything. She’s halfway sure she’s straight, but she holds my hand while we walk to class, maneuvers things so I’m always beside her every time we pile into a friend’s bed for movie night. We sit next to each other in geometry, and she knows the keycode to open the lock on my dorm room door. She gets high and drunk at a party I’m not invited to, opens up my room knowing I won’t be there, and eats my birthday cake out of the freezer. She knows I don’t know how to be mad at her. When she lunges forward to kiss me while we’re waiting at the crosswalk – only half joking – and I jerk my head back on instinct, the dread that settles, settles deep. It takes a few days for me to stop apologizing and I start to believe I won’t ever deserve any sort of love, not when I don’t have it in me to want to be touched like that.
She turns mean, even as she sleeps every other night in the top bunk in my room, going out of her way to make me feel stupid. I eat dinner at the neighbors’ as she watches TV with three of my roommates, and when our lease is up, I leave the four of them behind. I stop reaching out, and realize they’d never put in the effort. After two years, we never speak again.

Step 5: Gain a Mastery of Language

In the English language, there is a shared vocabulary between the different forms love takes. Adoration, desire, devotion, appreciation, love – between lovers, friends, parents and children, love of all mankind – we share a single set of phrases, and I make sure to shoehorn the word “friend” into every letter I write to make sure my professions of love are not misconstrued. There is an immensity to the love that I feel. They are love letters, but not like that.

Step 6: Something Easy

I’ve known her since she joined my girl scout troop when we were seven years old. In our senior year of high school, she asks me to prom quietly, handing me a homemade envelope covered in star-shaped sticky notes she’d decorated to look like the stuffed starfish that lives at the head of her bed. It holds a quiz whose answers spell out “will-you-go-to-prom-with-me?”
We’d already bought our dresses, but we accidentally match – me in aquamarine, her in midnight blue. I pack a deck of Uno cards in my floral clutch, so when the pounding of the music gets to be too much, we sit in the comfy chairs, outside by the photo booth and play round after round until the world feels balanced again.
When I tell her I love her, that I am so glad to live a life that she’s a part of – when we share a bed for the week I bring her on my family vacation – when her parents invite me to stay for dinner – when she saves money at her first job to buy me the soft stuffed cactus I mentioned in passing – when I mail her a care package because she’s sick, away at school – when she does her best to explain the concept of masturbation to me without a trace of judgement in her voice, over the phone one summer afternoon, far off topic from where the conversation started – when we sit in the spare room in her parent’s house as she talks over her special interest while I show her how to make stars out of paper – when I call her for help after getting hurt while home alone, and she comes and stays every night with me in my parents’ living room till they get home – when I tell her I love her, she knows exactly what I mean.

Step 7: A Moment of Self-Reflection

It is a very different thing to come to terms with the possibility of being broken and accept it, than it is to see yourself validated and see yourself as different, but not broken. It is a step in the right direction to know that the latter is a possibility, even if you can’t quite bring yourself to believe it yet.

Step 8: Traverse the Lexical Gap

In the DSM5, a distinction is made for individuals who self-identify with the term asexual. Self-definition negates diagnosis. If an individual lacks the vocabulary to self-define and finds that their lack of ability to comply with compulsory sexuality causes “marked personal distress or interpersonal difficulties”, they are, by default, pathologized, offered definition as suffering from Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder. Treatments for this disorder include psychotherapy, sex therapy, the broadly defined “education,” and medications such as Addyi with a 13% rate of patients discontinuing treatment due to adverse reactions. I know none of this at eighteen years old when I ask my pediatric endocrinologist if the glitchy nature of my reproductive endocrine system could be why I don’t react in the right way – the way my peers do to sexual advances. This is a diagnosis I only narrowly avoid because the pediatric endocrinologist, though she too suffers from a lack of vocabulary, refuses to tell me I am broken.

Step 9: Learn to Hide Less

I get used to hiding who I am at work. I wasn’t out in high school – not that I really knew how to define it then – and I’m working in my hometown. I get weird looks, sometimes, for my men’s button downs and corduroy dress pants, any compliments I receive from my boss contain the word “girly,” and are in reference to the rare occasions I wear a dress to work. One coworker knows I went on a zoom date with a sweet girl in Syracuse, who I met online, but I let the ambiguity of identity sit beyond that.
I know I’m leaving the job and moving to Ohio a month and a half before I give my notice, and I stop caring. If all else fails, I can burn that bridge when I get to it. I’m leaving in July, so at the end of May, I design a reading recommendation list for Pride and center it on the circulation desk in pride of place, egging on the people with their weird looks and quiet sneers to say something. The joy on the on the face on the anxious queer teen when I hand them the book list – recommending they try Snapdragon, if they liked the Lumberjanes book they returned – makes everything in the world good again. As they run back towards the kids’ section, I have to sit down under the desk, next to the filing cabinet where my coworker is sorting papers – take a moment to reign in my joy. And I grin so hard my face hurts.

Step 10: Seek out Information

I read the dedication to Angela Chen’s Ace:

                        “For everyone who has wanted to want more.”

I close the book and cry.

-Jessica Licker

Jessica Licker is an asexual creative nonfiction author from Pennsylvania and a literary history graduate student at Ohio University. She is a connoisseur of soft pretzels and can be found haunting public libraries and reading in trees when the weather is nice.