Kate Farr is a third-year journalism major and writes “Face to Face” for the Daily News. Her views do not necessarily reflect those of the newspaper.
It was guilt — the kind that sits heavily on your soul like a lead weight, the kind that twists in your stomach like a knife — that settled deeply in my chest at 13. I was only just becoming a teenager when my privacy was invaded, my trust in others was shattered and my identity was used as a weapon against me.
Being queer was the secret I held nearest to me, one I wouldn’t dare speak to my friends or family about, and it led to years of guilt, months of abuse and sleepless nights of questioning what I was even doing this for. It was something I barely even allowed myself to acknowledge.
Years later, I know people forget. I know that others moved on. And now, with a piece of metal on my left hand and some blanket of security by being in a heterosexual-presenting relationship, it would be so easy to let everyone forget. I always wondered if it would be easier to rewrite the past, to brush it under the rug and play pretend.
My queerness dulled, palatable and easier to swallow — maybe reduced to off-hand remarks like one I heard a couple of years ago: “Thank God, you turned straight” — would fit more neatly into whatever narrative is presumed of me. That off-hand remark, someone else’s version of my journey, felt less like a mistake corrected and more like a sucker punch to the face.
I don’t forget; I can’t forget.
It was a suffocating shame. The air felt like it was sucked out of the room when two of my friends told me they’d gone into my phone while I was sleeping and found out it wasn’t a boy who I was dating.
My secret was no longer my own, and there was a cost to that violation.
Blackmail, abuse, humiliation — a price to pay for existing in private, for loving in private — just isn’t the easiest to forgive and forget. I paid the price for daring to exist, even in secret.
I still carry the echoes of the past with me. The slurs that cut through the air like daggers. The laughter that followed my suffering. The blows that rained down on me, physical and verbal, are potent reminders of the pain.
I remember being spit on. I remember being pinned down. I remember wet towels leaving welts on my skin and pool balls thrown at my head. I remember being told I was disgusting, wrong and perverted.
I remember the first time I was called a f—g.
I can’t forget the way I held my breath in the classroom, praying my teacher didn’t hear the names I was called — praying, begging God I wouldn’t be outed in front of my peers. In my utter fear, I had accepted that I deserved it.
They forget, but I don’t. Sometimes, I wish I could.
My erasure is convenient. I only wish I could erase the memories. I’d erase the self-loathing, the suicidal thoughts and the memories of my attempts because I had accepted I was an abomination.
I was only 13.
Night after night, I hoped I’d go to sleep and not live to see the next morning, not because what I was doing was wrong, but because I had been made to believe it was. I was drowning in a guilt that I expected to bury me.
It took nearly eight years to claw out of the darkness. Eight years to rid myself of the belief that my mere existence was an inconvenience. Eight years of unraveling myself from the web of self-hatred and shame.
But the pain doesn’t stop just because abuse does. It takes root in new forms and finds ways to make itself known, finding ways to remind you it’s still there.
When I entered a relationship with a man, it felt like the world around me sighed in relief. I was easier to understand, to consume, to relate to. My queerness was an afterthought unless I said something about it.
It wasn’t until college that I was faced with another challenge when it came to my identity. My existence in this entirely new space has manifested into a question I never expected to face: Am I too queer or not queer enough?
The LGBTQ+ community was one of the only systems of support that kept me alive after being outed. But there are times when I’ve felt stopped at the gates, and it’s a devastating realization when faced with similar prejudices and restrictions as the ones I see in the world that rejected me in the first place.
We have created our own hierarchies, measurements of authenticity and worth, and we have begun to box each other in such a way that we are erasing the aspects of ourselves that are important parts of the whole.
Am I not queer enough because my past and my trauma isn’t visible? Because it isn’t talked about often? Because my relationship does not fit a mold of what’s to be expected? Because my pain is something that’s been mostly forgotten?
My queerness isn’t supposed to be measured by my suffering. My identity isn’t valid just because I have struggled. It is not dictated by the relationships I have been in and may be in in the future.
It’s not the ring I wear, the darkness that still looms at the back of my mind or the assumptions made when people see me.
My queerness isn’t a performance. We’re not supposed to fit inside a box.
It may have taken me nearly eight years to fully tell my story. Even if I never had it, it doesn’t mean my identity meant any less.
But I refuse to let my story be written by those who aren’t meant to hold the pen. It may have taken eight years, but that doesn’t make it any less mine. That doesn’t make me any less.
Contact Kate Farr via email at kate.farr@bsu.edu.
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