The first time I fell in love...

Reminisce with Soph of Queer Tax

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Clint Collide

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Queer Pioneers

is about the queer heroes, icons, pioneers, and trailblazers who’ve helped make history.

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Have you checked out The Books We ❤️ Club over at

FORD KNOWS

? This month’s book is Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City with guest poster

Nan Tepper

of

The Next Write Thing

and her article “A Tale of Two Teppers.” Check it out!

Why I ❤️ Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City"

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Addam Ledamyen

has a call for submissions to new journal

Starborne

: The Journal of Autocosmology:

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Gays & Ghouls: A Generative Queer Horror Workshop with

Kayla Kumari

Upadhyaya - Oct. 26 - $75

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Please join me in welcoming new supporting subscriber

Bo Ea

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Cheshir

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When we were kids, my sister had these fire-engine red knee-high boots which I COVETED and would put them on at every opportunity, followed by lots of yelling by her or my parents. I liked to pair these boots with a bath towel draped over my head for Cher-hair, and sing along to Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets” (“…she’s got electric boobs, her mom has two” … yes, yes, I know, I’m still bad at hearing lyrics…) I felt like a queen, but either I was too outrageous or my parents were too conservative to allow such an audacious display of gender-bending and my performances were firmly squashed.

I fell in love with

Soph (all pronouns)

’s account of falling in love with little Camille. I was falling in love inappropriately right and left at the same age (Liza, Olivia Newton-John, the Bay City Rollers) and it’s bittersweet to think sometimes about who we might have been under the loving care of the parents Soph mentions, creating a safe space for their kids to explore their authentic identities instead of the great averaging of our binary world.

The first time I fell in love…

by

Soph (all pronouns)

of

Queer Tax

I was five years old. She had those big green eyes and a blond bob cut. Her name was Camille. It must have been the mid eighties. I had small brown eyes and a light brown bob cut myself. I remember feeling shy and happy every time I saw her. It felt so natural and so good. That feeling didn’t last. I actually didn’t know it was the first time until years later. My actual memory as an adult about falling in love for the first time was of those two cute little boys fighting for my attention when I was six or seven years old. If I think about it, I remember that they were very sweet and kind little boys. We had the same haircut and they could have looked like girls. It was hard to resist. In any case, I kind of knew subconsciously at the time that I was supposed to be attracted to boys but what I really liked about them is that we shared the same interests. We would get dirty in the garden, build wood huts, rocket jump in the swimming pool or hang out with the ponies in the muddy field where they were grazing. I had no idea nor did I care about what girls were supposed to be doing instead. I had a blast with those boys!

I actually couldn’t care less about their gender, I just liked that we could play the same fun games together. 

There is this small window when you’re a kid and don’t quite conform with gender norms but it’s kind of okay because you’re not sexualized yet. It’s a very narrow window. Your parents still let you play with the opposite gender because “why not?!” until it’s not okay anymore. At that point, I remember having to force myself to find girl friends because that’s what I was supposed to do. Boys didn’t want to play with me anymore, I had to surrender to the gender-segregated playground rules. It sucked! I was very confused because I didn’t understand how to navigate this world. What I knew is that I wanted to hang out with boys since we wanted to play the same games but all of a sudden, they were excluding me. As for girls, ugh, they were so boring and they made me feel like I didn’t belong either. I guess I’d have to start growing my hair if I wanted to fit in. Or maybe I would just find the isolated boys who didn’t seem to fit either and maybe we could play together? It worked for a little while until I was in my early teens and they started telling me they had a crush on me. Let me tell you that it wasn’t reciprocal at all. I was so lost. I didn’t fit anywhere. 

Going to school started to become painful. Not only because it was a very strict French catholic school and I had to go to mass several times a week, but because I didn’t understand how to navigate the world. I had to pretend to like things I didn’t like just to fit in a little bit with other girls. I had to pretend I didn’t like boys because they were supposed to be boring and different but all I wanted to do was play with them. 

I really admire parents who insist on raising their kids outside of the gender binary. In the SF Bay Area, I have met some queer parents who use “they/them” pronouns for their infants and young kids and allow them to play with whomever they like. It is so hard to encourage your kids that it’s okay to live outside the gender binary when teachers and other parents reinforce the heteronormative rules of society everyday. 

I recently read an article by a French queer independent journalist that hit the spot when it comes to queer temporality. It’s in French but could be translated in English to “Draft to deviate from the heterosexual clock --How to queer time” by Camille Regache, Censored magazine #09, It’s about time!. She explains that it took her time to understand that us, queer people, “don’t share the same perception of time.” That “time is a normative concept, that time is straight, that time is cis[gender]”. The idea is that we, queer people, are supposed to respect and follow a temporal beat that is made by and for straight people while we don’t have access to the same freedom and rights. How am I supposed to flirt with the girls I like when I’m a lesbian in a lesbophobic environment? How am I supposed to discover my (homo)sexuality when I’m forced to pretend that I like boys? How am I supposed to be excited to go to college when many of my lesbophobic high school teachers treated me like I didn’t matter and I wasn’t worth it? How am I supposed to get a job and be financially independent when most of my applications get denied because I look like a butch? How am I supposed to find my life partner when I hate myself, I wish I were straight and gay people are not allowed to get married anyways? How am I supposed to have kids when it’s illegal for me to adopt kids as a single lesbian? How am I supposed to get pregnant when it’s illegal for me to access artificial insemination? You see what I mean?

I guess we have to wait and endure since they make us live on the sidelines. At some point though, we wake up or do our “coming in” as Camille says. She defines it as an “awareness of our own homosexuality which is by definition a breaking point with the cis-hetero linearity”. In other words, we, as queer folks, are able to finally realign our own life events with our queer temporality. What’s amazing about “queer time” is that we are allowed to explore, evolve and reinvent ourselves. Even though we have wasted so many years being lost in “straight time”, we can now fully embrace our queer selves and most importantly, do it together. Build our own timelines, build our own queer families, build our own queer communities, create our own jobs, and with limitations, create our own world outside the oppressive heterosexual injunctions. 

It is hard to describe how painful and unfair it is to discover that that feeling I had for years about having time stolen from me, is a part of what it’s like to be queer. Most of us have experienced a different version of it. Putting words on this feeling helps to heal and it’s a lot to process. It’s a lot to accept. I wondered for a long time about when I knew I was a lesbian. I really thought it was in my mid to late teens, but then I remembered that naive and warm feeling I had when I saw Camille for the first time. I couldn’t ignore it anymore. I finally knew, I've always been queer! I was born queer and I enjoyed it for a short amount of time until I was reborn.

Me at 5 years old (on the right) with a “friend”.

Until next time, take good care of yourselves!

Soph (all pronouns)

is a cis, white, physically-abled, xennial, non-binary butch lesbian, a highly sensitive person, and a binational intersectional activist from France who has been living in California for almost two decades. Having studied visual arts in Paris, New York City, and San Francisco, Soph’s professional life took them through the film industry, education, social work, and disability justice. Soph dreams of building more inclusive neurodivergent-friendly queer spaces, and is launching an organization with their partner to do exactly that.

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