On the second day of pride month 2021, I came out as a lesbian to my mother. Shaking by the sink in the kitchen, my face was covered in tears as my mother shut down the faucet to rid the entire house of white noise. This was not the only thing I told her that night. By that point of the conversation, everything awake knew that I was mentally ill, taking medication, and planning on moving back to my college town this July without so much as a discussion.
My mother’s response to my coming out was an apathetic “Okay, fine,” because that is her standard response to everything, and my queerness (as in “strangeness,” or rather, my “propensity to drop atomic bombs at the end of hopeless conversations”), is something that is familiar to her. We don’t speak to each other often, especially less so ever since I left home for college, but whenever we do, it always becomes an hour-long yelling match. By the end, I would be choking back tears. Over the years, our misunderstandings have stacked up due to cultural differences, language barriers, and conflicting moral philosophies. My mother and I are a chasm apart--a gap growing only wider as I get older.
Here’s the issue about being an Asian-American person and a lesbian at the same time: nobody understands the exact extent of this loneliness, nor the mutual exclusiveness of these identities. How can I describe the feeling of being the only Asian person in a queer space, and then the only queer person in an Asian space? Or, bleaching my hair to look more gay only to stand out in every Asian-American organization, but still being misidentified by white lesbians as a straight girl with a quirky fashion sense? You see, when I close my eyes and picture a queer woman, she is almost always white, and when I picture an Asian girl, she almost never loves like me. This feeling of in-betweenness feels groundless, like I will lose my breath at any second.
A few months ago I asked a group of friends if I was straight-passing. The results were mixed: some said strongly, others said not at all, but most people just shrugged and said they didn’t know.
The truth is, I know that I am straight-passing, and I know that I am straight-passing, specifically because I am Asian. Even with my bleached hair and black boots, white queer folks can’t see past the nonsexual, robotic stereotypes that people associate with the model minority myth. However, when I do genuinely appear as queer to these same people, they almost always deny the possibility that I may retain any connection to my so-called conservative heritage. What do your parents think, they might inevitably ask. Is this even allowed in your culture?
While American media frames coming out stories as the culmination of a young queer person’s journey to self-actualization, the idea of “come out when you’re ready” or “come out when you’re safe” has never occurred to me as genuine options. Part of it is the usual child-of-immigrant struggle, of course. Thoughts like I don’t want to disappoint my parents and what will the relatives say haunt my days and nights. The bulk of the fear, however, comes in smaller doses, in moments when my parents and I don’t really click, and in pauses that emerge in our conversations because these days, it’s easier to abandon the things we don’t understand about each other instead of explaining them. My biggest fear as a queer Asian-American person is the idea that my authenticity comes at the price of my family, my ethnicity, and my heritage: I simply cannot allow this chasm to expand larger, because it is already destructive enough.
About twenty minutes before I blurted out my confession, my mother told me that the more I grew older, the more she felt stupid around me. Every time I brought up American politics or critical race theory her tongue would tie up and run dry because she didn’t know who Amy Coney Barrett was, nor why it was devastating that she became a Supreme Court Justice. She didn’t know how to interact with the older version of me--a ghost she barely knew with blonde hair and thick boots--who no longer humored aunties and uncles at Chinese New Year gatherings, but would instead watch video essays at her own secluded corner of the dinner table. To my mother, my Americanness dangled upon her an impossible kind of salvation: the promise that her precious daughter would succeed in American society, but only at the cost of every Taiwanese thing in her blood.
According to my mother, a changeling child is what I became. How can she not feel cursed by that? And who am I as a queer person to discount this kind of humiliation, the mortification of being left behind by something that so inherently apart of you?
Coming out to my family was never my intention. Like I said, it never was an option for me, but think about it, isn’t that terrible? To have to pick and choose which parts of your identity to throw away and keep?
I am not a perfect person, but I am certainly not an abomination. The identities I hold, simultaneously intersecting, are not acid and base or fire and water. They do not cancel each other out. The fact that we, as Americans, think that they do is an issue that should be examined in anti-racist agendas but also in LGBTQ+ activism.
During not only pride month but for every day, I implore you to do better. Intersectional identities exist in every social group. We are not a monolith, thus, we are not aliens. Simply put, we just have issues, and we need love and support to deal with them. At the core of my being, I am just like you, and you are just like everyone else. You and I, we are not blessings nor are we curses. That’s all there is to it.
