By Olivia Williams
Nestled in the arms of my long-term boyfriend, I felt a familiar feeling begin in the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t just the fact that I was showing him a well-loved film for the first time. The movie, called Fried Green Tomatoes, follows the adventures of two female best friends and their adventures between the two World Wars, recounted by a woman in a nursing home. It was a familiar story to me and I was excited to let someone I love into a world that has welcomed me for so long. But as the story continued and the women got closer, I began to feel a longing for the kind of friendship that was portrayed on screen, just as I had every other time I had seen those characters. The understanding and love that was between the two girls in the movie was something that I desired deeply.
At one point, about halfway through the movie, my boyfriend asked me to pause it and got up to use the bathroom, brushing a kiss against my cheek as he left the room. It was only in seeing this action mirrored on the screen in front of us several minutes later, feminine Ruth kissing rebellious Idgie on the cheek before diving into the lake before them, that I finally came to a realization. However much the 1991 film stresses the importance of friendship, the main female relationship shown is a romantic one. The longing this movie gave me for all these years was in fact a hidden seed that would sprout years later when I finally realized that I am bisexual.
It was not that I was raised in a homophobic environment. My parents, both active liberals, instilled in me values of acceptance and open-mindedness from a young age. But for some reason, homosexuality seemed to be something that was for everyone else. I had always loved putting things in categories (which, ironically enough, would later lead to another realization: a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) and anything to do with the LGBTQ acronym was always a category that was separate from me. For me, the roles that I had in relation to the two main genders were clear. If they were male, I had three options: either being friends with them, being involved with them romantically, or not having them in my life. For the females, the options were narrowed to only two: friends or nothing. I spent years in high school and beyond wishing to emulate certain girls and lamenting the fact that I wasn’t closer friends with them, the same way I lusted after the friendship in Fried Green Tomatoes.
Cameron, a non-binary friend of mine, had a similar experience in their own journey. For both of us, being queer was seen as a separate, almost less valid experience, for other, more brave, people. Being heterosexual “…is the engrained path,” explains Cameron, “and if you stray from it, it’s not the norm, it’s not the default.” In fact, experiences by people other than cisgendered heterosexuals were thought of as almost enthralling. “I barely knew what trans people was,” they explained to me, “but I had some sort of notion. I saw like a quick ad about it on TLC.” Much like my misguided categorization, Cameron felt that there were only two options: “I knew I wasn’t a guy, like I always knew that. So I was like, ‘Guess I’m a girl, like, that’s the other option.’” Just as I assumed my feelings towards girls were those of intense friendship, Cameron also misrepresented themselves in order to fit into the only two options that they believed they had. If they were a girl, the feelings that they were having towards girls must be homosexual ones, because they were presumably of the same gender. However, this, too, posed a problem. “I didn’t really know any gay people,” Cameron says. “I had no gay people in my life…I still didn’t really have a concept of it until I developed a crush on a girl in my class.” Ultimately, this led them to claiming the wrong identity for several years, coming out as lesbian to their private, all-girls Catholic high school.
The main factor that changed Cameron’s worldview was graduating high school and participating in a theatre program, which ultimately exposed them to members of the LGBTQ community, including people who were non-binary. “I had non-binary friends before I came out [the second time]. That’s really how I came to the notion of it,” Cameron remarks. “I didn’t really know what that was before I had met them.” This resulted in the realization that not only are LGBTQ identities valid, but that they are unique, meaning that they span much farther than static categories that must be selected and stuck with. Perhaps, Cameron realized with time, queerness was even so flexible that it could include them, too. “And how I like really came to that realization was, you know, I’d be on-and-off thinking about it, and I was in bed with my girlfriend of a year at that point, and she’s half-asleep, and I just kind of said, like, ‘You know what? What if I’m non-binary?’” reflects Cameron. “…And saying it out loud for the first time just really solidified it and as soon as I said it I was like, ‘Yes. Absolutely. This fits.’”
Even during our conversation, recounting our experiences to each other, we are doing exactly what Cameron did all those nights ago: affirming and accepting our identities, out loud, to the world. In a place where girls are assumed to be friends, where transgender people are a sight to gawk at on reality television, confidently saying who were are is the first step in accepting ourselves, which then invites acceptance from the world. Sharing in this way increases visibility to those who feel invisible, from high school kids who aren’t exactly sure what they’re feeling, all the way up to the Cloud Dancer Foundation’s founder, Robina Asti, who transitioned at the age of 50 and spent the rest of her life encouraging others to live their truths too. Claiming identity is the ultimate first step in any queer journey, and this is why I have created a series of articles speaking with several different queer subjects on their journeys, from fighting internalized homophobia to defending their identity against societal oppression, and ending with a focus on the positive queer future. Cameron says it best, summing up not only my goal but the goal of the Cloud Dancers’ Foundation as a whole: “[Being represented] just constantly affirms it. It just feels like, ‘This is real. I’m not making it up. I’m not being overdramatic.’” By sharing queer stories like I hope to do in this series, I will make the invisible visible, which was, ultimately, Robina Asti’s biggest goal.