This piece was written and submitted by our fantastic contributor, Charlotte. Read on to learn how Charlotte's erasure led to a quiet confidence in how their queer identity shows up. 

“Charlotte was gay once”. My mother chortles down the phone.

She is on Facetime with a distant relative, I think. It's honestly hard to tell when the camera is focused so intimately on a closeup of her forehead. I can sense through time and space that this weird Aunty is unsure whether they are supposed to laugh.

But Mum still looks across the couch at me like she has delivered some great intellectual blow to my very secure sexuality, considering it a great feat of comedic prowess.

“Charlotte was gay once. But not anymore!”

She is of course, referring to my (then) long-term boyfriend. He is intelligent and attentive and kind, and who wouldn’t love him? But that’s not why she jokes, she is relieved by his cis-gender, white, heterosexuality, too. And enjoys the shame I am supposed to feel for being with him, despite being out.

The aforementioned relative changes the subject uncomfortably. I’m 24 and home for Christmas, through gritted teeth. It would take me another few years to be courageous enough to stop going.

I came out to my mum as bisexual when I was 17, after the canonical and catastrophic Sapphic experience of falling in love with your best friend. Though, I had known and accepted much earlier that I was attracted to women. In fact, I experienced my sexuality with such ease that it was never really a question or a revelation to me, personally. I am grateful for how steady I felt in myself as a young person, because it would help me bear the brunt of my personal life being the family punchline, later on.

I had realised long before this particular Christmas that, in my parent’s opinion, my most unforgivable shortcoming was that I wasn’t born a son and that I was born queer. But I wasn’t responsible for either of those things. And I certainly wasn’t sorry.

Despite being largely immune to my family's biphobia, I was wildly unprepared for the unnerving, prickly guilt that would wash over me when positioned face-to-face with my new, straight-passing privilege. And I don’t want to be that cis, white, able-bodied, middle class, tauiwi woman who disregards the safety and benefit of just existing as myself. I would like to recognise the enormous privilege that I carry around all the time, in so many ways. But I suddenly didn’t feel so assured about my place in the great rainbow order of things.

My experience in the world was devoid of many of the challenges our community faces. And I resented feeling like I had to come out to strangers all the time, for the same reasons many people in this community do. I wasn’t ashamed of my sexuality, or my partner, or my relationship: but I enjoyed the safety that the invisibility of compulsory heteronormativity afforded me. And that same invisibility obscured me from the community I loved and wanted to be seen by. I had a kind of imposter syndrome - too queer to be straight, too straight to be queer.

And I began to hear my Mum’s voice saying, “Charlotte was gay, once”, and wondered if actually she was right?

Since then, I have come to really understand what being queer means to me. That it can look so different to the experiences of others, but it is no less real. Sometimes pride is powerful and demanding. Sometimes it is quiet and sure. Sometimes it needs to be so little that it can’t be used to harm you. Sometimes it is all of these things in one day. There is no one, right way to be in this club.

It’s easy to feel external pressure to find your place, brand it, and put it in your Linktree. I have instead learned to ask who it is serving. My life has become wonderfully unrecognisable since I let go of trying to operate under (thus assuage) a rigid system that doesn’t have our best interests at heart. It turns out that a lot of this guilt that I carried belongs to this same prescriptive system which categorises in binary, demands evidence and has a long history of actively oppressing queer people.

So, I no longer justify, clarify or qualify my existence against somebody else' s matrix. The people who require it don’t love me. And the people who do love me, don't require it.