#queer culture is feeling guilty whenever you find people attractive | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

pridepages · 1 year

Text

Storytelling: Imogen, Obviously

I just finished Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli. I have thoughts...

Here there be spoilers!

Our lives are made up of the stories we tell. Narrative is how we make sense of the random events that occur and the feelings they inspire. We take the chaos and we impose order. Give it structure.

Slap a label on it.

I’ll be the first to tell you how important and empowering queer storytelling is. Control of the narrative is a form of power, and for centuries cisheterosexual society has tried to control our narratives by silencing them.

Little by little, we’re taking back the mic, the pen, the keyboard. We’re getting our stories out there, sending them out to let other queer people know: we see your experience. You are not alone.

So stories are powerful tools to help us define ourselves and find our people. But if stories help us define queerness...can they also confine it?

Enter Becky Albertalli with her newest YA novel Imogen, Obviously. Meet Imogen Scott: she’s the Best Ally Ever. Her sister is a queer woman. Both of her best friends are queer women. Imogen loves everything about them and about the gay culture around them. Imogen also feels a little funny, a little stung, whenever someone brings up the fact that she’s Straight. It’s almost like the label is being forced on her when it doesn’t fit...

“I’ve never quite been able to pin it down. The way queerness announces itself,” Imogen reflects. “How it seems so intuitive for people. How people just seem to know...There have to be some sort of visible markers of queerness. Otherwise, how could so many people know at a glance that I’m straight?”

That phrasing rings so many alarm bells...it’s not ‘I know I’m straight.’ It’s other people. Other queer people who draw the lines and set the rules of engagement.

It’s funny because it’s true. There are queer people who can say with the same breath: ‘it’s okay to question your identity!’ and ‘straight people need to stay out of queer safe spaces!’ It’s Schrodinger’s Gay--until you come out of the closet, you’re somehow both and neither.

Take Gretchen, one of Imogen’s best friends who talks like she’s terminally online and basically embodies the Schrodinger’s Gay approach. I give full credit to Albertalli for giving us a complex antagonist. Gretchen’s assumptions that straight is the default and absolute refusal to give any unlabeled person the benefit of the doubt is caused by the fact that she regularly experiences homophobia. Readers feel simultaneously furious watching her shove Imogen into the closet and sympathetic because we understand it comes from a place of envy for anyone with that mythical ‘straight passing privilege.’ For people like Gretchen, there’s one way to be gay. If you don’t fit the standard model, then you can’t be real.

For girls like Imogen...girls like me...this line of thinking is very, very dangerous.

Because it turns out that feelings and desires aren’t completely intuitive. We have to learn how to read them, how to put names on them...in effect, how to label them. And we need to be taught how. As it turns out, queer girls can be handed a lot of cracked lenses through which to see their own sexuality distorted...

Here are some of the ones I heard growing up.

“Everyone likes to look at women. They’re objectively more attractive than men.”

“You’re just too mature to be boycrazy.”

“You’ll feel it when the right man comes along.”

“Of course you feel intense about your friends...friends are more important than boys because they last forever!”

“Straight girls like when other girls touch/kiss them because it makes them feel a little wild.”

“If you’re gay, you just know. Because gay people are born that way.”

So that guilty, eager feeling I got looking at the Victoria’s Secret window just meant I was perverse.

And I was smart for not getting why my friends lost their heads over guys.

It didn’t matter that I only liked boys as friends. That funny feeling I got around my third grade teacher couldn’t be a crush.

It was normal that I hated all my best friend’s boyfriends.

It was cliche that tequila made me loose enough to like it when other girls grabbed my chest at college parties.

I wasn’t gay...

Because if I was, then I would already know.

I’d have grown up a little tomboy who hated girly things. I’d have identified some sort of unattainable crush and suffered from homophobia and consciously silencing myself. I’d gravitate toward flannel and the Indigo Girls and have pictures of famous women pinned up on my walls. Because that’s what Real Gay Girls did...

Right?

“It's like there's this idea that you have to earn your label through suffering. And then you have to prove it with who you date, how you dress, how other people perceive you,” Imogen explains. And she’s absolutely right. This idea that there is some kind of ‘right’ way to be gay poisons our brains and makes us feel like imposters in our own bodies.

For years, I thought the reason I kept failing every time I forced myself to try dating men was because I was a Broken Heterosexual.

Those words actually appeared in my brain.

Like that is a real thing a person can be.

People like me are in desperate need of stories like Imogen’s. Because it is long past time to break the mold. This cultural pressure to perform identity the ‘right’ way leads to internalized homophobia. We police ourselves, struggle with imposter syndrome and insist we must be making up our feelings.

Screw that. Here’s Imogen’s lesson for anyone who needs to hear it: No one knows you better than you know yourself.

Only you know what you feel right now. Only you know when your feelings are evolving. You are the only person who gets to label you because YOU are the authority.

And to anyone who dares to say otherwise, I’m holding up this bit of wisdom from Imogen: “promise to hold space for variation.” Because we aren’t one narrative. We’re a library.

So keep sharing your stories.

I can’t wait to read them all.

#imogen obviously #becky albertalli #wlw #sapphic #bisexual #lgbt read #queer lit

22 notes · View notes