Tag Archives: freedom



What If Being Gay Is A Choice?

What if being gay is a choice? Of course, to even consider debating that, we’d need to decide what it meant to “be gay.” Having “homosexual desires,” acting on them, being out, identifying as gay? What about queers? To a certain extent, depending on the definition “being gay” could be a choice (and being queer even more so). If being gay means being out and not acting in a heteronormative way, then yes, being gay is a choice. However, being alive is a choice (continuing to eat, only crossing streets when cars aren’t coming at you, not outright killing oneself — all choices to stay alive). Continue reading

Why I Am Queer

For me, queer is more than an orientation or preference. Queerness is political. For me, it is about the marginalized, the oppressed, the forgotten. It is about not assimilating. It is about not pretending that we’re “just like heterosexual people.” Queers aren’t all white, aren’t all middle or upper class, aren’t all cisgendered, aren’t all (temporarily) abled bodied. Queers break binaries. Continue reading

Reclaiming Masculinity

In many ways, when I first came out as trans, I was very much alone. I was attending a women’s college — and while not everyone there identified as a woman, from the people I knew or knew of, the openly trans / genderqueer / gender-variant population of my college was roughly one-half of one percent of the college’s undergrad population. I was sort of making things up as I went along. Continue reading