I am a gay man. If you’ve ever spent time with me, you probably already know this. If you’ve merely seen me around, you might also “know” this. Maybe I’m employing hand gestures while talking to a friend in the Student Union; maybe I’m sitting on the O.U.T. bus with my legs crossed (and not the more acceptable ankle-over-knee cross; think Dr. Melfi in The Sopranos). Any of these things could lead you to conclude that I’m gay; however, that I am, in fact, gay is not evidence of your deduction skills. These are elements of my gender expression, not my sexuality. Unfortunately, society at large tends to conflate the two: the concept of “gaydar” suggests that a person’s mannerisms can set off an intuitive response in the observer, like a metal detector spotting a rare coin. Yep, definitely gay.
When I come out to certain people, they laugh good-naturedly and say something like, “Yeah, I know.” This doesn’t offend me, any more than it would offend me for someone to assume I’m a writer because I carry a notebook around with me everywhere I go. These are simply facts about myself, and I’m not terribly concerned with what people think of me anyway.
But I am free to feel and act this way because I live with an incredible amount of privilege. I come from an accepting family, surround myself with culturally intelligent friends and live in a (comparatively) liberal pocket of this most conservative of states. As a white person, I also have the benefit of the first glance. You wouldn’t know from simply looking at my driver’s license that I’m any different from the white, heteronormative majority. If I lived with the daily threat of being kicked out of my home, rendered destitute or subjected to physical violence because of my sexuality, I would almost certainly change myself. I would modulate my voice, keep my hands from flying about as I talk, sit on the bus with my knees parallel.
I’m not out because I’m brave; I’m not out because I’ve battled adversity. I’m out because I am the beneficiary of my environment and of decades of social activism in which countless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender men and women have died so that I can sit here writing this article without worrying for my life. I am not every LGBTQ person. I am not threatened by assumptions about my sexuality in the same way many of my fellow LGBTQ people are. I have the freedom to shrug off the “obviousness” of my gender expression when many of us could be ruined by saying the wrong thing, making the wrong gesture, listening to the wrong kind of music.
We should all put down the gaydar. We have no idea what we’re playing with.
Charles McCrory is a junior English major from Florence.
