The first time I ever came out to someone was a surreal experience. I was 16, talking to my best friend on my mother’s phone.
“I uh.. have something to say to you”, I texted her. “But I think I’ll wait until I see you in person”
“I think I know…”
“Yeah?”
“You’re gay?”
“Bi”
Being a queer person in a straight world means living in an environment that is never tailored to you.
By the time I came out for the first time, I knew that my life would be unfathomably different from that of my straight friends. The internet told me about all the big things- the bullying, the stereotyping, the hate crimes. At thirteen, I knew that people were capable of taking my dignity away because they were the ones in power. They controlled the system.
But the bad things would not happen if the people in power never found out about me. I saw that as long as you walk the ‘straight’ and narrow, you’d be fine. Conceal, don’t feel, don’t let them know, right?
So that’s what I did. By the time I joined college, I’d perfected keeping my head down. I asked no doubts, had very few friends and my professors didn’t know I existed. However, all my efforts at anonymity ever did was trade the obvious, huge, battle-sized wounds for a thousand little paper cuts; and then the people ask “Do you want a side of lemonade with that?”
I once sat through an entire class about ‘unnatural sexual perversions’, two years ago. It was a lecture in my Forensic Medicine course and it shouldn’t have existed. Section 377 of the IPC had been revoked three years ago. But of course, something as trivial as a Supreme Court ruling doesn’t stop people from doing what they’ve always done. For my first internal a few weeks later, I wrote an essay on “sodomy, homosexuality, and transvestism” because that’s what the course demanded.
The reason queer youth have terrible mental health is not just because we live in a system that constantly tells us we’re worth nothing. It’s also because our friends and family, our colleagues, siblings, professors and bosses, seem to believe it and revel in telling us so.
The system is impartial and cold. It’s a machine that simply does what it is programmed to do, but people are flesh and blood. The reality is that systems don’t hurt queer people, other people do. I’m always more pessimistic than my straight friends, but that is only because I’ve seen the worst of humanity in ways that they probably never will. Good for them.
Over the years, I don’t feel that rage and hopelessness so acutely anymore. It’s replaced by that feeling you get when the lift suddenly stops – that pit in your stomach.
When I came out to my best friend in college and he spent the next month teasing me about crushing on him, I wasn’t even mad. The lift stopped, my brain filed another page into my ‘this is what people are like’ novel (that should be full any day now, so publishers hit me up) and I moved on.
It’s truly amazing what straight people think being queer means.
We were invited to a friend’s birthday party. Her farm was outside the city so it would be late when we returned. When we were discussing how we would come back, the girls decided just to stay the night. Simpler to navigate bad roads after sunrise, after all. My friend turned to me and said “Hey, you’re probably the only one of us (guys) who can also do that.”
If I sat down to unpack every batshit crazy thing straight people have told me, I’d probably never get out of bed, But I could probably make ‘this is what people are like’ a trilogy.
“Queer” is an umbrella term. It encompasses a myriad of unique, fluid, beautiful people. It’s a family as passionate and dysfunctional as any other. People don’t always understand each other. The worst ‘phobia’ queer people experience is often from other queer people.
A few months after I came out for the first time, my seniors in PU introduced me to a gay friend of theirs. I was nervous, and caught off guard,
“So, they tell me you’re gay.”
I hesitated.
It’s harder when you can look the person in the eye.
We were sitting at a food court and I felt every eye in the world between my shoulder blades.
I cleared my throat, “Bi actually.”
He waved his hands, “eh, you’ll get over the whole bi thing.” (spoiler alert: I didn’t. That’s not how that works)
The brain is an amazing organ. It computes solutions better than any supercomputer. Every time we face stress, our brain throws us into overdrive. But the human mind is also stupid; because while its trauma response is great for physical stresses, and even for singular traumatic experiences with overwhelming odds, it’s not sustainable.
Under constant stress and indecision, we begin to unravel. Unfortunately, the queer experience is a life sentence and much like prison, you go through it alone.
Research dictates that queer youth are more at risk for developing mental illness than their straight counterparts, even when we’ve grown up in the exact same households. Being LGBT+ finds a place under the ‘risk factors’ for every mental illness there is, and the reason for that is trauma.
Trauma, though not unique to queer people, is intrinsic to the queer experience. So, mental health, while not just a queer discussion, would be incomplete without a queer perspective.
– By Pranav