Queerly Happily Ever After
Words by Jackie Lamb (she/her)
The first time I realised I was queer, I was fifteen.
A girl in my geography class with an angelic name and tangled golden hair really annoyed me. I spent my days looking at her face and wondering why I could never hold her gaze. That was until I had a dream one night that she kissed me. What was I supposed to do with that? I had a geography exam the next day. I had a small town in France to go to. I had a university to attend, a new beginning to start. I hid, and came to university as a newly-reformed straight girl. People talk about discovering your sexuality as a life-altering moment. For me it was, until it wasn’t.
My friends began to seriously date people in 2019. While they brought guys up to their rooms on nights out, all that waited for me at home was a mars bar cheesecake to bake and a night of interrupted sleep with my stuffed seal. I had no idea why I didn’t want to date guys, but what I did know was that I felt wrong and broken. In her article ‘Orientations’, queer theory scholar Sara Ahmed discusses how social spaces “are oriented around the straight body.” The choosing of desire changes one’s relationships because it limits the kind of connections one can have. In a residential hall in the middle of Auckland, it seemed like all anyone wanted to talk about was the latest guy they’d been fucking.
Ahmed talks about happiness as an orientation point. People who value the same things congregate together, and when you don’t share the same values as the people around you, it can be very isolating. I tried so hard to make it work. I listened to my friend cry about the guy that she’d almost dated three years ago. I went to a cat cafe with this girl that liked me and tried to feel anything other than guilt and fear. Despite doing all the things I was told would lead me towards happiness, I felt hollow and alone.
Later that year, I made friends with Tom. Tom was a guy in my acapella group I had talked to and discovered shared similar worldviews with me. We both liked Japanese animated movies and singing, and could connect over things that weren’t drinking and dating. Talking to Tom, I felt important and needed. Someone wanted to talk to me! But I didn’t like how he constantly brought up the idea of us dating. I didn’t want to talk about it. I just wanted to spend time with him, eating snacks in the park and dog-spotting. The world shows us the prospect of happiness as something that follows an action you take. Dating is socialised into us. We believe that if we have a boyfriend, or girlfriend, somebody, anybody, to love us, then we will be happier. But whenever Tom showed interest in me, I wanted to disappear. Eventually, Tom realised I wasn’t interested in him romantically and stopped talking to me.
This tale tended to happen often in my life, regardless of the person’s gender. There’s a poem I love by Richard Siken called ‘Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out’. It explores how your choices make your life. Things may happen to you, and you can let them, or you can make your life into something better than the story you are told about yourself. He writes:
Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.
You still get to be the hero.
You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!
What more do you want?
I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re
really there.
Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?
Let me do it right for once…
I wanted to blame Tom for making me feel wrong and upset, but I had to accept that I had played a part in this too. I’d led him on because I wanted a friend. I wanted so badly to make things right. If everyone would love me, I would be happy, right?
I remember being sixteen and crying inconsolably as my mother, gently, asked me if I thought I was gay, and whether that was why I was so upset. “It’s okay to be gay,” said my sister, who then showed me a bouquet of rainbow roses on the internet. “I don’t know!” I replied. I didn’t know at sixteen, or at nineteen, and I still don’t know now, at twenty-one. What am I? Who am I? I don’t know who I am if I can’t make everyone else happy.
In Sarah Gailey’s personal essay about being queer, they open with “I always thought I’d be dead by now.” Death has been commonly associated with queerness in Young Adult fiction novels since one of the very first queer YA novels, I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip, was published. When you think death is the only option for you, you do not think to pursue happiness. You look for happiness in other people’s lives, but only survival for yourself. Why is this? Why did I feel like the dragon for wanting something different than the story I’d been given? I was alive and in my mind that had to be enough.
Sara Ahmed discusses queerness as a different way of seeing. Looking at the world on a slant is a queer way of observing the space you occupy in the world, and finding joy in unexpected places. Queering the way I looked at things gave me space to explore positive emotions outside of what I believed I should feel. We inherit values and ways of living from our parents, our society, and in my case, my friends. Choosing differently may have rendered me an outcast from them, but it also opened up another world.
This was not the fairytale I expected. But being queer had positively disrupted the order of my life. In rejecting Tom, I may have given up on having a relationship with another person, but I found one with myself. Prince Henry in Casey McQuiston’s novel Red, White & Royal Blue also experiences his own fairytale. He describes himself as unique among princes, “born with his heart on the outside of his body”. What a gift! What a curse! Henry believed it was the right thing to parcel away his heart, both for safety and to make sure he could make everyone else happy. Like me, he never realised that he deserved to find happiness outside of a romantic partner.
Being honest with myself made me realise that I wasn’t living the right life for me. Happiness had become a “lost object” as Ahmed describes, because I was also a lost object. Ahmed’s ‘Happy Objects’ article talks about “affect aliens”, people who fall out of step with their affective community because they don’t feel pleasure and happiness from objects socially seen as good. When the world you live in no longer brings you joy, maybe it is time to find a new world. For me, queerness brought me into a new way of life.
Letting go of the expectation that a relationship would bring me happiness, I found joy in doing things alone. I got an undercut. I went to second-hand markets and bought myself roses. I baked brownies, cookies, and red velvet cupcakes. I also found myself reading again. I read mostly queer YA. This was for a variety of reasons, but mainly because reading characters like me, who feel different from everyone else, made me feel accepted and like a happy-ever-after was possible after all. Seeing people like you is important because it gives you hope for the future. To live inside “straight time” and imagine a different future, writes queer theory scholar José Estaban Muñoz, is something both queer and utopian. To be queer is to embrace different desires and to desire to dream differently. Oscar Wilde wrote that “a map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth glancing at”. Happiness and hope link together in my mind. I don’t know if my future looks the same or different, but I want to keep going to see what it’s like.
There’s a line I wrote in my journal in 2019 that simply states, “everything matters.” It’s underlined. In Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World, Ari and Dante observe a painting and a poem where the artist asks, “what is it that makes things matter?” What matters to other people doesn’t have to matter to you. But what matters to you is important and it’s yours.
Queerness matters to me because it occupies a different space connected to love. It’s a space outside of language, rationality, and even the world itself. Queerness doesn’t need to be romantic or easily defined. It can make a new world, where everyone can live as they are. Where I can be queer and happy.