lgbtq – Page 4

Identified Patient

I am in Calgary today learning how to diagnose autism. The training is in the same hospital building where I was detained for a month and ultimately diagnosed with OCD when I was eleven. A month of one-way mirrors and cheese whiz toast and CBT worksheets. My current therapist sends me a message before I leave that says “I hope this trip is somehow good for you rather than jarring,” which I think was supposed to be reassuring but ends up coming off ominous.

At the Vancouver airport I text my partner and tell them I cannot stop thinking that I’ve forgotten something important and something terrible is going to happen. There must be a ritual I can do to prevent it, they joke. Ha ha ha. It turns out the feeling that I have forgotten something is correct, although the scale of the catastrophe is a little off. When I arrive at the Calgary airport and try to pick up my rental car, my driver’s license has expired two days earlier, and I have to get a cab. I had planned to maybe check out trendy restaurants that have popped up here since I left in 2004, but quickly I realize I’m going to be basically confined to the strip mall around my Best Western and the children’s hospital where my
course is being held. Wings clipped, I feel like I’m waiting for my sixteenth birthday so I can go through Peter’s drive-in for milkshakes or drive to the airport just to look at it, so I can start to imagine forward movement as a real possibility.

The view out the cab window is vast and empty and slow, and I realize I had forgotten how this place seemed to be a mismatch for the pace I wanted to go. Wheels spinning on ice, futility and pent up energy; knowing there was a whole big world out there where I wouldn’t be such an anomaly. In the parlance of CBT: the feeling didn’t necessarily tell me the truth. There was a whole big world out there, and I wouldn’t necessarily feel like less of an anomaly once I found it. But the idea of it was enough to give me traction, to propel me out of this place that always reminds me of how no one can hear you scream in space because there’s nothing for the sound waves to even bounce off of.

Did you know that it’s more common to be afraid of wide open spaces than it is to be claustrophobic? I am sure that I do not belong here. They gave me diagnostic powers by mistake, it is an administrative error. A Freaky Friday type mishap where I have woken up with unearned power and freedom. I spiral and sweat through the afternoon lecture, imagining all of the catastrophic sequelae of this mistake. My heart races. On the break I get an ice cream from the vending machine where my mom would get me ice cream before family therapy, like trying to coax a feral animal. Only she’s dead now, so I’m trying to coax myself back to productivity or achievement, to my hard-earned place on the other side of the glass this time. I am conscious that adult professionals probably don’t eat ice cream for lunch when surrounded by colleagues. At any second they may realize I’m an impostor, and send me back downstairs for toast, a PRN, a worksheet and a nap.

I go for a walk to try to feel better, and end up feeling sad and slow and lonely, a specific sensation that feels like dull prairie winter in my chest. Vancouver moves fast – my favourite restaurants and memories disappearing before I can make new ones. Calgary moves slow, the pancake restaurant I used to go to with my mom before skiing preserved like a bug trapped in amber. The steakhouse we’d go to after church. The dead mall, standing there like the husk of a giant insect, where I had my first job selling novelty swords to nerds with poor impulse control, and which I recognized recently when it was used as a set in The Last of Us. Everyone I could call from my previous life here has moved or died.

It is dense with memory and devoid of connection. When I was nineteen I saw another psychiatrist who told me he thought I had Asperger’s, which was a thing then. Likely because I looked at the floor while I talked to him, and told him that I believed that the problem was not depression or even OCD, but that “I suffered from a pervasive remoteness.”

These days I have mostly abandoned the CBT I learned when I was eleven at the Children’s hospital psych unit. I still eat cheese whiz on toast, because it feels like a hug. But in light of everything that’s happened, it feels unhelpful to say “that’s a catastrophic thought.” It’s trite, but the only thing that slows down my heart rate and lengthens my breath is gratitude. When I was thirteen I found queer youth group, and when I was fifteen I started volunteering to run it. When I was sixteen they started paying me, and I’ve been lucky to build that into a career as a therapist. The early parts of that were nurtured by old (to me) lesbians who wanted to see me be happy and succeed; who understood that I was doing my best in a hostile environment and wanted to believe in the idea that someone like me could be okay. You couldn’t take a kid under your wing like that now; it would be called grooming. But no one was ever creepy, and I wouldn’t be where I am now without them.

When I moved to Vancouver, queer people felt unfriendly and suspicious of difference. There were a lot of invisible divisions I struggled to intuit – the mirror is never just a mirror. No one was jumping to take me under their wing. I still had the embarrassing tells of someone from a town that hosted the national high school rodeo, whose social and cultural centre was a grain elevator, and where you could ride your horse to school and hitch it there. I used to think it was too easy here, that there wasn’t the kind of exposure to hostility that makes us tender with each other’s earnestness.

When I started writing this, what I didn’t want to happen was for it to turn into a kind of city-over-country supremacy that I think it’s easy for anyone, but maybe especially for queer people, to slip into without noticing. When we do that, what we’re actually trying to signify is the cruelty and stress of the places we grew up, but we tend to do so without examining our own capacity for cruelty that we pack up in our backpacks and Rubbermaid totes and bring with us across mountain ranges on Greyhound buses. I’d even hazard to guess that as much as we learn what to tolerate in relationships from our families of origin, we learn how to be in community in places that hurt us. From where I stand now, I know that under a lot of the cool disaffectedness that I used to be so intimidated by, there is often deep vulnerability.

What I brought with me was a pane of one-way glass, the pain of being observed and described, the specific pain of the identified patient. I roll the words around in my mouth. Nothing goes away until it teaches us what we need to know. I repeat it to myself over and over again like a mantra until my mouth is dry, and it seems to help. My heart slows down to match the pace of this place, the thing I couldn’t do when I was growing into myself

Mis raíces son de aquí y de allá.
My roots are from here and there.
But not literally here. By “here,” I mean Mexico—that’s where my “here” stayed.

Me and my family come from a long line of immigrants who arrived from northern Spain and Italy, eventually mixing with Indigenous people and mestizxs in Mexico. And no, I didn’t spit into a tube for Google to find this out.
I know, because where I come from, that kind of knowledge is passed down, close to the heart. Being of European descent still carries a kind of social value—less weight, more pride—even if it was five or seven generations ago.

Having that said, my gay genes are from all over the world!!
I only dare say genes because science hasn’t settled on it—it’s a mix of hormonal, genetic, and environmental factors. And I plan to tell my family that. So they can start taking responsibility for some of the emotional baggage they’ve passed down.

Yes, I’m from Mexico—from a city surrounded by three volcanoes.
Since I was little, my horizon has always been populated. It was hard to pick a favourite volcano, so I just decided to love them all. Which… maybe explains a lot.
I’m pansexual. And my volcano city was named Puebla by colonizers. Puebla doesn’t mean anything, but it sounds close to Pueblo—”town” in Spanish—just sapphic.

The city is colourful, artsy, painfully colonial. The population is mixed—Indigenous communities that still hold on to language and tradition, and whitexicans who think they’re more European than they actually are. There’s pride in food (rightfully so—don’t @ me!), but the snobbery doesn’t come from that. It comes from whiteness and class.
And even though we are all mixed, with Asian, Indigenous, European, black, over and over again, mestizaje didn’t mean equality. Now, Indigenous communities are a little better preserved, but that’s only because they have been pushed out to the peripheries—margins of the capital city.
In Puebla, waves of immigrants were welcomed: Lebanese people escaping the Ottoman Empire, Spaniards fleeing civil war, Germans leaving post-Nazi trauma behind. These communities were—and still are—respected, owning businesses, having their own schools, social clubs, factories. And indeed, in private schools in Puebla, you’re taught German, English, and French.
But not Nahuatl. Not Otomí.

Close to my hometown is a valley called Cholollan—renamed Cholula. Please, add it to your bucket list. This city was once a spiritual hub for many Indigenous communities, all praising different deities, but gathered in the same land.
Not only pan, but poly.
The first time I lived alone was in Cholula. Mi Cholu. Colourful, bike town, full of markets and fields of flowers, maiz, and so many fireworks, like crazy, every single day there’s a saint’s celebration. Because colonialism ensured Catholicism wasn’t just adopted in Mexico — it was absorbed, so now there aren’t temples — called calpullis— for different deities; now they are churches.
Puebla and Cholula are only 20 minutes apart: the whitewashed “we’re still European” city, and the cempasúchil lands that bloom every September.

I never really felt the need to come out to my family. I’d already come out as “the artist,” the cycle-breaker, the one who says no más to abuse and misogyny.
And as JuanGa said—and if you don’t know who Juan Gabriel is, how are you even here? Juan Gabriel was our Mexican Elton John, but gayer and way more legendary. He, maybe they, said “What is obvious doesn’t need to be asked”

I don’t know if I had any queer relatives, I never saw anyone in my family that could have been.
What I did see were women who got shit done and men who “worked all day” but had mini-golf in their offices and collectible toys in their meeting rooms.
The women had strong hands that braided my hair so tightly it would probably qualify as child abuse today. But then they’d hand me a tortilla con aguacate y sal before dinner, and my favourite agua fresca—papaya…
Maybe they knew I was queer before I did.

But don’t get me wrong—I’ve known for a while. I just did gay stuff before I said I was gay. Like kissing my girlfriends at parties (with consent, always). I also shared my first orgasm with a girl.
It’s funny how we think we have “first times,” and then someone reminds us: “Didn’t that happen… back in the day?”
I thought my first time having sex was with my middle school boyfriend—he told everyone. I didn’t even come. Double asshole.
Later in life, I wanted to leave Mexico, but my Saturn return aligned with the pandemic, and I ended up living in San Francisco. There one day, I was with friends and playing Never Have I Ever, and someone said, “Never had sex with a woman.”
I didn’t put a finger down. But a friend said, “Wait—you told me a story from when you were 13.”
And I said, “We didn’t have sex. We just touched each other… and came.”
(Everyone laughed. I didn’t.)
It took my poly, demi, pan, ADD, PTSD brain a hot minute, but I finally connected the dots… My first time had been with a girl. YAY!!!!!!

By 28, I started calling myself bi. I didn’t need to come out dramatically. I just accepted it, named it, and started dating a woman.
We met on an app—because, of course. It was late 2020. She was beautiful—blue eyes, ballerina body, smile that could heal your inner child. It was sweet and short. I had to return to the U.S. We still orbit each other’s socials. A win.
Especially since my relationships with men tend to end with full drama:
The “never speak to me again” kind… or worse.

In 2021, I finally moved to Vancouver.
Why did I leave Mexico in the first place? Because I was afraid. Afraid to walk free. To wear something tight. To show my breasts.
I had experienced too much violence. Misogyny lived too comfortably in my home, in the media, in our streets. So I leapt. I trusted myself—and my craft as an artist.
Living outside of Mexico gave me perspective.
In Mexico, I’m not considered a person of colour. I had white privilege—despite my mom calling me the N-word for being “the darkest one.”
But here? I’m not white. I’m brown. More than anyone in my family would ever admit. And I embrace it.

I have an accent. YES.
I wear colours. YES.
I cook amazingly. I dance badly. I sing, not so bad.
I’m loud. My eyebrows speak before I do.

At a staff party for an immersive theatre company I worked at, I realized I was the only non-Canadian, non-white person there. We were drinking, joking, talking about patriarchy (as you do). Then this guy—let’s call him Hunter, because that’s his name—says: “You’re not like the other girls. You’ve got Big Dick Energy.”
I was like… “WHAT?”
And the guys were nodding. “Yeah, like you’re confident, you speak your mind…” One added, “All the women at work are into you. It’s like they see the big dick.”
Then someone else chimed in: “Or maybe… they’re into her because she doesn’t have a dick at all—but treats them as if she did.”
I didn’t know what to do with that info. Still don’t.
But I did find out later, at a New Year’s party, that they weren’t wrong. I made a move on one of the women—she said yes… until she didn’t. She ghosted me when I got COVID. Then asked me out again. So… not a total loss. Not a total win, either.

As I’ve grown, I’ve realized I don’t just love femme femmes or masc boys.
I love people across the spectrum. Masc femmes, femme boys. I love trans folks. I love queers. I love sapphics. I love love—as long as they’re not assholes or racist.
And the biggest victory, I love me. All my spectrum. All my mixed, from all around, magical self.
Even my lows. ‘Cause nobody gets depressed like I do. And most certainly nobody binges peanut butter at midnight like I do. And if someone does, I hope we can be friends.

My hope here is that younger people out there get to see more of us queers. Because we are not going anywhere, and they don’t have to wait 28 years to name themselves.
You don’t need to come out perfectly formed.
Just come out… as you.

Tag: lgbtq

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