The Queer Imagination: On Language, Freedom, and Being Nonbinary
“‘Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.” — bell hooks
“Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.” — Simone de Beauvoir
I wasn’t really exposed to that many queer people growing up. I have a gay uncle, but by the time I started going to church, where I was taught being queer is a sin, my main points of queer representation were homophobic stereotypes in the media I consumed. And growing up in a more conservative part of St. Louis County, those stereotypes were often reaffirmed by people who lived in the same bubble I did (don’t get me wrong: my parents are incredibly affirming and did their absolute best in spite of this).
It wasn’t until I started dipping my toes in the Chicago music scene in 2021 that I became friends with many queer people. What struck me about the queer friends I was making was their incredible sense of authenticity; they were wholly true to themselves and valued that as much as anything else. To place authenticity at the forefront of one’s way of operating is an act of bravery in a world that rewards conformity, and embracing one’s queerness is as authentic as it gets.
This isn’t to say that not embracing it is an act of cowardice. Being authentically queer can look a lot of different ways, and that’s a good thing! But being true to oneself, however it may look, means knowing oneself, which is an incredibly difficult and scary thing to do when a) it is really hard to “know” anything, let alone ourselves, and b) the world is hostile toward people who form communities that grant people the space to imagine everything they could be, regardless (and sometimes in defiance) of outside societal pressures.
It takes a tremendous amount of imagination to envision not only the possibilities for identities within oneself, but also to invent language to then communicate those identities to other people and even ourselves. The language we learn is at the core of identity formation, but then it’s on us to imagine beyond the language to which we have recourse and live poetically in all facets of our being.
When I was the Vice President of a fraternity in college, somebody reached out to me asking if they could join even though they were nonbinary. They said they’d feel more comfortable in a fraternity than a sorority, and I said I would talk to our President and see what I could do. Unfortunately, that decision was above anyone in our chapter’s pay grade, and though I wanted to fight it, they ultimately weren’t allowed to join.
At that time, I had never really heard the word nonbinary, let alone met somebody who identified that way. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it started me on a journey toward realizing I’m nonbinary too. I’d long felt alienated by other men and the general concept of masculinity (part of why I joined a fraternity was in hopes I could get over that), but I’m also not a woman. I didn’t know there was a word for that ambiguous space until I met somebody who introduced me to a word that encapsulated the feeling.
Without language, we don’t understand ourselves. Understanding insofar as it relates to identity is a faculty rooted in the language we have access to in order to communicate what we are. We always talk about identifiers in terms of what they communicate to other people, but they say just as much to ourselves about ourselves. When I say I am nonbinary, it is just as much for my sake as anybody else’s.
It took years of coming to terms with other facets of my queerness and meeting queer people who told me about their experiences of gender to finally gather the language necessary to embrace my own experience as a nonbinary person, and it has been terrifying. One reason it has been terrifying is because we live in an incredibly gendered world that my identity is now at odds with, and that makes me a threat to many people who may not understand or want to understand the ways I am queer.
But I think another less obvious reason it has been terrifying is because of the gender-nonconforming world now being my oyster. While freedom is often framed as a greatest good, I’m skeptical people actually want to face true freedom’s existential implications, especially when it comes to their identities. I imagine most people (myself included) like being told what they are, whether it’s by their church, university, job, political party, etc. Now that I’ve lost recourse to (or, more accurately, rejected) those systems as the basis of my identity, it’s solely on my imagination to come up with who I am and how I talk about myself.
The imagination is an incredibly subjective and equivocal thing. There is no metric for what is right when it comes to the imagination apart from that which can be imagined and resonates with the person doing the imagining. This grants a lot of freedom as there are no moral boundaries to consider (meaning there is no “right” identity in the case of gender; there are other identities one can adopt that are morally wrong, such as those that necessitate impeding on the ability of others to identify freely).
This year, I saw a new movie called I Saw the TV Glow. In it, a teenager named Owen grapples with the death of their imagination as they grow up and surrender to suburban life. There is nothing objectively wrong with suburban life, but in the context of the movie, it’s clear Owen choosing that path is a decision made in bad faith. That’s as much as I’ll say about this movie as it’s best people go in as blindly as possible–it is an incredible piece of queer cinema that genuinely surprised me and rented space in my head for months.
I bring up TV Glow because, as I’ve learned to embrace my nonbinary identity, I’ve had to grapple with the fact my imagination is not what it used to be now that I’m “grown up.” Like Owen, I too feel like I’m dying; we are all always dying. And while that thought doesn’t scare me, the fact my imagination dies as my body does is proving to be an obstacle for imagining what my identity looks like without the use of identifiers I held onto for years. That I’m losing my imagination is another terror I’ve had to confront.
But despite all this terror, I still want to choose authenticity. Despite all this terror, I want to be me to the fullest extent I can imagine, transcend the identifiers society has placed on me, and create space not only for me to speak, thrive, and live but for others to do the same, authentically and freely.
