This story was originally published on The Spinoff.
From a very young age, I knew I was going off-script. I would sit and study television shows where gay characters were punchlines. If there was a rare transgender character, they were made the “special episode” of the week, posing a challenge to the cis main character to choose whether to accept their new-found friend or reject them from their lives. Funnily enough, the choice often didn’t matter, as the character would never appear again anyway.
As a queer kid, desperate to avoid being “found out” via some minor infraction of masculinity, I carefully crafted my character and avoided deviating from the script society had given me. Hell, I didn’t get my ears pierced until my late 20s because I was so deeply afraid of accidentally choosing “the gay ear” (thank you, Two and a Half Men). I dove headlong into less-than-desirable behaviours, embraced toxic masculinity, deflected all of my self-criticism onto others and, more often than not, hid myself in the silent corners of the room.
Read on @The Spinoff
