A Spy for the Gay Agenda

I awoke on a cold Sunday morning from a phone call from my boss at the CIA — the Catholic Intelligence Agency, that is. My boss (my father) was calling to notify me that I needed to report for my duties at our headquarters (my local parish). One of my colleagues was having their security clearance instated at a special initiation ceremony (read: my cousin’s baptism). My boss had sent me a dossier of important resources (an e-sermon about the sanctity of Catholic marriage) and alerted me that he would be there to pick me up from my apartment at 09:00 hours.

The night before, I had been to a rave hosted by an LGBTQ dance music collective. My best friend and I waved fans and mingled with boys with body-glitter abs, mullet sporting enbies and tall fem queens in latex boots. Electronic music with raunchy lyrics pulsed as we sweat under the strobe lights of an abandoned warehouse. After we had tired ourselves out, my friend and I sat in a Popeye’s and spoke wistfully about romance. I shyly stared into my lap while talking about the girl I was currently seeing: her eyes, her breasts, her pretentious friends, her tendency to leave me on read. We sat in the greasy orange booth, sipping on coke and speaking with frank compassion. I wandered back to my dorm in the dark and slept for whatever remained of the night.

Still on an adrenaline rush from the prior evening, the time had come to transform into my other self. I unhooked the keychain from the waistband of my black trousers and put them on. I rubbed the last remnants of the night’s eyeliner from my eyes, took out my nose ring, and headed out the door to my cousin’s baptism. The changes I had made to my appearance were tiny, but it felt like a fugitive from a Jason Bourne movie doing a quick change in an airport bathroom. As I slipped into my dad’s car, I truly felt as though I was being picked up by my CIA handler after being in cahoots with the Russians the night before.

The pews of the church were filled with my loving relatives; pristinely dressed, Catholic heterosexual couples flanked by their kids. My mom greeted me in her typical fashion — a remark along the lines of “You chose that shirt?” — before waving me into the pew. Evidently, my cover had slipped! Her motherly eye was tougher to fool, but the rest of my relatives were pleased with my little disguise. To them I was the eldest daughter, the shining example of well-adjusted elegance. I could never resent them, for they were always generous with their love, but I also could never shake the feeling of being an undercover agent for the frightful gay agenda.

I was living what some might call a double life. For some queer people, this is not an option. Especially for males, who are subject to the more rigid metrics of masculinity, queerness is sniffed out from childhood — the ‘closet is glass’ — and they must often flee to the bowels of urban centers to be seen as human. But for those whom the closet door is indeed made of solid wood, self expression becomes a semiotic game. Behind its doors festers a special kind of sorrow and discomfort, but that must be left on a hanger when you step outside. The closet is where the queer individual pilfers through costumes and disguises to either protect them from hostility or find community.

Clothes have been used to signify class, culture and rank since antiquity, and queerness is no different. In late-Victorian England, there was Oscar Wilde’s green carnation. In the 1920s and 30s, the monocle was a lesbian symbol. There’s hanky code and the keychain of the 1980s. Today, there are a dizzying amount of symbols to signify a vast array of categorized identities: some are muddled with alternative culture, such as face piercings or doc martens, and others are rooted in Tumblr folklore like cuffed jeans for bisexuals. While queer individuals like myself must signify normalcy among their conservative family members, they must also signify ab-normalcy to be seen in queer spaces.

While I spend my home life trying not to signify too gay, I suddenly don’t feel gay enough when the time comes to ‘be myself.’ Upon seeing metropolitan queer people, immersed in gay culture, who can be ‘themselves’ 24-hours a day, I feel embarrassed to tell them about my preppy heritage and church on Sundays. Somehow, in queer spaces, I still feel as though I’m wearing a disguise.

Code switching is a privilege. It means that what makes you abject in the eyes of society is transmutable, fluid, disguiseable. For racialized or trans people, the physical vessel in which you live is the site of your oppression; one’s skin, one’s walk, one’s own body. As a cis girl who can easily pass for straight, however, my lived experience isn’t stamped onto my skin. I can bring it out or suppress it with a quick change.

This is the double sided reality of a double life. On one hand, it allows for cultural fluency, social mobility, and adaptability. But it also corrodes one’s soul. According to an article published in the Journal of Intelligence Studies, espionage is a field that attracts psychopaths — self-centered manipulators, facile liars and those who don’t value authentic interpersonal connections. To a normal person, however, spying is a massive psychological ordeal that results in painful isolation, stress, anxiety and guilt. When people are forced to stay in the closet, it is akin to asking a person to adopt strategic psychopathy.

Although queer acceptance and advocacy has become far more commonplace, a delicate facade of public tolerance does not detract from the private prejudice that still exists in the majority of homes. Homophobia is often rephrased as kind-hearted guidance, but in reality, it is not a kindness: it forces an individual to straddle two opposite realities and act immorally — lying, hiding — where they otherwise wouldn’t. Though I’d love to someday have the two sides of myself be one, I’ve accepted it will always be easier to compartmentalize my life. I can’t afford to blow my cover in this queer cold war.

xoxo, Milena from iblamesociety