There are many moments that break your heart as a therapist. (And many more that do the opposite). One of those moments was a client describing his experience of homophobia growing up. He ended with the words “but that was a long time ago”. This man was in his early 20s.
It broke my heart because I have heard queer people say some version of this for as long as I have been a therapist. People in their 60s talking about the 70s and 80s. People in their 40s talking about the 80s and 90s. And people in their twenties, talking about the 2010s. We’re told that it gets better. I’m not so sure it does.
Of course, in lots of ways, it has got better. We are no longer living through the AIDS crisis, where the deaths of hundreds and thousands of (mainly) young men were met with political indifference. Nor are we living through Section 28, where teachers were forbidden from saying anything positive about queer people. We can get married now. Legislatively, things have moved on, no doubt. At least, in some ways.
What happens when you grow up queer
But I don’t know if the experience of growing up queer is radically different. Adolescence is a unique moment in our lives. We are both learning who we are and, as part of that, we are learning about our place in the tribe. Teenagers form cliques and try on new identities as part of the process of fitting in, and to find out where we belong. We are social creatures. We evolved in tribes and packs. To be outside of the group is to be dangerous, even fatal.
Queer people have a unique challenge. Our place within the group is challenged from the jump. We’re challenged in the way we hold ourselves, how we move. We’re challenged in how we respond to the world around us. It’s the enthusiasm with which we do, or do not, answer questions about who we fancy, or what we did over the weekend. And perhaps worst of all, our sense of belonging is challenged by ourselves.
The threats were everywhere. Your dad’s comments towards the footballer on TV. Your friends’ slightly unkind digs at the new kid at school. Your parents, aunts, uncles, friends might not have known they were speaking about you. But you did.
And so perhaps you learned to hide. You learned to protect yourself from those judgements, and perhaps, from violence too. You learned a lesson that you should never have had to learn, and at an age that was far too young to learn it. You learned that there was something wrong with you. We both did.
The wrongness wasn’t in what we did, or how we treated people. It was in who we were. Learning that, at a young age, is corrosive. It stays with you and it festers. Every taunt you hear, every hesitation. It might not be anything to do with you, but it takes you right back there, to then.
Queer-affirming therapy
When I work with queer people, we often start there. At those moments that shouldn’t bother you, as an adult living in the big city, but they do. The moments where you hide part of yourself. These moments can be small, almost trivial. Perhaps you elide the details of what you did on the weekend, or perhaps a loved one asks you a question and you don’t give a full answer. Or, perhaps it’s larger. Perhaps your experience of our community is of no community at all. Perhaps you feel lonely. Perhaps drink or drugs have taken over more of your life than you would want. Perhaps sex is no longer something that happens when you’re sober.
We start there. And perhaps that will be where we stay. There can be a lot to unpack in how you navigate your day-to-day. Or perhaps, you will want to go back in time, to where you first learned to hide part of yourself.
This isn’t about raking over what is painful, this is about understanding who you were then, and the choices you had to make. When you were younger you had to stay safe. Therapy is about understanding the choices you made then, so you can make different choices now.
If that sounds like something you’d like, let’s talk about it.