MY IDENTITY AND EXISTENCE IN THIS WORLD OPENS MINDS

In a complicated waltz between liberation and death, we dance with the idea of liberation, while steadily forced into a timeless tango with the reality of death.

Where is the liberation in that? It exists beyond my present, it lies in the past of my queer ancestors and the future of revolution. It lies in the large, like the fight against the systems of Oppression, but also in the small, like the use of proper pronouns.

When people see me — this 6-foot Black and proud queer glamazon icon — they’d be surprised to know I haven’t always been this confident. I used to be just as scared and confused as any run-of-the-mill kid.

I know that my identity and existence in this world as a possibility for some is seen as a threat to the system, it is seen as dangerous as it is a key to opening the minds, eyes and hearts of so many that there is more in this life. That we can and should be the arbiters of our own destiny. I am the manifestation of the works of my ancestors whose very existence was in opposition to the very society we have come to be subjected to. It is in that rebellious nature that I find my power, it is in that seed that the mighty oak tree of liberation grows in many of us. Consistently watered with the nurturing perseverance of freedom.

When people see me — this 6-foot Black and proud queer glamazon icon — they’d be surprised to know I haven’t always been this confident. I used to be just as scared and confused as any run-of-the-mill kid. I always felt this affinity for feminine things from girls’ clothes (granted, fabric has no gender) to long luxurious hair and bright colors and pretty smells (all things that at that age society deemed wrong for a boy). All these wants and desires manifested into many a close friendship with girls who met all those things, almost as my way of getting to be in proximity to the things

society punished me for wanting (rebellious even back then as we see).

It wasn’t until elementary school that I began to question what these feelings were, and when the question of “Is there something wrong with me for this?” came up. As I went through the casual growing pains of getting older, this question always loomed over me and eventually manifested in a near hatred of all things masculine about my body in this desperate need to feel more at home in my own body. As if the rejection was my only way of saying that what I saw in the mirror did not match my internal self.

As I looked in the mirror, more and more I couldn’t recognize the stranger looking back at me because they were no more than the shell of who was fighting to be released on the inside. I couldn’t bear to feel like a stranger in my own body, so with the help of my chosen family — my best friends at the time — I began to venture out to find what would make me feel closer to the true me. Through trial and error, I began to find myself and find what worked for me — for instance, wearing heelys for the simulated click clack of a wedge high heel, and wearing long cardigans tied around my waist as if to act like a long flowing gown. It was from these baby steps that I finally made my big step to purchasing my first pair of heels in high school, which never truly premiered until I got to college and out of my mother’s home.

It was there that I began to walk — scratch that — strut, in my truth, a 6-inch patent leather truth to be exact. While I was still struggling to find myself, I had finally began to build the foundation of what would culminate in the kick-butt fierce nonbinary activist icon I am today.

I got there because I finally had access to people like me, I finally saw people who looked like who I envisioned in my desires so many years ago as a child. They were the possibility models who gave me permission to be all parts of myself, and to break the oppressive social contracts that society forces on us. I can be the arbiter of my own story. And so it’s my mission to do that for others — to operate as a model of possibility in the same way that was done for me.