Hi, I'm Aiden Bassett. I am the summer 2020 daily Californian opinion editor. And my name is Kat Schock, and I'm the summer 2020 deputy opinion editor. And we will be your hosts for who we are, which will be an identity focused pseudo news podcast, where sometimes Kat and I opine on the news, and sometimes we just opine irrespective of the facts and the events.
Our thinking for this podcast is that it will center around queer issues. Kat and I both, I believe, currently identified as bisexual, and we'll be taking it one day at a time. So we will have episodes around queer history, around queer allyship, around the legal progress of queer folks, and about our own personal lives, and how we've come to terms with our identities, and how we see our place in the world and the queer community. So that's our thinking for this podcast.
And for this first one, Kat and I are going to talk about how we came out, came out to ourselves, came out to other people in our lives, and came to terms with being by, or being queer generally. So Kat, do you want to kick it off with how old you think you were when you first really came out to yourself, came to accept that you probably weren't straight? Oh gosh, this is weird, but I went to this Chinese elementary school for five years, and there I didn't really know any queer people. I had no exposure to queer relationships and a concept of being not straight.
And I generally just didn't really know queer people until I hit middle school, and that's where the concept was kind of introduced to me. But I didn't really think much of it. I've never really been a person who has crushes really often, but crushes really hard, yeah, I know. But yeah, I think it was sort of just a gradual kind of understanding for me.
I mean, I feel lucky to have grown up in the era of YouTube and social media, because that's where I started learning more about the community, like watching the YouTubers Hannah Hart and the Tyler Oakley, which was, I think, yeah, it really does, just to have that kind of role model. And I think if there was one moment where I realized that I wasn't straight, was summer before my freshman year of high school, I was at Great America with a friend. And we were just walking around talking about life. My friend was in a relationship, and so she's a lesbian.
And she was just talking to me about what her relationship was like. And then as conversation carried on, we're walking to the part. It was a nice summer day, plenty of gorgeous, attractive, wonderful humans out and about. And I just kind of realized that I was kind of looking at men and women, or male and female presenting people in the same kind of way.
And I was just like, huh, interesting information. I'll fly out of that way for later consideration, just because of my family. That's just not something that we ever really talked about or discussed. And so I just kind of thought about it for a couple of years.
And my junior year of high school was the first time I became really, really close friends with somebody who was queer, and talking to her about her experiences and how she felt, being as she identifies as bisexual. And so I was just like, well, damn, that sounds like me. I guess I'm bi. And that was kind of it.
It wasn't really anything dramatic or like life changing, but I guess it was life changing. I take that back. It was super life changing. But yeah, that's kind of it.
And I started talking to my friends about it. I was like, hey, I was just like a little, I'm your token, queer friend, I guess now. Yeah. And then, yeah.
And how old do you think you were when you started like telling your friends? 17. 17. Yeah, I think that's kind of late in the scope of queerness.
I think like today is kind of late. Yeah. I think it's, yeah, I think it's so cool. I don't know.
Looking on Twitter and on Instagram and on just like social media in general, seeing how young kids are when they figure out their identities and like embody their identities. That's, yeah, I don't know. That's something that I never really had the courage to figure out until I was older. Yeah.
And then it took me another year and a half before I could tell my family and my parents about all that stuff. So it's a journey. It's a process. It's interesting that you say it took, like I think most people tell their friends before they tell their families.
I mean, from everything I know, from friends of mine who've discussed their coming out with me, it is very typical for people to feel more comfortable discussing it with non-family members first, even if they think their families will be understanding. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I definitely did the same.
I came out to kind of friends one at a time before I came out to my family. You know, it's interesting too that you talk about YouTubers because I, for better or for worse, was not very online as a kid. Like I think it wasn't, I don't remember when I got a phone. I think it was high school maybe, the end of middle school, really.
Yeah, the end of middle school probably. But I didn't spend that much time online. Like I didn't have favorite YouTube personalities. So that wasn't so much my exposure to it.
And I think maybe it had been, I might have even felt comfortable coming out earlier. But that's not to say that I didn't have frames of reference for queerness. I currently live in Eugene, which is where I was born, I haven't lived here in 20 years but or 15. But a ton of my parents, social network at least are lesbian.
A ton of people are either single parents or have been partnered. My girlfriend at the moment actually, her mother is lesbian. And so all my life, like from the time I was a kid, I've had role models in my life who were queer, who were raising queer families. And I definitely think I should have better understood that that was an option.
But that's what that meant, was that if they could be queer, I could be queer too. But it's interesting to me that that, I think there were a lot of factors that kept me from internalizing that that was an option. And I think maybe the biggest one was, I've always been very flamboyant. Like it's, you know, no one comes up to me and is shocked to find out I'm queer.
Like people, most people even tell me like they assumed I was gay and not bi. I seem that flamboyant to them. And that's true, I definitely am quite flambing quite often. But because I am that way, boys my age in middle school would just be merciless.
And, you know, like, I think the number of times I was called faggot or heard someone say the word faggot was very rare. I mean, maybe I could count on one hand, like, you know, growing up in Massachusetts, especially, you know, the Boston suburbs, it wasn't like an intensely religious or intensely homophobic atmosphere where that wouldn't have been welcome, but it was still, you know, like I was in middle school in what 2012, 2013, well before the Supreme Court made gay marriage legal. And so I think it was just still very normal to like bully flamboyant between boys for seeming gay. And so I think I internalized that bullying from a pretty young age as if you think that's something wrong with me, then I either want it desperately not to be true or I will have to hide it if it is true.
So I don't think I really started coming out to myself and like accepting the fact that I like thought boys were cute, was an acceptable thing or meant something about my identity until I was in high school. And I had a few friends, you know, I was a theater kid in high school, still am in many ways. And so I had lots of female friends. I've only ever really had female friends.
And I think in some ways that helped because I think in some ways queerness is maybe policed differently for men and for women. And I think the fact that I had so many female friends meant that they were just more willing to like nudge me gently and be like, so if you think boys are cute, doesn't that mean something like, you think you're straight? Do you really think you're straight? And I remember having one conversation in particular where a friend of mine was like, I really don't want to like push you to come out to yourself, but also like, I think you're bi.
And I was like, no, I think I might be. And it was in some ways it was hilarious at the moment to have someone else be like, no, I think you need to come out to yourself. And I was like, what? Oh my goodness.
And it was shocking. And I can remember so many times when I was like 14, 15, just like standing in the shower being like, how will my life be different if I come out? Like I tell people, I'm not straight. They're going to look at me differently.
They're going to think about me differently. They're going to assume that's all I am. When I was a teenager, that was definitely like a big source of fear. It was that everyone was going to think they knew me once they knew my sexuality.
Yeah. And in the great cliche of cliche is it was at a production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Oh, that's just poetic. I love it.
I decided to come out. And I just decided I needed to tell people. And so I posted on Facebook about it, actually. So maybe this is a tie into how the modern era has made it possible to come out to hundreds of people all at the same time through a post.
And that saved me a lot of work. I didn't have to go around every person I knew at school individually or call on my grandparents and all my family members and be like, hey, by the way, I'm bisexual, just so you've been updated. And I just made that knowledge. And then I really had almost no conversations for years afterwards where I had to come out to anyone or anyone other than acquaintances.
So yeah, definitely. You know, again, I was like, I think 15, 16 at the time. It was just a matter of like four or five months before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. It was that same year.
But yeah, it was a long time ago now. I don't think about that much anymore. But yeah, it's I think it is fascinating how role models make a big difference. But they're rarely the tipping point.
Like you owning up to it yourself. Like in your experience, it was like you had to be out in the world, noticing that you were just bisexual for it to matter to you. And for me, I was like, I thought the guy who was the star of Rocky Horror was just incredibly attractive. And so I was like, I should probably go up to this super queer and I was like, you know, such a while to come to terms with that stuff.
Like even with ourselves. Nevermind. You know, broadcasting to other people. Right.
Yeah, I did speech in abatement high school. And one of the speeches I wrote involved telling the story of my coming out. And one of the one of the central stories in that speech that I was giving was that Matthew Shepard, who is the central, you know, the catalytic character of the Laramie Project, if you will, if you're familiar with that was beaten to death and died on my birthday, October 12, 1998. And in that speech, I use that as a reference point for in my lifetime.
We went from, you know, in Wyoming, you could be beaten to death for being gay to when I came out a few months later, marrying someone of your same sex was legal everywhere in the country. And so I think, I think on top of the, the internet has given us role models and coming out to yourself as a long process. I also think the social pressures in our lifetimes, even, you know, as short as they are, just a couple decades has been the single greatest change in what it means to be able to come out, you know, like friends of my parents, um, in Eugene, you know, they've been, they've been raising kids and been in some degree of open, um, queer relationships for upwards of 30 years at this point. But it's, it's radically different in my head to hear stories about how they came out to themselves and their families, um, in the 80s as compared to you and me coming out, I don't know, 2014, 2015, 2016, something like that.
Um, and yeah, those are, those are radically different experiences. So yeah, I'm grateful for that, you know, shift in social stuff. But I don't know, I feel like I haven't even like heard stories about, um, what it was like to come out, you know, just like 30 or 50 years ago, um, besides like, you know, watching documentaries or, um, I know I think I saw milk, that's about it. Um, I'm excited to talk about, you know, how like queer history and queer representation in media down the road.
But yeah, I think part of, part of that social context is, you know, I think, pride, like, pride as a concept, like being proud of like who you are and having this entire community kind of step up and say that like, you know, we're making ourselves public. Like here we are. We exist in this space. You can, how the gays are everywhere.
You can't avoid us. Sorry. You know, and I also think that you kind of come out to yourself in stages. And in some ways, I think if we want to expand what the coming out process means from accepting an identity to maybe owning an identity and the, and the process you go through of deciding how important queerness is in your life.
Like for some people, it comes to define who they are, it comes to define their careers, their public personas, like I'm thinking of like, Laverne Cox, you know, like Laverne Cox on any given day, she can decide that maybe she doesn't feel like advertising her queerness everywhere, but her whole career, her whole activism, everything has its roots in being openly and, you know, like confidently trans. And that's, that's like one end of the spectrum of like, some people get to the point where they're so out that it comes to define them. And I think there are also people on the other end of the spectrum for whom, and I feel this way sometimes I wrote, I wrote a column for the Daily Cow about this about how sometimes your sexual orientation starts to feel just like another detail about you, like not even a fun fact, and simply just a fact, like your hair color or your ethnicity, it's just an immutable thing that doesn't matter very much to you. So I think it's, I think it's interesting how different queerness is in different people's lives.
It does not mean the same thing to everyone. And I think it even hasn't meant the same thing to me over the course of my life. I don't know if you've had any pieces of art or any pieces of literature or something that has catalyzed you thinking differently about queerness, but I remember I think it was just a, just a year ago last summer that I read and the band played on about the AIDS epidemic. And I think I had a whole new appreciation for just how profoundly marginalized queer people were, like, you know, you hear about black trans women dying all the time in the US still.
But I think in some ways the reason we find out that much about this now, you know, nobody would have heard a darn thing about it 30 years ago, it wouldn't have been considered news. But it took something on the scale of the AIDS epidemic to get people to pay attention to queer death and things like that. So I think it's, it is interesting that in different generations and from different sources of art or literature or media, how we evaluate how important that identity is to us. I know what you mean when you say that.
I don't know when I was kind of like questioning myself as to like, you know, if I was queer or bi or whatever, there's something in between. A lot of what I did was like using my dad's Netflix account and like trying and just like searching the LGBTQ plus section because, and you know, going on YouTube and watching coming out videos because that's, I don't know, hearing about their experiences kind of helped me learn how to integrate queerness into my own identity. And so I think that's what you were saying about how like you'll feel sometimes that Korean is just another fact about you. I don't know.
I still don't know how I feel about my queerness in myself. I never posted on social media. I was queer. I made like a pride post, but it's very interesting being said that how do you think you like, what was your journey on like integrating queerness into your identity?
I think, I think this experience, this experience I'm about to describe is pretty common for at least, at least a lot of like the queer teenage boys I've encountered, where I very much felt like I needed to perform this fact about myself. I needed to present my queerness, especially to other queer people. Like there was no option to kind of hide it or minimize it in our early interactions. It needed to be needed to come out for lack of a better friend.
And I think, I think in some ways it, you know, as a teenager, when you're finding all the ways you can to get other people to like you, like the only people I was interested in as friends were women. Like I can count on one hand the number of close male friends I've had in my whole life shy. And I think something about being queer when you're a teenage guy is that girls are just radically less threatened by you. You become a friend option so much more quickly if they know that you're like maybe not going to hate on them as much.
And so I especially felt around my female friends or my people I wanted to be friends with that if I like announced that I was bisexual or made it really clear or I was just like the laning gay all the time in front of them, that it would be entertaining. I think I have a natural need to perform anyways. Peter Kidd, there you go. Yeah, no kidding in more ways than one.
And so it definitely my coming to incorporate it as a more important thing in my life initially was once I was out, I really leveraged it in social situations with peers because I was like, this is an interesting thing about myself that separates me from all the other generic cis white guys I know who are your age. And it was definitely a thing I used to get attention and I'm not even particularly embarrassed about that because the only thing most teenagers ever desperately want is attention. So it was a probably developmentally pre-normal behavior. But I definitely feel as I got older, especially since coming to college, my freshman year I was in the queer theme program, which was kind of a debacle.
Like it wasn't a well run program, it wasn't very enriching. But I was on a floor with a bunch of other queer people for like the most time I had ever spent around other queer people. In some ways it still remains the most time I've ever spent around other queer people. Although if you're involved in theater, you're not going to avoid the careers for that long.
And I was in college too. So in some ways it's college had had another catalytic effect on how I reevaluated what queerness meant to me. At no point in college did I ever not live with a queer roommate. And I think the effect of having it feel so normal and banal to always have queer roommates and be in the Bay Area and I went to one year I went to Oakland Pride and San Francisco Pride.
And I know it's a humdinger of weekend. Perhaps surprisingly, rather than dialing up the degree that my queerness felt like it mattered in my life, having it be so pervasive, so ubiquitous in college made me feel like it actually was less of a big deal. Because it was commonplace. It suddenly wasn't my way to get attention because every other person I knew was queer or whatever.
So it was suddenly a lot less remarkable. And I always think that was a really healthy thing for me because it helped me come to terms with the fact that I didn't need to be performing it because A, half the people I knew wouldn't give a damn because they were queer too. And so it wasn't exactly something new and titillating for them. And I also feel very much that it's healthy at some point to believe your core immutable traits aren't big deals.
Or at least aren't big deals unless you choose. You deliberately consciously choose to activate them and acknowledge their relevance. And certainly with things like race where no part of your life is treated the same based on your race. There's kind of no way to escape those traits.
But especially the ones where it's more optional. And I think in some way sexual orientation is one that you can decide how salient it is in your life. I think it's nice to have an opportunity to come to terms with how much that actually matters to you and make your relationship with an intentional rather than an inadvertent or arbitrary or a source of pressure or the outgrowth of pressure. So I think it was good to have my queerness feel banal to me at some point.
So that anytime since then that I came back to it and decided it mattered, decided it was something I wanted to have a conversation about or whatever, it could be deliberate. It could be thoughtful. Wow. That's, wow.
That's a really foreign concept to me. Not to give myself too much credit. I'm sure there are still ways in which I use being by as a source of attention or whatever, like there are still ways in which I interact with fact about myself in a way that is less mature and intellectually rigorous than I'd like to. But I definitely think I am closer to a place where it is a mutable fact that I can decide how important it is and not one that kind of has me by the collar instead of the other way around.
Wow. That's empowering. That was empowering for me. I'm like sitting here.
I just like, because I think we've had really different journeys. I don't know, man. I only came out two years ago. So it's like I was really...
That's right. That's right. And my friends in high school were straight until my senior year. And I think I can count the number of queer friends I have on the one hand.
And I know. It's very weird because when I first came out, I... You're from the Bay Area. That's surprising to me.
I know. It's very weird. I was like a weirdly sheltered, withdrawn child and teen. So I didn't really know what kind of queer I wanted to be if that makes sense.
That's fair. When I first came out, I was a date on a man and then I dated men and didn't really interact with my queerness until my senior year of high school when I made my first really true friend. And then she basically took my hand and exposed me to this whole new world of being proud about who you are and of course I immediately cut my hair. You had your Princess Jasmine moment where I took you on a carpet.
And then my moment immediately gave myself a bop. And then I started dressing different and then college came around and I was like, I'm going to make it so subtly obvious that I'm queer so that the queers can come to me because I'm... You can pick up the pheromones and be like cats on one of us. I went to one QS union at the beginning of my first semester at Allen.
I was there and I was like, I don't really feel like I connect with any of these people. So I never went back. And then I just put some rainbow stickers on my laptop and like hope for the best. I do think you have at least one or two naked women on your laptop which...
Yeah, that was a cool, just choice. It's a queer suggested thing for you to choose. If there are tits on my laptop, they got to know. They got to know.
There's no way to... Yeah. That's really funny. And I do take your point about we've had very different journeys and it's always...
I feel lucky that mine has been as long as it has and in that I did know as early as I knew but definitely not still the kids who know when they're like eight or not. I mean, should I probably have guessed that the fact that I thought Ethan Fritzburg was really cute was a sign that maybe... Yeah, he was one of my classites in elementary school. Yeah, like should I have taken that as a sign that probably I was not heterosexual?
Maybe. Like, you know, they're like, they're out of that. Yeah, that probably should have pulled me something. But it is interesting too though.
I think sometimes to your point about the QSU meeting, I think sometimes other people's confidence in their own queerness can be really intimidating. Like, they're so sure of themselves. They're so comfortable advertising it. They have their eyelashes on fleek and they can walk around in heels or they rock a pixie cut like nobody's business or, you know, like their eyebrow slit is like, oh my gosh, it's all in point.
You know, it sometimes very much feels like, wow, other people have their act together. They're owning all the signals of queerness. What am I going to do? How do I even compete with that?
And if I can't compete with that, am I just a fraud? You know, like, there was a long time where I got my ears pierced on my birthday. What? Not quite a full year ago at this point.
But it was definitely like... It felt like a watershed moment. It felt like... You know, I'm one of those bye guys who has ears pierced and that means I'm in the club.
And it was... Oh my gosh. You know, it's... It's always like so juvenile.
I'm so absurd that like little things like the little signifiers of queerness matter so much to us. But I also think that's one of the beautiful things at times about being in an in-group is that you get to revel in the little signifiers of, this is my identity. This is who I belong with. These are the people whose aesthetic choices when they present themselves seem really cool to me.
I want to do that too. So in some ways it is an affirmation of your own sense of belonging. Sometimes you feel comfortable enough to pick which ones really fit you and aren't just arbitrary expressions. Yeah, I love that idea.
I mean, while queer stereotypes aren't necessarily great for their community when we're trying to communicate to the straits. For sure. Yeah. But I think they're helpful for when you're trying to figure out yourself.
You can kind of like dip a toe into each of these different stereotypes and figure out your own combination of those traits. If that makes sense. And then you can kind of like quote a quote person that you want to be. I'm so touched right now.
Well, I do think we should clarify to our audience next week that we are definitely wanting to talk about intra-queer conflict. And we also want to talk about queer history. And I think definitely stereotypes are going to feature in that discussion as they might be a useful thing for you when you're coming out. They definitely were for me.
Like the fact that I thought the boys in high heels were more attractive than the boys in high heels. Like that's, you know, it's a, again, those stereotypes are double edged short, but they also are inevitably part of what queerness is. You know, as cliched and stereotyped as parts of it are, you know, they are also touch stones and you have to figure out what parts of them are valuable and productive and innocuous and what parts of them carry risks, especially when, as you put it, they're brought outside of the community and they are no longer queer touchstones and they are suddenly what we are reduced to. So I definitely think we should pursue that next week or, I guess, our next episode.
But yeah. Well, wonderful. Thank you all for joining us on this inaugural episode of Who We Are. And we look forward to seeing you in our next episode.
Thank you.