Still Queer After Finding the Opposite-Sex Love of My Life
Roller derby, mental health, and the patriarchy
“If it helps, I always think of you as part of the queer community,” said one of my favourite gay people recently. And it did help. It meant a lot to hear someone validate my identity, because I’m still struggling with it in my forties.
Growing up, my family would have accepted me being queer, except I didn’t even know it myself. We used to joke that if one in five Canadians were gay, one of the five of us had to be. And it never occurred to me that I was that one.
It wasn’t that I actively ignored the idea or didn’t realize it fully; I literally had no clue about a huge part of my own identity for a large portion of my life until suddenly I knew. This sudden shift and completely new understanding happened primarily because of three things: roller derby, undiagnosed developmental/mental health issues, and the patriarchy.
First of all, the fact that I didn’t know I was queer until my thirties was in large part because of a patriarchal misogynist culture that presented overt female sexuality as something that not only didn’t turn me on but as something I didn’t want to even be associated with. I was never attracted to skinny women with enormous breasts squeezed into too-small bikinis doing a really bad job of washing fancy cars. So I couldn’t be attracted to women, right?
Okay, that’s oversimplifying things and I don’t mean to disparage anyone who feels empowered and sexy when wearing very small bathing costumes, nor folks who are legitimately turned on by ineffective attempts at washing cars — but I spent enough time in grad school to have a great many thoughts and fancy words to describe the icky feelings I had back then about what I didn’t know was called “the male gaze” and how our society’s deeper systemic oppressive machinations impact our views on what’s considered sexy and desirable.
Back when I was coming to understand my own sexuality in the first place, all I knew was that I felt that pleasant buzzy feeling when I looked at certain boys or men but not when I looked at the “desirable” women in the media I had access to. So I agreed with the general assumption that I must be straight. Another facet of this problem was that growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, heteronormativity and misogynistic perceptions of sexuality dominated pretty much everything and I didn’t have access to any discussion about the broader queer spectrum. In my mind, if I wasn’t gay and my understanding of bisexuality (equally attracted to both genders in totality) didn’t seem to fit because I wasn’t attracted to “sexy” women, I must be straight; not to mention the fact that I didn’t really see very many examples of the kind of women I now know I’m attracted to.
I think I may have started to have more of an understanding when I first went to university and lived in residence with some gay folks, but throughout adolescence and early adulthood, I was pretty preoccupied with just getting through basic life stuff and didn’t have the capacity to stop and consider it more deeply. This brings me to the second factor of my late coming out — undiagnosed mental health and developmental issues that were a lot to deal with as a teen/young adult.
Instead of spending my teen years figuring out who I was and how I fit into the world, I was pretty caught up in just trying to get through and build a functional life despite what I now know was semi-severe depression (that I didn’t tell anyone about until I was about 20) and ADHD coupled with generalized anxiety disorder (neither of which would be diagnosed until I turned 40). Covering and compensating for symptoms I didn’t fully understand was exhausting in every way. Hiding my sadness, navigating social skill gaps, correcting impulsivity, pushing through depressive lethargy, managing countless little systems I developed to counteract executive disfunction and poor working memory, it was essentially a full-time job just trying to be a “normal” person most of the time.
In trying to “overcome” or “correct” these issues without really understanding what they were, I was not only perpetually exhausted but also instinctually felt I had to suppress a lot of my own feelings and impulses because they didn’t match what I was supposed to say or do in a given situation. Unaware of this tendency until well into adulthood, from a young age I learned to automatically override or ignore what I wanted in order to avoid making a mistake. Started as a way to counteract my impulsivity and social missteps, this survival technique unintentionally flooded over into all areas of life and eventually included my queerness, even though it wasn’t something I thought I had to suppress; the habit just took over and ended up impacting completely unrelated areas.
All in all, during the time a lot of queer folks figure themselves out, I simply didn’t have the energy or capacity to stop and think about my sexual orientation. I knew I was attracted to guys and definitely wasn’t attracted to all women so I left the matter at that and focused on getting by.
And then along came roller derby.
The year I turned thirty I moved to a new city and was looking for a new hobby. I’d played a wide range of sports throughout childhood and adolescence but never really found my fit. At the start of my thirties, however, knew I should probably find something physically active to balance out my time sitting at the computer and one day I saw a flyer for a roller derby info session hanging in my favourite downtown coffee shop.
I’m generally very averse to injury (thank you over-active imagination) and am easily scared of things where I feel physically out of control like skiing too fast or snowboarding at almost any speed. But despite the danger, and not having much experience on skates- roller or otherwise, derby somehow felt right. It felt like maybe it was finally something that could be “my thing”. And after a basic overview of the rules calmed some of my fears, I decided to try it out because something in it spoke to my heart in a way nothing else ever had, a kind of resonance within me and a hunger for all that it was. The alternative vibe, the female-centric organization, the combination of strength and sexiness and theatrics (which it still had back then in the early 2010s), the piercings and tattoos and wild hair, it all felt so much more like home to me than any ball team or fencing club ever had.
And it was my first real encounter with the queer community on a broader scale.
While bashing around school gyms and hockey arenas summer-stripped of ice, slamming into and being knocked over by other women (it is now more trans-inclusionary, which is awesome), in wild after-parties and tedious board meetings, and all the while being quite terrible at actually playing the sport of flat-track roller derby, I found a new part of myself. It was as if derby pointed out the pull cord for a warm and welcoming bare bulb, that had always been there dangling just above my head, and I discovered a whole other section to the closet in which I had never even realized I was contently hanging out. It literally felt as quick and decisive as turning on a light.
One day I was straight and then suddenly I realized I was actually attracted to women too, and kind of always had been.
That realization felt so grounded and true to me, it didn’t really feel new or strange or at all questionable; the real and honest reality about myself was just different than I always thought it was. And suddenly a lot of stuff made sense in a different way and I sat there thinking “jeez, how did I not notice all of this before?”. Once that bulb lit up, it was all laid out so simply and clearly, it was almost laughable.
Taking the logical next step, I tried dating women. And I liked it.
Well, no, I hated dating. I’m far too self-conscious and judgemental and averse to small talk to enjoy dating no matter who is sitting across the table from me. But dating women turned out to be as close to an enjoyable experience as dating men. And while dating itself was awful, having sex with women was definitely something I enjoyed, a confirmation that felt pretty significant. I don’t see enjoying sex with anyone as a fundamental requirement for a queer identity, lots of asexual folks are super queer, but for me, it was an absolute confirmation that my new understanding was in fact accurate.
I was definitely queer.
Having confirmed and embraced this new identity, the queer dating pool in my small Ontario city was frustratingly limited and I never found anyone I connected with enough to go beyond two or three dates. During this time, therefore, I felt like I connected with my queerness on a personal or internal level but never really developed a connection with the broader queer community or publicly explored that part of it. Perhaps because of this limited experience, I felt kind of funny publicly naming my own queerness with those who knew me before my coming out. Most of this awkwardness has faded with time, especially when dealing with straight friends and family, but I still feel pretty uncomfortable within the broader queer community especially because, in the end, I married a dude.
A few years into dating predominantly women, I had the extreme good fortune of finding someone who matched my weird, who made my heart both race and feel so very calm and safe, who made me laugh like no one else in the world, and who understood and cherished both my strengths and my broken bits.
So I married him, we bought a house, and had a kid.
I love our life together and find myself more and more in love with him as our time together goes by. And at the same time, I have this lingering bit of what I guess I could call sadness, for lack of a better term, that just because this wonderful incredible needle-in-a-haystack-find of a person happened to be a man, people now only see this very limited two-dimensional side of who I really am.
And while I understand the extensive privilege I experience because our relationship passes as a hetero marriage, sometimes it feels like there was this whole other life I walked away from — one of difference and queerness and belonging together in our outsider-ness that I’ll never really be a part of again and while that loss makes me a little sad sometimes, interestingly enough, writing this piece and putting thoughts and words to these feelings has actually has made me feel closer to my spouse.
I think that affirming the entirety of my sexuality also validates and confirms my attraction to my husband and my enjoyment of our relationship — of all the possible people out there that I could be with, male, female, non-binary or identifying in other ways, he’s the one for me and while I have conflicting feelings about presenting as straight in this way, our life together as a whole feels like a more perfect match than I ever thought possible. This insight into our relationship brings me to my initial motivation in writing this piece, to clarify and then share my thoughts and feelings about my queer identity for both my own sake and for anyone else who might read this.
I worry that some folks might see my need to assert my queerness or express my bi-/pan-sexuality (still working out which term fits best) as attention-seeking, trend-following, or an expression of insecurity etc. but it’s not as trivial or petty as all that. It matters. It matters to me because it is part of me, part of who I am.
And it matters because kids like me deserve to see grownups like me, deserve to feel validated and accepted no matter where they land on that beautiful rainbow, when they figure that out, or with whom they end up sharing their life (or their bed, or backseat, or whatever).
It matters because fully grown adults who are wondering if lifelong assumptions were wrong deserve to see others who’ve gone down that path before them and come out happy and whole.
It matters because folks who are one-hundred percent straight without a single question or doubt in their entire lives also deserve to understand the width and breadth of human sexuality and how individual stories and identities can change and grow and evolve over time.
Erasure matters. Representation matters. My queerness matters.
So I’m going to stake my claim on my little piece of the rainbow and agree with what my friend said, I’m a member of the queer community. And no matter who I married or what my life looks like, I deserve to share that and own that and take pride in that.
