by outsider
written October 11, 2004
Well, where to start...so much has happened over the last year since I came out. The growth and learning has been accelerated, and on some level I'm still reeling from the information overload of it all. As of this writing, I am 21 years old, living in Lahore, Pakistan, female and queer-identified. I go by the handle 'outsider' on queer mailing lists. When I first came out, my friends bought me a T-shirt on which they printed the words: "Where's My Freakin' Leather?" They didn't mean leather in the S/M sense...they meant leather in the 'tough dykes wear leather' sense. Leather became a symbol of losing my innocence, of becoming braver, smarter, stronger. Leather was how I measured my growth.
Still can't believe it sometimes. How did I get here? Here is a chronology:
The Process of Coming Out as a Queer Woman in Pakistan (i.e. Finding Your Leather)
Adolescence:
- Hit puberty. Have raging hormones. Feel attracted to friend who pretends to be gay and comes on to you.
- Feel guilty, write in journal about wanting to be normal, and listen to Roxette's 'Fading Like a Flower' in order to help you get over your friend.
- Visit some NGO that deals with sexuality issues and ask them what to do. They tell you to masturbate and forget about it; it's just a phase. You do not know what masturbation is.
- Become a hyper-religious, anti-feminist, homophobic bigot. Stay this way till you get to college. Oh, and just ignore the fact that you repeatedly get hopelessly attracted and attached to girls.
Freshman year in college:
- Lose faith in organized religion. Make fun of fundies. Be shocked at how you bought into religion in the first place.
- Become agnostic.
First half of sophomore year in college:
- Watch the video for Tatu's 'All the Things She Said'. Get very, very turned on. (Get grossed out when you read up on Tatu, discover they're only 16 although they look older, that they're not even really gay and that their manager calls them an 'underage sex project'.)
- Still, listen to 'All the Things She Said' and fantasize about what it would be like if you were a lesbian.
- Start to realize that you sometimes fantasize about your college roommate. Brush it off as nothing. Wish you were a boy so you could go out with her.
- Discover punk rock.
Second half of sophomore year in college:
- Discover Team Dresch. Fall in love with Kaia Wilson.
- Listen to 'She's Crushing my Mind' by Team Dresch, which says, "Only she's not having / A thought past thinking about why / She was born this way / She was born this way.' Say to self: "Holy crap, I'm so gay!"
- Block out all memories of heterosexual fantasies or attractions that may have occurred in the past.
- Wrack memories for evidence of attraction to girls. Find memories, and exaggerate them.
- Engage in stupid narratives like: "I used to be a total tomboy when I was a kid, I must be gay."
- Freak out.
- Tell your sister and all your friends that you're gay. Be relieved when they're quite accepting. Be frustrated when they play it down. Be desperate to find someone who understands.
- Listen to the angriest lesbian punk rock you can find. Spend nights smoking and listening to punk. Stop eating. Stop studying.
- Buy guitar. Play till your fingers bleed.
- Be angry, reactionary and get paralysed with fear. Convince self that you don't have a choice, that you're doomed to living life on the fringes of society, that you didn't ask for this 'biological defect', etc. Convince self that you will be ostracized by parents and society through no fault of your own.
- When a friend 'accidentally' outs you to a friend of hers, be terrified, and nearly kill yourself in a car accident.
- Realize you are a sexual being for the first time in your life. Realize for the first time what your genitalia looks like. Realize there is such a thing as the clitoris.
- Figure out what women do in bed. Be shocked by your (theoretical) discovery of sexually liberated cultures. (Examples: "I actually have to go down on a girl?" "Awww, dammit, now that I'm gay, do I have to be okay with BDSM?" "What's polyamory?")
- Become okay with BDSM. Or at least milder forms of it.
- Try to masturbate. Have no idea how to do it. End up looking and feeling very dumb. (It took me months to actually get it to work.)
- Watch lots and lots of lesbian pornography. Or read it, if you can't find good visual porn. Objectify women at every available opportunity to remind yourself that you are, in fact, a lesbian.
- Join South Asian mailing lists for queer women. Be temporarily relieved that you are not the only South Asian, or even the only Pakistani dyke.
- Get leather cuff. Feel very dykey.
Summer vacation:
- Bring up homosexuality with parents. Parents freak out. Freak out in response. Get more scared.
- Fight with sister. Nearly slit wrists.
Junior year in college:
- Be as scared as ever. Be unable to concentrate on studies. Be hung up on the whole "I was born this way and I don't have a choice about this!" thing. Constantly worry about the future.
- Decide you must find queer people or you will just die of depression.
- Find queer people in Pakistan. Be ecstatic at discovering some semblance of queer community. Worship the queer people you find, and do everything in your power to impress them.
- Be taken aback when queer community imposes cartoonish gender stereotypes on you.
- Feel completely betrayed by the queer community you discovered. (Ugly story...I am not going to be talking about it in this journal.)
- Cross-dress like crazy, pass for a boy, discover gender is a social construct. Become significantly more androgynous. (I had some basic ideas about gender socialization, but I never thoroughly considered the implications.)
- Get leather jacket.
- Wind up with clinical depression and an anxiety disorder. Get into therapy and get on medication.
- During depression, start opening mind to other theories about queerness. Discover Queer By Choice, which is run by Gayle Madwin. Join Queer by Choice mailing list.
- Beg professor (who you are out to) to get you a copy of Michel Foucault's 'The History of Sexuality.' Read Foucault.
- Start rambly LiveJournal while doped up on meds trying to make sense of all this choice stuff. (I'm not repeating it here, so if people who believe in biological theories of queerness are reading this, please go through Gayle's website.)
Summer vacation:
- Delete LiveJournal realizing you are on meds, hysterical and not making sense.
- Read everything on Gayle's Queer by Choice website. Read everything on the Queer by Choice mailing list. Stop believing in 'gay gene'. Stop believing that sexuality is something no-one has any control over.
- Let go of attachment to lesbian label. Realize that you do have some choice, even if you are currently in a place where you have a preference for women. Realize that if you ever have a relationship with a woman in Pakistan, you should defend it as a moral choice, and not as a consequence of biology.
- Re-define self as mainly queer/bisexual/pansexual/pomosexual, or as gender-indifferent. Choose to stop asking, in theory, whether someone is male or female. Call self lesbian only insofar as you believe that in a society as patriarchal as Pakistan's, a person who agrees with your beliefs on gender and queerness is much more likely to be female than male.
- Feel stupid for buying into biological theories of gender and sexuality.
- Find that you have to give some explanation to parents for depression and anxiety. So come out to parents as bisexual. Parents do not freak out as much as expected. Tell parents you are not sure yet whether you will actually do anything about bisexuality. Parents seem satisfied.
- Get leather wallet.
Senior year in college:
- Calm down!
- Stop whining.
- Cross-dress sometimes as gender identity seems to be shifting.
- Be stuck in limbo as to whether you will in fact explore your gender and sexuality or choose to make them non-issues and concentrate on other pursuits more relevant to a Third World society. Decide to let things work out with time. (That's where I am right now.)
- Read lots of LiveJournals, and be impressed by people's insights and theory-savviness.
- Be told by Gayle that you are 'stunningly beautiful'.
- Develop tiny crush on Gayle. :-)
- Restart your LiveJournal, hoping to make more sense. :-)
Whew! That's a mouthful. I think I deserve leather pants now. Hallo, humjinsparast, I am glaaad to be here.
A slightly modified version of the above article can be found at outsider's journal here. You can e-mail outsider at to_be_broadcast_live@yahoo.com.
You can send an email to author by emailing us on humjinsparast@yahoo.com.
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