Let's be Real

In the movie, one man states, “When you’re gay, you monitor everything you do. You monitor how you look, how you dress, how you talk, how you act, did they see me, what do they think of me.” I found myself shaking my head in agreement while the words were coming out of his mouth. Now, I know that I am not an African American, gay man, and I cannot understand the extreme difficulties that group of individuals face on a daily basis, but that statement still struck a cord in me because it completely describes how I feel as I navigate through life, while simultaneously being gay. In a society that presumes you are straight until you “come out”, I personally feel more pressure to hide that part of myself from the rest of the world. Therefore, when I am around people who do not know that I am gay or when I am in public in general, I find myself constantly monitoring everything I do and wondering if they know, and if they know, what do they think of me. As a result, I hold parts of myself back in fear that the truth will somehow come out and a negative consequence will occur. I am very fortunate, as I have never experienced an extremely violent situation associated with coming out; however, I have experienced situations in which I have been verbally degraded by people who were once close to me and even strangers. I have also experienced many times in which people did not know I was gay, and they proceeded to speak hatefully about the gay community right in front of me. It is for these very reasons, that I feel the need to monitor myself, even in a society that has become increasingly more accepting. I am not ashamed of who I am in anyway, and I am not afraid of people knowing that I am gay. In fact, once people know, and I know that they do not care, that anxiety completely disappears. Still, I monitor myself to ensure my own safety because the truth is that I never know how someone is going to react, and in order to live comfortably in society by not facing prejudice on a daily basis, you have to blend in with what is considered to be acceptable.

This is exactly the idea behind “realness”. It is essentially a strategy of survival. As the movie mentioned, those “Femme Realness” queens, who participate in the ball and carry on as women in their real lives, are those who are able to pass or are “able to emerge from a ball and into the subway and arrive home without being bloodied in the process.” On the other hand, you have gay men who, by emulating masculine realness, protect themselves from possible violence by hiding their potential effeminate selves. It is sad, but the realities of not being able to “pass” in society include violence, and even death, especially if you are of color.  I could not even begin to list the number of transgender and gay individuals who have been killed, just for being who they are. These murders are still happening in today’s society (five already this year), along with many other forms of discrimination. Hence, why these balls were so important. They provided the opportunity for these men and women to “be anything you want”, and they did not have to worry about the repercussions of such behaviors while at these balls. It gave them the chance to take that chip on their shoulder off for at least one night. The balls ultimately provided a safe place, and a place where young boys and girls could find “houses” or families after their own families rejected them or find people they could look up to and talk to about the issues they were going through that people who were “not like them” would not understand. The most important thing that the balls did was that they sent the message that being who you are is ok; when society was saying that it was not.  For me, that’s the most beautiful thing.