A Queer Contagion
Embracing the spread and taking up space
Article by Margalit Goldberg, art by Emmaline Hawley
The blustery October wind made her cheeks pink and tousled her long brunette hair. We’d been good friends since the beginning of freshman year and were by each other's sides almost all the time. I’d been wrestling with the idea of telling her who I thought I might be. As we walked back inside, I told her I thought that maybe I liked girls. I’d been secretly looking at the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition since 5th grade. I would tell myself that women only turned me on because society had objectified women so much that I’d been trained to think that way. Cognitive dissonance is one powerful force.
She was out to me and a couple of our other friends. Or at least as out as a bisexual girl can be as a sophomore in a high school where girls often kissed other girls when they were shitfaced at parties. Most people thought it wasn’t gay when straight boys made it into a show for themselves.
Obviously, she was excited when I told her, and not surprised. It didn’t take a genius to notice that I felt grossly uncomfortable with my identity and sought male attention only for validation, not because I genuinely liked the guy. I attempted an air of nonchalance. I was flirting with the idea of it. I’m too young to actually know my sexuality. I haven’t even had sex yet!
New Year’s Eve rolled around, and I was going to her house for a sleepover with three of our other friends. We had the basement and what looked to our dewy eyes like a smorgasbord of stolen alcohol. It wasn’t much, but to us, it was like an open bar at a wedding: a one-way ticket to getting drunk.
It started out like any New Year’s Eve slumber party, shrieking about someone she had made out with at the last party she was at, timid sips of hard alcohol burning our throats, half-assed watching of the NYE TV program hosted by some B-list celebrity. As it got closer to midnight, and I got more intoxicated, I found the audacity to ask her to be my New Year’s kiss. When the ball dropped, we kissed. And then we kissed. And then we kissed. I took her to the bathroom and pushed her up against the wall, our hands wandered. We didn’t care if the other girls knew. It felt right. We kissed so much it took more time than I’d like to admit for the cuts her braces gave me on my tongue to heal. In the following days, every time citrus stung my mouth, I was reminded not of her, but of the act of kissing a girl.
It was the first lunch after the return from Winter Break. We gathered in a little circle on the field chatting about where we went over break, and have you heard about Sarah’s older sister getting chlamydia at CU, and that Garret and Maeve broke up over break and Maeve is already talking to Sam, and that Christian got caught by his parents so now Max doesn’t know where he’s going to get weed to feed his crippling undiagnosed dependency. Eventually we ran out of things to talk about, and someone flippantly mentioned our New Year’s kiss.
We laughed it off. It was the only response that felt available to me. If we played it off as just two drunk girls kissing, then we could avoid confirming that either of us were queer. But turns out when you’re actually queer, something feels gross about lessening the meaning and weight of kissing a woman. Cheapening female intimacy by writing it off as erotic for the appeal of men. You no longer need to take an “Am I Gay?” quiz every few weeks when you realize this.
In the following days, we began to hear that the story had left our group and other people in the grade were starting to talk. We were both aware of the power that the rumor mill had at our school. I dealt with having my personal information spread the same way that I dealt with my queerness: pretending that it wasn’t a big deal. I was entranced by the biggest fallacy of stoicism, that if you think something doesn’t matter then it won’t. Especially when someone you care about is affected.
She texted me that she was uncomfortable with the situation. My responses included:
“Is it spreading like a bad thing?”
“I’m sorry it got out but I don’t think it’s that big of a deal that it did because I don’t think anyone cares.”
“I don’t think anyone cares and if they do fuck them.”
I denied myself and her the right to have privacy and the right for us to care. The “anyone” I was referring to in my texts did not include us. I was so concerned with how everyone would think of me after finding out that I didn’t let myself have an opinion and I denied any discomfort that she had. While the story moved through the school like wildfire, I squared away most of what I’d been thinking about and put it in a file in the back corner of my brain.
A year and some months later Covid was in its full first wave. Lockdown, online school, every moment on Facetime or texting or TikTok. Late night zoom calls with a random group of people because everyone was so desperate for some form of human contact. We were playing one of those online server games where a player is assigned a prompt that everyone answers and then votes on which submission is funniest. For example: What should you not bring up at Margalit’s wedding? A submission from the boy a year older than me: Abbie Mulligan. It was her name.
For the first time, I registered that my kissing her had become a fact that people still thought about more than a year later. I was directly confronted with the information that primed the schema in other people’s brains that I was gay. Not that people thought I was gay, but that people knew that I was gay with evidence to cite. And after people decide they know that you're gay, then you don’t have any power over your identity. You are how they see you as queer, not how you see yourself as queer.
I texted her the next day. “The weirdest thing happened…” As we reminisced about our sophomore year and how awful most of high school was, the realization that we had been outed slowly crept into the conversation. It’s not that I didn’t have the language sophomore year to understand that I was outed. I had watched and read plenty of queer stories that dealt with this issue. I felt like I didn’t deserve to have control over my story. I wasn’t important enough to label my experience as being outed.
Covid raged on and I had an abundance of time to sit with myself. The bruises that classmates’ stares left on me began to fade. The shame I constantly felt in high school washed away and I was comfortable in the few spaces I occupied. I cut off most of my friends and kept close the ones who mattered most to me. I knew that when I left high school things would change and I was waiting for the day that I could form a new way of existing in the world — with the ability to shamelessly take up space.
I wish I had been able to see the way people treated me in high school without a skewed lens of inadequate self-worth. I wish that the day after we were outed, we came to school in the most powerful outfits we could think of, told everyone to fucking mind their own business, and then walked through the hallways to the front door flipping everyone off. We’d get into my car, roll the windows down and drive away as “Because the Night” by Patti Smith played. Fade to black.