The Year I Learned to Be Queer

What I learned about masculinity, style, and growing into my queer self.

I’m Alexander Cheves, and this is LOVE, BEASTLY—a blog about sex, feelings, and manhood. It’s written mostly for men—gay, straight, bi, MSM, or just curious—but some readers are women, and some don’t fit into categories. Everyone’s welcome here.

This is one of my more personal essays. Heads up: these can sometimes include explicit content or emotionally triggering subjects.

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I've been thinking about my time in La La Land. After three months, I was newly single, broke, and very depressed.

The breakup with my boyfriend—now, my ex-boyfriend—happened one quiet weekday in sunny Los Angeles, via phone call. Most people are sad in Los Angeles. A strange, sleepy sadness fills the entire city. After he hung up, I was one of them.

To cope with the emotional fallout, I started impulse shopping. On the one hand, this was necessary. When I arrived in the city, I quickly realised that all my clothes were wrong. My suitcase was filled with buttoned-up shirts and khaki pants. On my first day in the office of the magazine where I would be working for a few months, I was dressed as a Baptist youth pastor. Everyone in the office wore t-shirts. "You look very nice," a coworker said. “But darling, you never have to wear a collared shirt here."

On the other hand, I had no money—the internship at the magazine was unpaid. Then the breakup. Then the impulse shopping, mostly for clothes I could not afford. I knew if I was not careful, this would get out of hand.

Everyone in L.A. was beautiful. Beautiful people drove Ferraris to restaurants, to the cinema, to the Beverly Wilshire. Local streetwear for men at the time embraced the feminine, the queer, the nonbinary—even straight guys wore jewellery, tiny shorts, and long, flowing cardigans. I felt free to start experimenting, but on my Southern, cornfed, ridiculous body, my thick legs and long torso, the clothes I tried on in the shops looked so stupid. I wanted to look chic in an L.A. way, but I was too gamey, too Georgia—I looked like a country boy trying to be cool.

I didn't even know how to walk. All my life, I’ve stomped and huffed along, head bent down. I tried walking like a model, as a friend instructed, with my chest up and my head back, but this felt dangerous. I was worried I would miss something at my feet and fall. I am a chronic ground-watcher and have been all my life; I’ve never quite mastered the art of walking while looking up. It’s as if the world around me has always been a little too much to bear, so I must huff through it and try to stay out of the way.

Masculinity is a difficult subject these days. Certain gay men—the masculine ones—have a bad habit and a not-new history of shaming feminine ones, and in response, feminine gays, armed with the media power of the internet, have created an online culture in which masculine gays are regularly presented as lumbering, toxic oafs. People write and tweet now about #masc gays like they’re the embarrassing uncle at the dinner party: Ignore him, sweetie! He’s a dinosaur.

This bizarre little division is rooted, I think, in misogyny and internalised homophobia—two things all gay men, of all stripes, have to deal with. And while debate stirs arguments on both sides, this fight is not really new. As far back as the '70s, there was a divide between feminine gays who loved Judy and Liza and masculine gays who loved metal and leather. These camps—faeries and leathermen, queers and clones—have mixed, intermingled, overlapped, and blended in the years since, but their perspectives have not fully dissolved. When I dropped into L.A., an epicentre of trendy, on-the-needle, shifting cultural dialogues about things that, to my eyes, seemed pretty straightforward—things like clothes and self-expression—I realised I had come to this city of media and discourse without having chosen where I fit, stylistically, culturally, in the landscape of modern gay life.

I realised that I was, in fact, naturally masculine. It wasn’t a performance—I wasn’t trying to be masculine, or afraid of being feminine, or stressed in any real way about my masculinity. I just was. I never even thought about it, really, until friends in L.A. brought it up. They remarked on my deep voice, my mannerisms, my “vibe.” Once the recognition was made—once I had been positioned, however subtly, on one side of a quiet queer division—I wanted to challenge it and break out of it. Suddenly, I found that I wanted to wear feminine clothes, or at least try to: a purple cardigan, a pleated skirt. At the same time, I wanted to wear sexy, masculine harnesses from the leather community and get fucked by mean, manly men. Did I have to choose?