Navigating queer identity when going home for the holidays
By Tara Romero — tcrome@ucdavis.edu
As we enter the American holiday season, many students are going back home to spend time with family. The holidays are a time for family and cultural traditions to be shared — a time for genuine connection with the people we grew up with.
As college students, many of us live away from home. The holidays give us a break from the never-ending current of midterms and paper deadlines, and we can return home to reconnect with our roots. However, for many queer students, the holiday season can feel much less genuine and much more like a performance.
When away from home, queer students may feel more comfortable exploring their identities. This is because we meet people with identities like our own, and we make meaningful connections outside of the world we used to know. We can explore ways to express gender and our queer identities far away from the fear of our family’s judgment. UC Davis excels in this particular area, offering a variety of intersectionality-centered student-led clubs, as well as the LGBTQIA Resource Center led by staff who are dedicated to providing support for students on campus.
For many queer students, returning home from college means leaving behind a part of ourselves. When I sit at the family dinner table on Thanksgiving, I do not feel like myself. I leave behind my non-binary lesbian identity and enter my critically acclaimed role as the “average straight girl.”
Although I am out to my very accepting immediate family and a fairly large percentage of my extended family, I still put on this role every year for the members I am not out to and for the ones who know but clearly wish they didn’t.
I trade in my binder for a push-up bra. I put on my mask of lipstick and eyeshadow. I pull out my most feminine dress sitting at the bottom of my closet. I put on this costume, and I get ready for the performance of a lifetime.
My costume gets critical praise from the audience. I carefully read my script, knowing that one wrong move means receiving tossed tomatoes instead of flowers. I face the dreaded question: “Do you have a boyfriend yet?” to which I read off my script, “Not yet! I’m just focusing on school” — an instant crowd-pleaser. Exhausted by the end of my performance, I give my final bow with a “See you next year!”
Even though the holidays are supposed to be about connecting with family, the “connections” I share with my extended family do not feel genuine. This performance only results in more feelings of isolation.
To stop performing is a risky decision with family ties on the line. Many queer students do not have the option of attending the holidays with their families because of it.
Therefore, plenty of queer students will continue to perform at their family dinners this year. In American queer culture, there is always a pressure to come out, live authentically and abandon everything else in our lives. For some people, that is their lived truth. But this is not the truth for everyone. For many queer students, performing around family allows them to connect with other essential parts of their identity.
The reality is that the holidays are a complicated time for queer students — no matter if they are on or off the stage this year. All we can do is continue to support those of us without accepting families at home and wish all of our fellow queer actors at UC Davis a very sincere “break a leg” this holiday season.
Written by: Tara Romero— tcrome@ucdavis.edu
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