That tirade played in my head for years. Luckily, I\u2019ve since learned that none of it is true. Therapy helped. So did queer content, in the form of TV shows, movies and, of course, books.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Part of my shame stemmed from the fact that I hadn\u2019t engaged with any queer content before that first crush. I\u2019d called myself an ally for years, and had done my best to support my queer friends, but as an overworked grad student dealing with a sexuality crisis, I didn\u2019t know where to start on my own self-acceptance journey. For the first two years, admitting I was bi was hard enough; committing to queer TV or books felt too visible and real. I needed to work through my internalized biphobia first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because of this, I didn\u2019t know the variety of queer stories that existed. Reading these works of nonfiction, mostly memoirs, helped me understand that I wasn\u2019t behind or late or alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The following five books helped normalize my experience of queerness. Though I read them mainly because they were available through my local library\u2014and they\u2019re all pretty recent titles\u2014each one spoke to a different facet of my self-acceptance journey. On these frenzied library trips, I was looking to see myself in book-jacket copy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A manual titled A Guide to Help Natalie<\/em> would\u2019ve been ideal, but short of that, I was on my own. I didn\u2019t have a bi mentor who could\u2019ve pointed me toward the existing queer canon. I was too scared to reach out. I had to reinvent the wheel, looking primarily for books by millennial or younger Gen-X writers, people who share many of my cultural influences. Many of these books made good use of humour to balance out heavier subject matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I also stuck with memoir. Though I love fiction, poetry and essays, I wanted to be with real people with experiences similar to mine. I wanted to feel less alone. Each of these books helped me understand the larger cultural context surrounding queerness and coming out. It\u2019s a perspective that helped me accept myself\u2014and then, eventually, write about my experiences to reach others struggling with the same self-hate. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Growing up, I was an avid manga and comics fan. So it\u2019s no surprise that, as an adult, I picked up a graphic memoir when purposefully looking for queer content. Set in urban London in the aughts and 2010s, Crewes details her coming out as a lesbian, and then her later retreat to the closet and second coming out, amidst heteronormative confusion. I was drawn immediately to her candid humour. But what sucker-punched me was the connection she drew between her sexuality and her dislike of her body: \u201cMy struggle with food was a subconscious way to redirect myself from the fact that I was gay. I created a problem to distract my body from my body \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Crewes\u2019s line\u2014graphically displayed as a two-paragraph blurb centred on an otherwise black page\u2014hit so close to home that I took a photo of it. I think about it often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I didn\u2019t distract myself with food, but with sports: Starting at age 13, I dedicated myself to tennis. I practised against a wall, rode my bike to the local park to play and attended tennis clinics. I played practice matches, worked out and cross-trained. Hyper-focusing on tennis meant I didn\u2019t have to think about my peers and their burgeoning sexualities, or my body or the ways my body\u2014and desires\u2014were changing as I aged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though I realized I was queer at age 25, I didn\u2019t come out until 28\u2014just like Heaney, who also struggled with the \u201clateness\u201d of her sexuality. In Would You Rather?<\/em> Heaney grapples with adulthood and her burgeoning feelings for women. This followed her first memoir, Never Have I Ever<\/em>, a book about her struggle to find the right (male) partner. Our assumed straightness, coupled with our coming out in our late 20s and our careers as writers and journalists, eased some of my anxiety about being behind and alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my favourite parts of Heaney\u2019s memoir is about labels. Though she struggles with them throughout, this particular section focuses on how she isn\u2019t sure what to call herself now that she\u2019s dating a woman. She doesn\u2019t want to make a big coming-out post on social media only to correct it later if her label changes. Because she had touted her straightness in her first memoir, she feels a pressure to be accurate, precise and public. This tension leaves Heaney afraid to call herself anything \u201cfor fear of making [herself] inaccurate\u201d\u2014again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was something I struggled with, too. I\u2019d liked women and men, so that made me bi, but I\u2019d liked so few people of any gender; did that make me demi or ace instead? Though I hadn\u2019t had a crush on a non-binary person, I felt pretty certain that I would if I met the right person, so maybe that made me pan and not bi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe, picking up on Heaney\u2019s approach, I\u2019d be safer not labelling myself publicly until I was a little more certain. Though Heaney did eventually post a photo of her and her girlfriend on social media, along with a coming-out caption, her misgivings about these posts gave me permission to skip them in my own life. I don\u2019t have<\/em> to do anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n More important, though, Heaney\u2019s memoir helped me appreciate that sexuality can be complicated and messy\u2014and that that messiness doesn\u2019t make me any less queer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Lambda Literary Award finalist, Perry\u2019s essay collection navigates aughts pop culture alongside Perry\u2019s own coming-out story from her childhood in Illinois, through her college years in Massachusetts and abroad, with a focus on the media she consumed during that time. This title skews more research-heavy than the other books on this list. It also specifically focused on the dearth of queer representation in the aughts, which left me wondering how much of my own confusion stemmed from a lack of representation, and mentors, in my adolescence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So many lines of Perry\u2019s resonated with me\u2014helped, I\u2019m sure, by the fact that she\u2019s only a few years older than me, so we grew up on much of the same media. Katy Perry\u2019s \u201cI Kissed a Girl,\u201d the TV show Glee<\/em><\/a> and Taylor Swift<\/a>\u2019s 2008 album Fearless<\/em> are just a few; though, like Grace Perry, I wouldn\u2019t understand their connection to my perception of sexuality for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my favourite lines comes from the essay \u201cBanter Boys,\u201d where Perry writes about attraction, and the myriad ways that people experience it: romantic, sexual, aesthetic, etc. What she calls a \u201cfamiliar question\u201d was all-too-familiar for me: \u201cDo I want to be <\/em>this person, or do I want to fuck <\/em>this person?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Perry suggests that this question is especially complicated for queer folks, who may be noticing queer attraction for the first time, and therefore may not acknowledge romantic or sexual attraction for what it is. She writes of her love of the 2001 film Moulin Rouge!<\/em><\/a>, \u201cAnd yet I now see that even in [my own] red dress, I didn\u2019t want to be<\/em> Satine…. No, I just had a throbbing crush on Nicole Kidman.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though those lines aren\u2019t particularly funny, I laughed out loud reading them. My own crush on Gamora began the same way. Admiration, I\u2019d called it. Kinship. It took a few months for the full truth to crystalize. Perry\u2019s mix of her own personal story, with both pop culture and research on appropriate subjects, helped me get out of my own head and see the larger context in which Perry\u2019s life\u2014and my own\u2014occurred. It anchored me to a wider perspective that I desperately needed as I began to read queer content for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The book jacket description for Faliveno\u2019s essay collection opens with the line, \u201cSometimes there is no one word for who we are.\u201d I checked it out from the library without reading the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The rest, as I\u2019d find out, explored Faliveno\u2019s perceptions of sexuality and gender as she grew up in the American Midwest and later moved to New York City. It vacillates between tornadoes and kink parties, between motherhood and sports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a former competitive athlete, the essay \u201cSwitch Hitter\u201d really hit home for me (pun very much intended). Faliveno, who played softball, didn\u2019t make her college team\u2014just like me. She almost had an inappropriate relationship with a coach, though nothing came of it\u2014just like me. She, too, had to figure out who she was going to be in the absence of the sport that had once consumed her life. No single essay had paralleled my late adolescence so closely. It left me feeling completely and fully seen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though I would\u2019ve loved that essay whether or not Faliveno was queer, I\u2019d be remiss if I didn\u2019t mention the complicated ways that her collection addresses and studies her struggles to feel fully comfortable in her body and sexuality. In the essay \u201cTomboy,\u201d Faliveno writes about being a bi woman currently dating a man (again, just like me). \u201cWhen I meet new people, queer or straight, I carry this anxiety with me\u2014that as soon as I reveal I\u2019m in a relationship with a man, I will be questioned or invalidated or both.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though I know bisexuality is valid, regardless of what other people think, like Faliveno, I was\u2014and am\u2014scared of that invalidation. It\u2019s something that bi folks face all too often, and Faliveno discusses the times she\u2019s received it both from the queer community and from her straight friends. Like Perry\u2019s work, Faliveno\u2019s essays helped me understand the larger context in which bisexuality exists. Knowing that invalidation occurs across genders and sexualities doesn\u2019t make it hurt any less, but it does help me formulate responses for when it happens. That gives me the courage to interact with the larger world, a courage I didn\u2019t have before I began to read queer content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last but certainly not least, Gomez\u2019s essay collection explores his coming out as a gay man in Florida in the aughts and 2010s, with a focus on his learning to accept himself. Both provocative and darkly funny, he explores shame, pride and longing against the larger cultural backdrop of queerness and his Latinx roots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The essay \u201cBoys Club\u201d is about Gomez\u2019s first trip to Club Orlando, a men\u2019s bathhouse. He wants to belong there, even as he\u2019s afraid of being seen, both entering the establishment and once inside. He struggles to own up to this desire within himself and with others: He tells friends that he\u2019s going to the bathhouse as research. To make fun of it. He calls it \u201can assignment\u201d and \u201ca case,\u201d as though someone else has dictated his going there, which makes his presence somehow okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gomez\u2019s desire to belong was so raw and honest that it transcended some of the differences in our lived experiences and had me looking at my own longings\u2014specifically my desperation to belong to the larger queer community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Toward the end of the essay, Gomez writes, \u201cAs much as I wished I could shed all my shame in one night, I was still too afraid of Club O, of what it would mean for me to feel at home at a place designed for quick sex. It was easier to tell myself I wanted what wasn\u2019t being offered there [i.e., dating], because as long as I pined for something else, what was actually within my grasp couldn\u2019t frighten me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I wouldn\u2019t have expected to see aspects of my experience in an essay about men\u2019s bathhouses. Yet Gomez\u2019s shame and fear brought back my memories of high school, and how I\u2019d focused so narrowly on tennis\u2014my \u201csomething else.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n1. The Times I Knew I Was Gay<\/em><\/a> <\/em>by Eleanor Crewes. Simon & Schuster, 2020<\/h3>\n\n\n
![\"queer](\"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/the-times-i-knew-i-was-gay-9781982147112_xlg.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n2. Would You Rather?<\/em><\/a> by Katie Heaney. Penguin Random House, 2018<\/h3>\n\n\n
![\"queer](\"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Would-You-rather-book-cover.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n3. The 2000s Made Me Gay: Essays on Pop Culture<\/em><\/a> by Grace Perry. Macmillan, 2021<\/h3>\n\n\n
![\"queer](\"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/The-2000s-made-me-gay.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n4. Tomboyland<\/em><\/a> by Melissa Faliveno. Topple Books, 2020<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
5. High-Risk Homosexual<\/a> by Edgar Gomez. Soft Skull Press, 2022<\/h3>\n\n\n\n