Homecoming

I. Empathy

Imagine yourself single, emotionally available and wanting to meet new people without the help of chance. Imagine yourself on your way to a blind date. Different from the common definition. (This my imaginary challenge implies thinking about a literally blind date. In the dark and orchestrated by no one in common).

Imagine yourself entering a building, being blindfolded by the concierge and gently led by two fingers that press on your left arm. You go down a staircase, accompanied by whoever blindfold you. You allow your right hand to slide over the rail, it is smooth and not too cold. The blindfold is very tight, without hurting you and without you being able to peek through the crack that opens near your nostrils. You don’t see, but you hear. You hear whispered conversations, mismatched clinking of cutlery, glasses that land in slow motion, smooth scraping of chairs and rejoicing.

The room is pitch black, you’re possibly in a basement. You know it because you’re not here by chance. However, little else you know. You sit down, they remove the blindfold and you stay there. No longer alone, but still in the dark. You see different black shadows and your eyes try, effortlessly and in vain, to paint any image that doesn’t feed your fear and make you regret being here.

Someone is sitting across from you.

You hear the chair drag, you feel the tip of a shoe scrape your shin and you delight with a nervous laugh that vibrates in your air. A laugh without gender. You say hello and don´t recognize your voice, you hear hello and can’t decipher whether it is the voice of a man or a woman. It’s just a voice. This dark room eliminates gender in voices. After all, you’re here to meet people, souls. Who knows to be interested in someone, man or woman, who excites your brain with words. To teach you something you didn’t know before you sat down. You will leave this room with someone or alone. You choose. Without anything physical influencing your choice, just everything you don’t see. The conversation, the dynamics, the energy, the laughter, the common, the disagreeing, the dreams, the gallantry, the pains and the tight dance. Always in the dark.

Always without knowing if the human, who was sitting in front of you, is a man or a woman. Tall, blonde, muscular, plump, sporty or political. (Ah, there’s a rule in this conversation. You don’t talk about what you do or how much you earn. It doesn’t matter to meet people. After all, we were born without a profession).

It only matters if you laugh, if you feel comfortable and content. If you feel pleasure in the company, in what is not seen, what comes from within. In the end, humans will leave this room. Voices will return to the body, humans will have gender.

Did you imagine?

Well, that’s how I love.

II. The closet

Embodying of the flow of a Portuguese river that intends to demolish old prejudices and deconstruct our homophobic self, among so many other evil selves, I escape from the closet. My closet.

For forty months, I count them precisely because I carry them with shame, I designed and built a cocoon. A type of bunker where presidents hide in the event of a nuclear attack. Quaint, decorated with the most perfect taste and feng shui art. Warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Adorned with fluffy pillows, old photographs and plastic plants, because everything that lives doesn’t survive in it for long. Me included.

I built a motherfucker of a closet. With big and small drawers, fancy hangers, candles and mirrors. With plenty of room for me, but not for my freedom, and with the most infallible security system. Fundamental to the well-being of my cowardly feelings.

I built this closet in Portugal the supposed safe haven, happy and loving space.

Almost nobody knows about this closet. Anyone who sees it from the outside says it doesn’t even look like a closet. It lived there, in Portugal, for almost two years. And I live there too, whenever I’m in Portugal.

In fact, the closet is crucial to my pupal period. I wouldn’t write this if I hadn’t lived, matured and morphed into it. However, I extended the lease, written and signed by me. Because living in the closet is comfortable. It is playing hide and seek alone, it is giving space to feel insufficient and fragile. It is the black hole of happiness.

Living in the closet is living a double agent life where the bad guy, the one who fights against my happiness, is me. The closet is that villain that you like somedays, especially when fear destroys my soul and freezes my reason, here it comes … with a warm blanket to snuggle me up to, to make the doors slide and whisper “the world is cruel, you are safe here”. This fear is recent, the result of having lost my blinders when I emigrated.

Emigrating introduced me to homesickness, struggle and a life of an aerialist without a safety net. It made me grow and reborn, I will never be who I was again. Living in New York made me brave, detached, free from judgment and prejudice. It opened my eyes and my mind. It slapped me with diversity, multiculturalism and human expressiveness. Presented me to different human beings, creative minds and the most diverse ways of living this life. It lowered my ego. And when it stepped on my discomfort I ordered New York to shut up! To stop filling my ears with abominable provocations! But no one silences big cities, not even me inside my head. We argued. New York called me self-centered, as if someone who lived in it and itself, New York, wanted to know how I dress, with whom my tongue dances or with whom I fantasize at night. Reality is: NOBODY CARES!

It was at the distance of an ocean, it was not listening to Portugal close by, that I realized the pompous homophobic self that lives in me. A little homophobic, and disgusting me. Who eats and drinks for free, who pays no rent or light, who I caress and ignore when he says barbarities. I didn’t give birth to him, but I’m the one who supports him. Only in Portugal.

Is this the great irony? A homophobic self that lives on the spectrum? Are homophobic queer selves scared by freedom?

I kick the closet doors and see the light. The hands that strangle me disappear. The suffocation is over.

Here I deconstruct my homophobic self. One minute of silence.

Here lies my closet. Two minutes of silence.

I moved out. I flew into the spectrum.

III. On the spectrum

The sexual spectrum is, in my perspective, a rainbow of happy and judgment-free possibilities, which allows sexual variation from the exclusively heterosexual to the exclusively homosexual. It’s a coloured cloud where black and white exist and/or coexist. Those who like only the opposite sex, those who like only the same sex, those who like both, the shy and resolved curious, those who like all human life, sapiosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, allies, those I don’t mention and everyone who doesn’t want to be boxed or labelled float there. Everyone is on the spectrum. Travelling the rainbow. They live on the pinnacle of freedom. They land where they feel like it and let happiness unravel their path. They are the courageous, who fight prejudice with their truth.

In fact, it was only thirty years ago, that the world health organization declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. It was also only in 2018, that being transgender was no longer categorized as having a mental health disorder. I believe that, in very small steps, other theories have already been demystified for those who don’t seem fit into others shoes… That being different is the most natural thing in our world. From the shape of our eyes, palate, complexion, taste, talent … we are all different and all human. Why are our intimate, sexual choices supposed to be the same? Why is someone who isn’t “the same” automatically different? Who defines what being different means? Is being different not marrying a man, not having children, not baking cakes and pruning roses? We witness the evolution of medicine and science… what about mentality?!

I know that the winds have changed and we don’t live in the homophobic cages from the past, because the struggle for love has gained a voice. Minorities, called different and ill, formed communities and around the world welcomed the unequal, broke the rules and demystified false truths. And even if, in hope, I believe in a future where communities and movements that give voice to injustice are just good memories (because we will live in an equal world), I’m immensely grateful for the LGBTQ+ community. For the space of comfort, acceptance, support, education, struggle, courage, hope and resilience that it has conquered in the world. And that I’ve always been part of.

Living on the spectrum isn’t a choice, an act of rebellion, a phase, a golden ticket to hell, an atheistic statement or a desire to be different. It’s wanting to live in love. IT’S JUST LOVE. I would end here but more has to be written, said and seen.

You don’t have a problem!

You aren’t a broken human being.

Sexual orientation doesn’t define your qualities, defects, intelligence or talent.

You are valid. Just like your family dreams and wishes. Your son will call father or mother to the two of you. Who wears the pants in the relationship? Nobody! Both! Does it matter?

Live, love and be. With everything you’re entitled to, with everything you deserve.

Your truth will not disappoint or sadden those who love you. And if so, the problem doesn’t live with you. It doesn’t matter how long you take. If you discover yourself in adolescence or rediscover yourself as an adult, life is just yours.

You owe you and no one else, a life of colour and splendour, of truth and love.