Embracing the Sweater Weather Side of Me
My queerness has generally had a weird place in my identity. How can I be so proud of a part of me one day but be made to feel ashamed of it the next? How can I be proud of something that I identify with while also knowing that I have shunned other people for identifying with it too? Am I just being too hard on myself or too dramatic? Probably a bit of both. When I was in middle school, I was more than just ashamed of being queer; I was actively disgusted by it. Many people around me treated being gay as something that was a sickness or something worthy of belittlement, and that put me in such a bizarre position. Was I ill in some way? I didn’t feel sick. I mostly decided to suppress it, that the fact that I had feelings for both boys and girls was something that time would correct eventually. But over time and throughout tumultuous periods in both my own life and the country during quarantine, it became apparent that this was a growing part of me and that whether I embraced it or not was completely up to me. I started to slowly explore the queer side of the internet and I started to realize that I really loved the music and the fan bases of queer musicians.
During quarantine, the communities online became the only place that I felt comfortable to embrace this sort of new aspect of my identity. Seeing artists be so…unashamed to be themselves on massive stages gave me a sense of confidence and a certainty that I wasn’t alone or sick. At least online. What I didn’t feel comfortable with was being queer in person. Middle school was hard enough without having to navigate self acceptance and I thought it was something too personal to wear on my sleeve. It took a long time for me to get to that point. In 8th grade, I made a project about the LGBTQ community for English class and my teacher put me in touch with two juniors who played a huge part in making safe spaces for queer people in the upper and middle schools. I’ll never forget that conversation, particularly one thing that one of the juniors said: I asked him, “if the world was perfect, how would you want the LGBTQ community to be viewed?” He responded, “I wouldn’t want anyone to care.” That’s stuck with me for a long time, because at the end of the day, we’re just people. We may have an extra layer to our identities but we are still just people. I’m just a person. That day, I made a promise to myself that when I got to high school, I would join the queer community and that I would be proud of it. That has been a decision that I haven’t regretted once.
The people that I have met in these spaces have inspired and taught me so much. They have introduced me to so many queer leaders, educators, artists, more musicians, actors, and stories that it is almost impossible for me to feel alone. A friend of mine who is also queer identifying (and low key the head of this whole website) told me that sexuality is a spectrum. Everyone has their spot on that spectrum, and the spot is absolutely fluid to change. In the meantime, I am extremely proud that I have found mine and I can’t wait to keep finding it over and over and over again. My name is Humzah Ladiwala, my pronouns are He/Him, and I am proudly bisexual.
Author’s Note
This past year, I volunteered to speak in front of my entire high school for our queer history month assembly. The above is the speech I wrote and then was terrified to read out loud, but it seemed to be received quite well. It honestly felt like the biggest win I’ve had as an out queer person: telling my story to a crowd of a thousand people and watching them hear it, feel it, and respect it. We all have a place in this world, and to me, the whole point of life is finding that place and making something from it. Sounds cheesy i know. But it rings true, at least so far it has for me. Regardless, thank you for reading.
– Humzah L. .
edited & published by Gayatri Noor Choudhury
