What I Love About Being Gay: Boxer Briefs, Hot Friends, & Liberation

It’s the middle of June, and on Substack (the only social media I still use), I’m seeing all the Pride-themed posts rolling out. I’ve read articles about how the mainstream Christian church, in maintaining its anti-queer theology, is totally misunderstanding the whole point of the Bible; articles about the assault on queer rights in our hostile political climate; articles about how sneaky internalized queerphobia can be, even years after coming out. These articles are great. They’re meaningful, necessary, powerful. I’ve even written this sort of thing myself. But today, I feel like writing about the other side of being queer: not the pain and suffering, but the joy, the beauty, and the pure fun of it.

So this post is going to be all about what I love about being gay.

Sexual orientation sometimes gets defined solely by who you enjoy sleeping with. Rather than reduce queer identity down to sex acts or body parts, I want to recognize it as the huge, beautiful, expansive, all-encompassing experience of being in the world it is. So I’m going to focus on what I love about being gay that has nothing to do with actual gay relationships. And it’s still a long, fun list.

(Please note, I’m writing solely from my own personal experience. None of these are attempts to say anything universal or absolute about what it’s like to be queer. This is just what I enjoy about it, as a cis, white, middle-class, exvangelical, gay millennial woman.)

Awesome tagline I saw on a t-shirt once: Live Your Life Like a Book Texas Would Ban!

1.) I love being gay because of the freedom to be creative with my gender expression.

Before I came out, I lived with this constant, nagging pressure to look “feminine enough,” to fit in with all the other girls. But I was tall and broad-shouldered, I walked like a lesbian long before I knew I was one, and I really liked plaid, so this was an endless source of distress. After I came out, I felt a different kind of constant, nagging pressure—this time, to look “gay enough,” but also not “too gay.” I went through a butch stage, and then several iterations of trying on dresses, almost leaving the house, and then changing. I also went through a lot of bad haircuts. Finally, after a queer friend told me my best look was “soft androgynous,” I found this beautiful space of playfulness and ease around gender expression. I don’t have to impress anyone. I don’t have to fit in. I don’t have to make my body look “right.” I just get to…wear what I want.

I know. What a novel concept.

Some days, I love the comfort and power of a masc look—men’s basketball shorts and a t-shirt with no makeup, or straight-leg jeans and lumberjack plaid. Some days, I do my makeup and wear jewel-toned tops and palazzo pants that swish like a skirt when I twirl. Most days, I mix-and-match. I’ve accepted that most women’s clothing will look a little androgynous on my body no matter what, and that my short haircut requires big, dangly earrings and a lot of makeup to skew femme. But I love the freedom to express all the facets of gender within me.

It isn’t just about appearance. It’s also the energy I’m allowed to embody—leading on the dance floor, and bringing my maternal essence to my professional work of healing and nurturing. I no longer think in terms of gender roles, but in terms of gender energy. And after unblocking all of that energy, my posture is better, my voice is stronger, and I finally feel good in my own skin.

Of course, anyone—regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation—can explore a spectrum of gendered presentations, activities, energies, and ways of being. And I wish more cishet* people felt the freedom to experiment. Because for every straight woman who wishes she could propose to her boyfriend without it being a thing, I have to believe there's a straight dude who secretly wants to wear makeup.

*Cisgender and heterosexual; term for straight people whose sex at birth is congruent with their gender identity.

2.) I love being gay because I get to enjoy that all of my friends are super hot.

As a woman, the majority of my friends are also women. And as a lesbian woman, I have a unique experience of female friendship. In my teens and 20s, I listened to my straight peers compare themselves to their friends: “She’s prettier. She’s hotter. She’s got better legs.” The negative vibe to this always confused me. I've never had much brain space for comparison. I’m way too busy enjoying being surrounded by the crowd of amazing, incredibly attractive women who are my friends, basking in the glow, admiring the view—not in an ogling, sexual, self-gratifying way, but with the kind of awe you feel beneath the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Wow! Can you believe so much beauty exists? And I get to be here! It’s all around me! This is incredible! It’s overwhelming sometimes, the magnitude and variety of female beauty in my life.

Let me tell you, this is a totally rad way to experience your friend group. A lot of ink has been spilled dissecting “the male gaze.” When is someone going to start writing about “the lesbian gaze”? I don’t think there is a more worshipful, adoring, reverent, and poetic gaze in the universe. Shakespeare can’t compete with Sappho.

3.) I love being gay because of how it allows me to find my own body beautiful and arousing.

Okay, I get it. This sounds a little weird. It’s not like I’m looking in the mirror, drooling over myself. But as someone with a female-presenting body, who is attracted to female-presenting bodies, the more I nurture my sexuality and expand into the fullness of my sexual orientation, the more I embrace my body as beautiful, desirable, arousing, and worthy of pleasure.

In my struggles with heteronormative culture as an adolescent and young adult, I primarily viewed my body as an asset to be assessed, assigned a value, purchased, and consumed. I had to earn male admiration by achieving some standard of physical perfection. If my body was attractive enough, I could be chosen by a man—and as long as my body satisfied him enough, I could keep him. Now, my body is my own, lovable for itself. Because I myself enjoy the richness, the lushness, the wonder of female beauty in its raw form (un-plucked, un-plumped, un-adorned, un-enhanced), I no longer find it hard to admire my own body. In fact, I revel in the marvel of my body—its curves and dimples, its swells and softness, its smells and textures. My body possesses the capacity to arouse and be aroused. It’s wondrous.

Some of this is maturity, recovery, the healing of the patriarchal commodification of female beauty, and doesn’t belong solely to queer women. But for me, queerness has been my path to sensual self-love.

4.) I love being gay because of how it pushed me into deconstruction and liberation.

For many queer people raised in conservative religious traditions, the swelling force of their own sexual orientation or gender identity is what finally pushes them to begin questioning, expanding, and sometimes deconstructing the theology and worldview of their family or culture. It’s the unignorable variable that doesn’t fit, the fact you cannot avoid because you’re carrying it around in your own body. And queerness falls so far outside the structures of belief and absolute truth you’ve been given that to look yourself square in the eye requires reorienting yourself to your entire tradition. I am so grateful to my own queerness for being the gateway, the triumphal arch, into a more inclusive, life-giving, and loving spirituality.

The analogy I often use is that conservative evangelical theology, and the culture it upholds, felt like a piano that was perfectly in tune with itself. You could play any song. It all sounded good. It all made sense. But then, Middle C went sorta flat. And so I retuned Middle C, got it resonating with the tuning fork…but then D sounded just a little bit off, too, and the A minor chord was wonky. So I retuned A, D, and E to match C…but then the rest of the keys sounded even more off. After performing the theological gymnastics required to affirm LGBTQ+ identities within a conservative hermeneutic, suddenly, I could hear all the dissonance: biblical literalism, scriptural infallibility, a 7-day creation, original sin, hell, substitutionary atonement. And one key at a time, I had to retune the entire piano. Now, it doesn’t sound like it used to—but only now can I make music with the full orchestra of humankind. And that is a much bigger and louder kind of joy than playing a solo in my own living room.

5.) I love being gay because the underwear are so much more comfortable.

It’s been well over a decade since I vowed that I would never again wear a thong. But my life changed when I discovered boxer briefs. I literally couldn’t stop smiling the first day I wore them. I had no idea how amazing underwear could be. #lifechanging #notevenkidding #likeacloudforyourloins

Also, did you know you don’t have to be a lesbian to wear boxer briefs??? Yes, straight women can wear them, too! We’re pretty sure that Woxers won’t turn you into a lesbian…but we are still waiting on full findings from the double-blind clinical trial, and the bi girlies keep confounding the results, so purchase at your own risk.

6.) I love being gay because it has improved my relationships with men.

Maybe this is just a conservative evangelical thing, but growing up, there was always this weirdness about friendship between men and women—this belief that it couldn’t not somehow become sexual, that it was playing with fire, that if you were married and had a friend of the opposite sex, you were basically asking for an affair to spontaneously occur. Even outside of Christian circles, there was always this sense of caution about opposite sex friendships. You didn’t want to send the wrong signals or lead a guy on accidentally. If you got too close, spent too much time together, or gave full-frontal hugs, you might ruin the friendship. The overall impact was to make me view friendship with men as a risk. So I stayed away; monitored my physical distance from them, my body language, my tone of voice, my eye contact; guarded against accidentally being alone with a man; withheld myself from them emotionally and socially. Sadly, I viewed men as unfit companions who had nothing to offer me (outside of marriage).

Now, though, I can go to a movie with a friend’s husband, and nobody cares. Now, I can put a hand on a male friend’s shoulder to express care, and it isn’t weird. I can build friendships with men, invite men into my life, allow a man to hug me or even hold me and still feel safe. Now that relationships with men are uncomplicated, I can fully enjoy them: I can offer to and receive from men what I used to reserve only for my female friends—emotional intimacy, support, self-disclosure, trust, warmth, affection, physical touch, inside jokes, personal advice, one-on-one conversation, the respect born of genuine closeness.

Ironically, it was eliminating men as a source of sexual or romantic fulfillment that finally brought men into my life in a genuine and meaningful way. And you know what else I’ve noticed? The men in my life are more relaxed and open around me, too. They aren’t having to be as guarded, either. (Btw, it super sucks that this is what patriarchy has done to inter-gender relationships. Yes, you should be pissed. Especially if you’re a man.)

7.) I love being gay because I don’t have to worry about birth control anymore.

I didn’t even realize the stress of having to manage the risk of pregnancy in my own body until I no longer had to. The other night, I had a nightmare that I accidentally got pregnant, and the tormenting impossibility of carrying, birthing, keeping, and raising a child that would exceed my financial, physical, and emotional capacities vs the heart-breaking impossibility of ending a pregnancy when I have always mourned not giving my daughter a sibling…it literally kept me awake in a cold sweat for over an hour after I woke. It’s hard to fully capture the physical, emotional, and relational toll of birth control—but if you know, you know.

Pure joy: When a medical professional asks me what method of birth control I use, and I say “lesbianism,” and then watch them try to fix their face.

8.) I love being gay because it has deepened my self-discovery.

One thing you can say for the LGBTQ+ community: most of us have done a lot of soul-searching. It isn’t easy to get to know yourself when you grow up without even a vocabulary to describe your experiences; when you don’t know any caregivers, mentors, or authority figures who are like you; when you are pretty sure you’re going to hell just for being who you are; when your sexuality or gender identity aren’t even mentioned in your school’s sex ed curriculum or your parents’ awkward 2-minute lecture about “the birds and the bees,” and when there are no easily accessible, age-appropriate resources, media, professional support, or literature to help you find your way. Yes, society has gotten better over time, but the progress is slow, and the majority of queer people out there—from our queer elders who led the Gay Rights movement to the queer kids on our streets whose families kicked them out, and everyone in between—have not had an easy time.

But what is true of every other minority community is also true of the queer community: when you have to fight for your identity, when your journey to a healthy self-concept is opposed or even just under-supported, you have to dig deep. And when you dig deep, you often find gold.

(Okay, that metaphor is cheesy as hell. Forgive me. I couldn’t resist, but now I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.)

I am so grateful for all the pages I’ve filled, reflecting on sensations and feelings, analyzing old memories, weighing and processing, researching, and getting to know my body, my sexuality, my orientation to the world. I am so grateful for how well I have learned myself, the compassion this journey has taught me for my younger self, the connection I’ve found to a community with a rich history that is so much bigger than my own small place in it. I am so grateful to have had the space to consider the gendered and un-gendered permutations of love, and what values around sex, gender, inclusion, freedom, and justice I want to pass on to my child. I am so grateful for all the ways I’ve discovered to express who I am in the world. There is so much of me that I’ve unearthed in all of this, that I never otherwise would have had a reason to go searching for.

It’s not that I’m a more complex or interesting person because I’m queer. It’s just that I’ve had an excuse to sift through these parts of myself in a way that most cishet people never have to—and thus, never get to. Without questions, there is no expansion. If you never question or think through your sexuality or gender orientation, you will live a smaller version of it.

I think the world would be a better place if we all had to question, experiment, learn, integrate, and declare ourselves to the world. We would all know ourselves better. We would all have more room inside to hold the varied experiences of others. We would probably all be a little kinder, a little gentler, a little wiser.

Because I am queer, I have had to work hard to find, accept, and honor all the parts of my gender and sexuality. And now, all of it is mine, known and named—even loved. It’s my human birthright. It’s your human birthright, too. And whoever you are, I wish you the same free, expansive, exuberant experience of self that I’ve found through coming out.

There is a lot to love about being queer.

No, it doesn’t make up for the trauma of growing up in the closet, or of having to come out over and over again your whole life. No, it doesn’t make up for thousands of years of brutal extermination efforts. No, it doesn’t make up for legalized discrimination and the exhaustion of fighting for basic rights. No, it doesn’t make up for the challenges of starting a family, the constant threats to belonging, the struggle to find, create, or keep safe spaces, the low-grade ache of missing representation in everything from our leadership to our entertainment.

But…it certainly helps.