Why is no one talking about the shame?

This article discusses themes of internalised homophobia, self-loathing and rejection.

Shame

Why is no one talking about the shame?

Contrapoints, 2020

I have watched and rewatched Contrapoint’s video about shame many times, in different contexts and life situations, with and without other people around. Every time I have found something different in it, a new layer, angle, a different focus. One time it was a parallel with the “friendship” she talks about in the video. One time it was as the partner of a trans woman and what that means for her.

But that first time, in December of 2020, was the most Earth-shattering time for me.

The one at which I felt the most shame myself.</br> Watching that video that evening led to a very dark and lonely night. I think of it as one of those single, life-defining moments that you only get a few of in your life. Realising my attraction to women led me down a very dark thought spiral that took me months to completely get out of.</br>

Before that video. I figured that as long as I kept it to myself, as long as no one knew, I would be safe. As long as I repressed any bad thoughts immediately when they came up, I would be safe. As long as I wasn’t thinking about it, had never tried anything, I couldn’t be sure, so I was safe.</br> But that video convinced me. And that’s what made me sink.

The most overwhelming feeling for me that night was disgust about myself, to the point where I was feeling physically ill. I figured my social life was over, my family life was over, my relationship was over. Everything I had worked for and built up until this moment felt like it was going to fall apart in an instant.

Before that point, I had found my own self-worth and validation in the traditional social markers of success. I had just finished my studies, landed a fulfilling job, and, more importantly, I was in a sfuccessful long-term relationship. I felt like I had it all figured out. Of course I sometimes felt empty, like if that was success and I wouldn’t ever get anything more out of life, what was really the point? It didn’t bring me the fulfillment I thought it would. </br> But still, having to destroy it all and start over? Was I really ready to sacrifice everything I had strived for up until this moment?

People would be disappointed, it was going to change the way they looked at me, people would reject me, they would think I’m wrong and judge me, or they would be afraid of me, or they would think I was just lying for attention. I was sad, and I was ashamed.

I was alone, I felt like there was nobody I could turn to. I thought my queer friends, who’d had that part figured out for a long time, would make fun of me. They’d be surprised I didn’t figure it out sooner.

I was ashamed of feeling like I couldn’t live up to them, because I had idealized them. I had made them up to be so much stronger than myself. I thought they never doubted themselves, and were out in every single area of their life and were so confident and proud. I thought shame was a concept that was alien to them, because they’d been comfortable with who they were for so long. Because I always saw them being comfortable around me. I thought about reaching out, asking for advice, for acceptance, but I just couldn’t find it in me to say the words out loud, or to write them down. If they were always so proud and comfortable, they probably wouldn’t understand me. If they’d been through that phase, I thought, it would have been long ago, a thing of the past. They wouldn’t remember what it was like anymore. I imagined my queer friends as unattainable, because it was better to be alone than to be rejected by them.

I was ashamed that I had hidden it from myself for so long, that I was so stupid for not realising it sooner.

I was ashamed that, even after all of this, my first reflex was still to hide.

I was ashamed that, in retrospect, everything I had said and done before this point felt like a lie.

I was ashamed because I couldn’t see any other option than to keep lying, building up on the lies again and again until there would be no way out.</br> There is a pain in knowing you aren’t be able to be yourself completely with someone else. This feeling that you will never be able to completely connect with them, because you don’t feel safe enough to be authentic with them. It creates a distance, a ledge between you that is insurmountable. I thought I would feel like that for the rest of my life. If I could never really connect with anyone, it meant that no matter how many connections I made, I would always be truly alone.

But the thing I was the most ashamed of was my attraction to women itself. I felt like I was no better than the men that are sexualising women all the time, like I was a wolf in the middle of a hen house.

I was ashamed because I thought other women would be afraid of me, like they are of men. Not really afraid, but suspicious. Vigilant. Like if I went to a space where women feel safe, it wouldn’t feel safe to them anymore.

That is not true.

That is not true.

Why am I not talking about the shame?

I was ashamed of so much at the beginning of my coming to terms with my sexuality, that there were too many things for me to really see the shame surrounding shame itself. And even though I am deeply aware of my shame now, as I am still pretty closeted and that in itself is caused by my shame, I rarely see depictions of shame on social media or in shows and movies that I watch. Teenagers in Sex Education have more confidence in themselves and their identity than I do as an adult.

As Contrapoints puts it:

It’s difficult and risky for me to admit these feelings, because visible queer people are supposed to perform pride. Why is no one talking about the shame? Because we’re ashamed of the shame. But we shouldn’t be. The shame is a natural result of shaming.

I grew up in a media era where trans women were usually represented as vomit-inducing monstrosities who deserve the violence they bring upon themselves by existing. And I started my transition in the first year of the Trump administration, where there’s been constant vilification of trans people in the press, invading women’s bathrooms, forcing our insanity on children, and destroying Western civilization with our authoritarian pronouns. It’s hard to express just the daily humiliation of being a trans woman under these conditions.

Then there’s the little jabs people throw at you, like what my laser technician recently told me: “You must be very courageous to transition, because that is not socially acceptable.”

She talks about the pressure she feels as a public figure to show a good, aspiration example. At the end of the day, we all want to show our best, strongest image to the world. This is especially true when other people are looking up to these creators as role models, looking up to them for validation and proof that they can find a way to be proud like them.

Mae Martin’s show Feel good does depict a woman who is, at first, ashamed of being in a relationship with another woman. We could think, I used to think that, as soon as she’s come out to her homophobic friends, she would be done with the shame. As if shame is a one time step before coming out, that evaporates as soon as you are out to the world and have accepted yourself for who you are. It is based on this false dichotomy between being out and being closeted. There is such a thing as being both out and closeted at the same time. Be it a dinner party where you’re out to some people and not others, or just going to a job where you’re not out and coming back to your safe space at home to be yourself.

Just because someone does videos on the internet about being queer, doesn’t mean that they are out to everyone they ever talked to. Coming out is a never-ending process in a society that expects you to be in the norm, it is a tiring process that, according to what I’ve heard, doesn’t get that much easier with time.

We don’t talk about the shame because we are forced to have thick skin in a world that is unforgiving to say the least.

We don’t talk about shame because no one else is talking about it. There are other subjects we might feel are more important, or it’s just not usually brought up in conversation. It makes us think we are alone in it. That we are the only ones feeling shame, that we are weaker than the others, thus repeating the cycle.

We don’t talk about shame because it’s such an inherent part of being queer and it’s been in our life for so long that we have learned to ignore it. As queer people, we are made to be ashamed of who we are even before we can really comprehend our queerness. Other kids don’t wait for your coming out to call you gay in primary school. We don’t have to be conscious of what makes us different for people to cast us aside. When you have been traumatized by bullying from a young age, simply talking about it can be too painful. We don’t talk about it because we want to protect ourselves, and others, from our own suffering.

We hide our suffering because when our right to exist is threatened daily, showing any sign of weakness can feel as giving the other side the exact weapons they need to attack us. We have to show as strong face as a survival mechanism, because without that strength, if you can’t keep your head up, it can feel like drowning. It makes me think of a trend of short videos I saw around Pride month, where older, mostly straight people, would give out free hugs to LGBT youths or saying that if their family wouldn’t accept them, they would become their parents. The emotional response of these young people feeling accepted by a parental figure, as well as the response I had to these videos as a closeted queer person. made me realize all of the unspoken loneliness and rejection we might feel. We have to show a strong face when we need to move away from our families for our own safety, but that leaves us in need of a community, of a sense of belonging. Sometimes we don’t want to talk about the shame because we want a moment of respite when we’ve finally found a space we are comfortable in.

In a world where a few decades ago, being LGBT was considered a mental illness, there is still a lot of stigma around poor mental health in general. On top of that, lots of people on the far-right using LGBT people’s mental health issues as evidence that their gender identities or sexual orientations make them broken.

Even though this shame is caused by systemic issues, we still see it as an individual moral failure within ourselves. We feel as if we as individuals are fully responsible for how we feel about ourselves and our own queerness, when we’ve been bombarded since before we could talk with homophobic, heterocentric, transphobic messages. We have to learn that what we consider to be flaws in our character are more often than not symptoms of a society that makes no effort to give us a space to be safe and accepted. Looking into concepts such as minority stress can help us get out of this individual failure mindset, and give us the tools to actually combat the root cause of the shame by bringing the change we need in our society.

Pride

I didn’t feel pride at all for a long time after coming out to myself. I didn’t feel pride until I began trying to accept myself, and authentically connected with some of the people that matter to me.

It’s only through honesty, with myself and with others, that I was able to achieve that.

Only by being honest with them, I figured that my idealized friends were struggling with pretty much the same things I was. My friend who I’d assumed was casually out in every single aspect of her life was actually not. If she seemed so comfortable every time I saw her, it was because she felt safe in our friend group, not because she was like that with everyone.

It is so easy to feel shame, because that’s the only path that is showed to us, drilled into our brains, before we can even consciously understand it. It takes a lot of work to build enough pride to balance it out. It’s not something you can do alone. I remember watching longingly the proud people marching for pride, feeling like I was made differently from them, because that feeling was so foreign to me, I wouldn’t ever be able to truly feel it, to be like them. In my mind I was a different type of queer, the weak type.

We need pride because shame is the most powerful tool for society to keep us in line, to prevent us from exposing every social code for what it is, just a masquerade people so desperately want to believe in. We need pride to take up the space that we deserve. We need pride so that we can resist the people who don’t want us to exist. We need pride so that we don’t disappear. We need pride so that young queers like me don’t feel like there is no happy ending waiting for them, that there is no future.

Pride is the opposite of shame and it’s our only weapon against it, our only way to live, and keep on living. I can imagine a future now, a happy one, and that would not be possible without pride.