I Am Queer

Cheerleaders with beards strolled arm in arm down the street. "Women" with three-foot-high green bee-hives giggled at silver-lame suited space boys. Six-foot-five divas draped in sequins and heels and attitudes that extended around them like magical auras sauntered along, too beautiful, too glamorous, to even notice the ordinary people around them. But if a camera, glinting in the sunlight, caught their eyes, they turned fiercely, like dragons with glittering scales, not to attack, but to pose. Some over nine feet tall in full regalia, they were totems of defiance against any attempt at definition. This was Wigstock, a festival of drag and a window into the recent disappearance of "Truth" from the West's intellectual landscape.

I walked into this wonderland unassumingly and was sucked into its surreal reality. It turned out to be the perfect introduction to my studies at NYU because it showed me just how slippery, and ultimately untenable "Truth" can be. I came to this city and this school for many reasons, but one of them was because I am gay, and I wanted to live in an environment that was not only tolerant but actively accepting of that part of myself. I had gone to a Catholic high school, where, surprisingly enough, I received the most support as I began to work out for myself a definition for my sexuality. In high school I embraced what I suppose is our society's mainstream pro-gay stance: "Sexual orientation and gender are natural, maybe even biological, and not a matter of choice, thus homosexuality should not be condemned." In the spirit of this position even my religion teachers took on the issue of homosexuality in classes on morality, teaching tolerance and acceptance. And yet, after my experiences in New York, starting with Wigstock, I can see how simplistic and even demeaning the argument really is. Coming in the form of a justification, it amounts to little more than an excuse for my existence. "Marco is gay, but it can't be helped."

"Well, honey, are you gonna take my picture or are you gonna let all this beauty go to waste?"

I just stood there for several seconds in awe. What was I to make of a seven foot tall Diana Ross with an impossibly deep voice and a dress of purple sequins that trailed forever behind her on the soft summer breeze? This, contrary to everything I ever believed in support of my sexuality, was certainly not natural.