Pride Reflection

Emily Pan ’24 (Graphics Editor, 143rd Board) in Opinions | April 19, 2024

I often joke with my friends that Lawrenceville “turned me” queer; after all, I spent the 14 years prior to arriving on this campus only having crushes on guys, and though I would find other girls pretty, they weren’t ever attractive in the same way. One fateful day in my sophomore year, however, I walked into math class and saw her for the first time — a dazzling smile, an impeccable outfit, a kind and charming personality. I thought to myself, Wow. Do I want to be her, or be with her?

Ok, I didn’t exactly think that. It was more like, Wow. I wish I could be like her, but throughout class, my gaze would drift towards her direction, the way they did for my guy crushes during middle school. Seating was randomly distributed, and so my heart would skip a beat everytime we were assigned to the same table for that class. And when she started saying hi to me in the halls, I’d get the same warm fuzzy feeling I thought I could only get with guys. One day, it clicked. Oh, I like her!

The story I just described is what I believe to be a pretty common queer, specifically bisexual, experience. It’s the uncertainty in one’s feelings, the blurring of the line between admiration and attraction. In the beginning, it felt like I had to pick one or the other, because when growing up hetero, the choice really is a binary (you only admire people of the same gender and are only attracted to people of the opposite gender). But after a little bit of time, introspection, and experience with being queer, I’ve come to the grand conclusion that, drumroll please… it can be both admiration and attraction!

Though that conclusion seems a bit “look at you, Captain Obvious!” I feel as though the queer experience is often like this: arriving at pretty self-evident ideas that heteronormativity made obscure. That’s not to say that there aren’t confusing things about being queer—attraction is a confusing thing, and can be made even more confusing by our attempt to understand it, whether that’s through labels or definitions or even some fancy-schmancy-psychoanalysis of the human psyche (I’m looking at you Freud).

This is all to say, like who you like, and don’t be weird if you can’t understand why someone else likes who they like (unless it’s like, a crime. Then you can be concerned).

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Pride Reflection