The start of..a memoir perhaps.

Queer: strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric.

Suspicious.

Dubious.

And later a word for people like me.

Before it was identity, before it was politics, before it was something you could claim out loud,queer just meant

different.

Off.

I think I knew that version first.

I grew up in Henty, a town of about four hundred people, where everything was known before it happened and nothing ever really changed. One main street. Dust. Silence that settled into your bones. The kind of place where difference didn’t announce itself, it disappeared. There were rules (even if no one said them out loud), about how girls should be, about what love should look like, about what was normal. I didn’t have the language for any of it yet. But I knew when something didn’t fit and I did not.

I was eight the first time the world cracked open.

Not in a big, cinematic way. Not in a moment anyone else would have noticed. Just a television, a lounge room, the hum of something ordinary.

And then

him.

Carson Kressley, on Queer Eye, larger than anything I had ever seen in my small, quiet world.

Bright.

Funny.

Unapologetic.

"The only thing that separates us from the heterosexuals is our ability to accessorize.”

He moved like he had never been told to shrink. Spoke like he had never learned how. There was something about him that didn’t make sense to me and because of that, it made perfect sense. I thought he was the most fabulous thing I had ever seen. Not in a way I could explain. Not in a way that fit into the categories I had been given.

At eight years old, I had dreams that he would come to Henty. That somehow, impossibly, he would find his way to our tiny town on the map and he would see me and he would want to marry me. Despite the fact that he was a grown man. Despite the fact that he was gay. Despite the fact that none of it made any logical sense.

But that’s the thing about queerness, it doesn’t begin with logic.

It begins with recognition.

I was 8.

I didn’t understand sexuality.

I didn’t understand gender.

I didn’t understand why he felt so different from everything I had ever known.

I just knew that whatever that was, I wanted to be closer to it.