Parallels
There is nothing for you where you grow up. Most of the people who are like you you know only online handles of, and you'll have to go to a big city to find others like you in person. If you can make it out, you hear the biggest and most glamorous contingent is out in the bay area.
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You were different from others, in a way that made it so that you were unpleasant to be around. Your peers did not take pains to hide this from you. You learn, slowly and carefully over your second decade of existence, how much it hurts to hide who you are, and how much it hurts others around you when you do not.
You build a little shell around yourself. You find ways to be otherwise likeable, valuable. You take on a certain apologism for the way you are.
The first time you meet more of your kind in person, it is in a quiet bar in a new city where you otherwise know no one. How queer the sensation, to have looked around at every strange new face, and felt at home.
They didn't just tolerate you; they liked you, liked your perspectives, thought about the world in the same way.
You had not even dreamt that such a thing could happen. The most you'd ever wished for, back then, was a friend or two who would take you as you are, even if they didn't quite understand.
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"I just don't see why they have to make it their whole personality."
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private dm
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You didn't choose to be this way. It would be easier, in many ways, if you weren't. But now that you've found people who are like you, you wouldn't give it up for the world.
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The idea that it's a cult kind of makes you laugh. You're not building this for anyone except the people who are already one of you, or feel a longing to be. You're building this for the ghost of your eighteen year old self, alone and made awkward by the loneliness.
The thought of outsiders coming into your spaces brings you no joy at all. Haven't they taken enough from you? Why can't they all just fuck off and leave you alone? You leave the door open, though, because it's the only way to guarantee that the people who need to find you, will.
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Grouphouses at 35. No timeline for kids, no timeline for retirement. When you join this community you stop having a traditional future.
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Wiser members of your community tell you that despite the chasm of understanding, the mutual mislike, you need to make an effort to make yourself palatable to the wider world. There are larger things at stake.
So you self-police, try to clean up your image. Exhort others to do the same.
The people you're most embarrassed by are the ones with nowhere else to go.
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For the local festival last year you took them out to Hanlan's Point. You have to warn people not to go into the bushes south of the beach without knowing what they're getting in for, because it's an active cruise site even in the middle of the day.
There's an idle hope that the location helps the not insignificant queer and trans contingent feel a little better about swimming in public, but the reason you do it is because you feel better there. One more group of weirdos, on this beach that was claimed by people like you a century ago. A little continuity.
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Trying to clock each other, in the wild.
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You hear "you're one of the good ones," often, with barely any irony. What they mean is that you can pass.
One friend introduces you to his new girlfriend as a rationalist, and then immediately goes about describing the community in the worst possible light. What makes him think it's okay to talk to you like that? Why do you let him talk to you like that, what makes you think that you win by refusing to flinch?
Another friend throws up her hands in disgust after her rant about the rationalists leaves you visibly upset. You know I like you, she says, and I like all your friends. It's true; she's in the discords, she's at the festivals. She's even helped you run them. She's proven herself an ally, so why is it that she isn't allowed to speak her truth without you blowing up at her?
You try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they don't know how to relate to you. Perhaps they don't know how to relate to the part of themselves that are too like you. Perhaps it's your own fault, somehow.
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"Rationalist adjacent". "Post-rat". It's better for your health to not be mistaken for one of us, even if you are an ally.
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Without the community, you would have strangled this part of yourself to death, in order to survive and to fit in with the rest of the world.
If you were born a hundred years ago, you would have found yourself a husband and a normal life. Or perhaps you would have become a very weird nun. Or killed yourself. Not known that life can be this sweet and wonderful. That you can have this form of relief. That you were numb in the first place.
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Modify your body, transcend the flesh. Take the strange drugs that are available on the party circuit.
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The community, its cultures and conventions, the meaning, the goodness, the joy, the grief, the way it makes you feel like you're close to dying, the way it makes you feel immortal — it separates you from a normal life, it separates you from your family.
You can't even come out to them. What you are is illegible, in a way that your queerness isn't. (But even the queerness - it's hard for people who aren't to understand, isn't it?)
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There is no history. There are no elders, only middle aged weirdos. When you finally make it out to the big city you are warned by the whisper network about which ones will try to fuck you.
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It is a little juvenile, caring about this part of you so much. You're generally expected to outgrow that in a couple of years.
The best of you aren't exactly closeted, but... it no longer consumes them that they are this way, and it's no longer a big part of their identity. They're free to care more about other things. The other things are often also beautiful, and generative, and good.
You wonder why you aren't like them.
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Devon Price writes in a recent post about vampirism and queerness:
Vampires in Rice’s world are afflicted with an all-consuming loneliness —but their only options for companionship are a couple of dozen of other creepy assholes who have interweaving backstories and beef that makes The L Word’s Chart look like a child’s hopscotch drawing. As they fumble through relationships constantly retraumatizing one another, they lack any guidance for how to actually do being a vampire correctly, because all of their elders have already died.
If that doesn’t remind you of your own queer coming-of-age, well, maybe you’re younger and better adjusted than me.
You're too young to have experienced this in the gay community, but it reminds you of another community you are in.
Price also writes:
As queer people, we are vastly fewer in number than the heterosexual society that surrounds us, and because they have convinced us we are evil and disgusting, we carry a lot of baggage into our every relationship. When we start to find one another, we usually aren’t very good at being loving, but our desperate need to form relationships with one another is also what defines us.
The vampires in Interview have no choice but to find what is lovable in the annoying bitches they have hated for the last three hundred years and the exes who’ve thrown them off of buildings. For us, having a viable social life requires learning to smile across the potluck table at an ex when what we’d really like to do is carve out their throat.
You know, in case you need another reason to not move to the Bay.
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There's no reason that the culture that arose around same-sex attraction would have rainbows and raves and piercings, the concept of camp and haircuts that will make your mom throw up her hands.
There's no reason that the culture that arose around a strange autodidact's warnings about AI progress would have soylent and catgirls and poly, solstice ceremonies and sprawling multi-author fiction written on forum software.
There's no reason. And yet.
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