I was born in the right generation. I am grateful for my vape, my vibrator, my air-fryer, my bluetooth headphones and my iPhone. I checked my screen time and I apparently spend an average of 3-6 hours on Instagram per day. Rookie numbers, in my opinion.
Being queer and chronically online are two concepts that I believe go hand in hand. Who am I if I’m unable to list every film or television show that involves bareback off the top of my head? As a queer person of colour (love pulling this card), the internet serves many purposes for me, including being a platform that allows me the ability to connect with other queers, who are just as equally sick in the head as I am.
I hear many stories of introverted gays finding lifelong friends through Discord, Brockhampton subreddits, mutual Instagram story liking—and even Facebook marketplace. I’m proud of, and grateful for, the friends that I have in my life now, but I didn’t feel like this for a long time. I wasn’t close with my family and I always struggled to make friends in school. But as I’ve gotten older, and through listening to the experiences of others, what I’ve come to realise is that despite there being so many of us who exist in the same timeline, queer people still spend many years of their lives feeling completely alone. And one of the only ways to mend this isolation is via online communication.
I’d always felt very out of place in my childhood and adolescence. I was a girl who was confused about being a girl, but I knew that I definitely wasn’t a boy. As a result, I underwent a million mental, emotional and physical changes, pushing and pulling between hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine qualities. I think “freak of nature” would be the best way to describe me.
Code-switching was a very common occurrence for me; I liked to try out new identities and qualities with people and see which ones would be received well. This never really worked out in my favour. I think children are a lot more perceptive than people let on, so a lot of people were apprehensive towards making friends with me because I just wasn’t very trustworthy, and also I was just fucking weird.
It’s kind of funny, when high school bullies clock something about you before you do. Guys in high school used to call me a f*ggot or a tr*nny and I would feel miserable, because I used to tell myself that they were wrong and that I could pass. I felt so much insecurity regarding my gender and sexuality and who I was as a person. I was also raised Christian, so I’m sure some underlying religious trauma influenced those feelings too.
I was a leaking pot of repressed guilt, shame, trauma, and a touch of obliviousness.
After escaping the nightmarish hellscape that was high school, I was given more freedom to figure out who I really was and, in time, learn to accept myself wholeheartedly. The first introductions I had of queerness were yaoi and those millennial bisexual memes on Tumblr. You know the ones, like, if you cuff your jeans and own a Fjällräven Kånken backpack, you’re bisexual. I didn’t really feel like I resonated with either of these things, yes, I am a pervert and yes, I was cuffing my jeans at the time, but I needed to know more. This couldn’t be the only LGBTQIA+ representation that existed.
I spent many nights reading articles online about gender, sexuality, and what it ‘meant’ to be queer before I finally found what I was looking for my whole life: the term non-binary (non-bino, if you’re Australian).
I was pretty gagged, initially, reading about this. I felt like a lot of questions I had about myself were finally answered, and I didn’t feel like such a mistake, a lab experiment gone wrong. I received the confirmation that what I was experiencing was real, and valid. A part of my loneliness was finally cured.
So, the obvious next step after this was trying to find community—trying to find other people who understood how I felt, and who had gone through similar experiences with their queerness. This was hard as, unfortunately, I live in a colonial white-centric ass country. Straya.
I went out to gay clubs, and also used Instagram to find other gay people in Naarm (Melbourne). What was interesting about this was that even being in spaces that were curated for gay people, I came to realise that only a certain kind of queer person was acknowledged and praised in these spaces. White cis gays. Specifically, white cis gays who only fuck other white cis gays.
I see how white gays try to combat these accusations that they’re sheltered and borderline racist. Putting “she/they” in your bio on IG to try and communicate that you understand intersectionality and experience the same issues queer people of colour experience does not excuse you from the reality that you don’t make friends with or date any person who isn’t white and also upper middle class. These friendship group are, in my personal opinion, incestuous, inherently racist, ugly and—to be honest—y’all fucking smell like prolapse and poppers. I still think about the time I went to a lesbian bar, and I counted three people of colour (including myself) there that night.
Even being in a space that I had every right to be in, those familiar feelings of isolation I used to experience were coming back again.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. With every passing day, I could feel my sanity slipping. The feelings of suffocation and despair were growing larger in size. Honestly, I was ready to die. Why should I even attempt living in a world that clearly didn’t care for my existence? I felt like Kathy Griffin when she famously said “I need to talk to a gay person” (REAL).
So, I submitted entries to magazines, I was active on websites like WeHeartIt, Tumblr and Pinterest, I littered throwaway comments and likes all throughout Instagram, I followed anyone who I had an inkling was also queer and living in Melbourne, and started heavily shitposting online to build some sort of following. GRASSROOTS.
This following increased the more people became aware of my existence, and blew up when I started my podcast, thanks to Reddit and the Youtube algorithm. Utilising the internet to track down every queer person I wanted to be friends with—domestically and internationally—was one of the best decisions of my entire life. My days of being groomed on Kik by 40 year old men were over!
I’m really grateful for the queer friends that I’ve connected with over the course of my life, especially in the more recent years of my life. I have a lot of queer friends that live in really close proximity to me that I spend most of my time with. When I think of them, my heart swells a thousand sizes bigger. Interestingly enough, I discovered that a few of us have lived essentially next door to each other for most of our lives, but had only recently become aware of each others’ existence. This is a discovery that I still can barely wrap my head around.
I spent my whole youth thinking that I was the only gay loser living in my area, but apparently I wasn’t. My future best friends were only a 2-5-minute drive away. I wish there was an app like Grindr, but for finding gay people in your area horny for friendship (instead of smooth, young Asians). School would have been a whole lot easier had I known there were others going through the exact same misery.
I also have a lot of queer friends I primarily communicate with online. This works for me. I experience really intense burnout at times and can only handle conversations via Instagram DMs. I think a lot of other queer people find comfort in communicating online as well, it can feel a lot less extreme than face-to-face conversations. It’s definitely a lot more convenient if your plans for the day consist of bed-rotting and only getting up to use the toilet or raid your pantry for snacks.
I used to think that I was eternally doomed to suffer in this life. I wouldn’t say the suffering ends; it comes and goes. But despite everything I’ve been through, I take solace in the fact that I didn’t have to suffer alone. With enough motivation and the will to change, I eventually learnt how to find my community.
It can be really confronting, to learn how to connect and reach out, after feeling so isolated from your peers for such a long period of time. I did ask myself why I decided to write about this particular experience of mine. Normally the pieces I write are quite bleak and depressing. But I think that after reflecting on the relationships I’ve obtained in my life, I feel really hopeful (a feeling I’m not necessarily used to, but a feeling that I like nonetheless).
I feel really proud of myself for learning to communicate with others and make friends, despite having such unhealthy and depraved examples of relationships, and having to teach myself how to trust others. It’s important to recognise that as queer people, survival is an in-built instinct. In the face of adversity and struggle, we always find ways to come out on top and flourish. Queer existence is resistance, period. Happiness isn’t a pipe dream for people like us. When I think about the happiest moments of my life, I think about watching TV with my friends or listening to music together on the bus with the same set of earphones.
So, from one incredibly lonesome individual to another, whether it’s through Discord, Reddit, Instagram, or another obscure website in a dark corner of The Internet, I urge you to find support and love through chosen family and friendship—the support and love you’ve always deserved to receive.
This article was proudly sponsored by Pride Foundation Australia.