“So, Are You Gay?”

Five hours into first-year orientation, amid Annenberg’s clamor, I sat across from someone I’d just met. In our obligatory introductions, we scratched only names before she asked: “Are you gay?” We had not yet exchanged our living arrangements and potential concentrations. I feigned deafness. Surely, the echo chamber deceived me. But she sat erect, confident. Excitedly, she repeated herself: “So, are you gay?”

Back home, I knew better than to answer that question — not that many people asked. The culture of my all-male high school offered rigid forms of masculinity that excluded queerness, queer visibility, or gayness itself. The school and its students rarely intended to isolate queer students, but it happened. For many of my peers, to ask if students were gay — to live among them, even — threatened their masculinity. Unwinding the impression of an apparently preferable masculinity was hard; reimagining ourselves without hypermasculinity was harder still. Embracing such a reimagining would be queer.

I can’t quite pinpoint the last time I introduced myself as gay before I arrived at Harvard. Save for what’s elapsed in my first semester, the months stretch endlessly between me and my proverbial coming out. Few people knew in high school. Frankly, I never intended to alter this privacy; I’m quite happy choosing whom I tell, when I tell, or if I disclose at all. I want to exist beyond my queerness.

But in Annenberg, my queerness crystallized atop the table. When I nodded yes, she celebrated. She danced. “I knew it, I knew it!” she cheered. This reception to my queerness felt unfamiliar. It seemed generous for a simple facet of my existence. That evening, we neglected our future concentrations and dorm situations. That evening, we talked about my gayness.

Now, the queer label seemed to capture me completely in the eyes of those around me.

I could not tell you how I envisioned queerness in college. It was not something I thought too much about. Queer theorists like J. Jack Halberstam and Dustin B. Goltz argue for a queer temporality, the idea that a separate chronology exists for queer people. Queer people experience time differently. They succumb to time vortexes of coming out, of gender transition, of generational inheritances, differently than their counterparts. I think this applies to my experiences, too. We experience queered relationships shaped by how we interpret and interact with gay identities. Yet in high school, I pedaled between queered and unqueered experiences. I had access to both.

So, I contented myself with personal rituals of becoming. I remember the first time the algorithm queued a “Mean Girls” compilation in my YouTube watchlist. I was a sixth grader who stood at the cusp of discovering the perceived alliance between gay men and women. I saw this through Damian’s relationships, and, soon, the compilations assembled themselves: Kurt and Rachel encircled the world of “Glee,” the titular characters in “Will and Grace” embodied my couple goals, Steven and Linda held the synchronicity I aspired to in “Get Real.” From these I’d conceive of myself as a component of an integral symbiosis — a girl and her gay best friend.

As I got older, my experiences inside and outside school diverged almost into distinct realities. My relationships with female friends outside of school modeled the gay best friend trope even as I never emphasized my sexuality. Here, gay actualization mirrored what I had imagined it would be from those middle school years spent fermenting on the internet. I played a “feminine” role like Tanner in “G.B.F.” — yes, that’s what the film is titled — dabbling in exclusive girls’ gossip and maintaining “girl code.”

In high school, though, I did not aspire to this idyllic image, conscious of perceptions of queerness. I chose not to publicly disclose my sexuality, and my relationships transcended the GBF trope. My relationships with my male peers pluralized the conventions of a gay man’s friendships. I was not a GBF; I was simply a best friend. I found solace in the knowledge that there was no qualifier or requirement for queerness. Perhaps the very lack of avenues paralleling the expectations of queer pop culturalism invited me to reinvent queerness as it fit me.

***

My conversation during orientation at Annenberg was not unique. While packing up after a panel in the SOCH lecture hall, another peer asked if I was gay. Upon her discovery, she, too, beamed. She clapped her hands and hugged me tightly. I thought it was a satirical joke. It was not.

She told me: “Chris, I am mother of the gays,” citing her many gay friends at home. She told me that I would love her. I had known her for mere days. I was not in search of a mother. Predictably, our subsequent conversations devolved into similar myopia: her relationships, my queerness, and how those two destined us toward friendship.

These encounters felt harmless at first. I take no offense to the jarring nature of first meetings. But I did not expect my relationship-building to evoke my queer pocket of YouTube clips so well. Our cultural conscience — at Harvard and elsewhere — ebbs and flows on the crux of queer plurality. We celebrate solidarity and allyship in a community that embodies monolithic tendencies through its self-advocacy for queer people. However, while useful for activism, queer people exist as unique individuals. An ineffable tension arises between the pragmatic consolidation of queer identities for the heteronormative gaze and the recognition of queer people as multitudinous.

Type in “a girl’s GBF” into Google and you will be bombarded by countless articles asserting the importance of the symbiotic relationships of women and gay men. Often, these perpetuate the objectification of gayness. In each encounter, one assumes that I, a gay man, must be inclined toward friendships with women. They suppose that I am like other gay people.

In some ways, I contribute to this phenomenon. I have, for example, befriended more girls than guys at Harvard. As a result, I sense that my queerness can appear unoriginal — that I am in line with my middle school YouTube homepage, drawing upon reductive tropes of queer encounters. Yet I don’t want the tendencies of my current relationships to premeditate others. My female friends do not prevent me from fostering interpersonal relationships with men.

Recently, a peer introduced me to some of his friends. I found it interesting that he, having inquired about my sexuality during move-in, introduced me to his gay friends. Call it a pattern: I meet his friends, we talk, we turn out to be gay. These fledgling encounters ended once those people exited the room: We had nothing in common, shared no all-important vibes. But to this person, I appeared an anomaly that unsettled his perception of queer relationships. “So did you like him?” he’d ask. Not all my friends must be queer, nor do all gay men fall in love with each other. Queerness is not substantive fodder for bonding, let alone romance.

This resortment to tropes exists beyond the interactivity of women and gay men: Gay men, too, can succumb to the expectations of assumed fraternity. Among the friends brought to my room, a blonde boy. I was sick — three makeshift trash cans overflowing with first-year flu — when he arrived in the late evening. He knocked on my door, and as I scrambled for a mask, I heard from the other side: “Are you the white twink?” Aghast, I summoned the few coherent thoughts I had, stuttering, “I guess.”

I’ve never celebrated labels. I find them stifling, their social weight burdensome. I am mixed-race and unconcerned with my body shape. For the 20 minutes they hovered over the threshold of my room, I learned that he, too, “was a twink” and that we — jointly — should explore the school’s orgy culture. I was disoriented, slightly pissed off, and, strangely, amused. Here, two queer people shared nothing in common.

***

On a liberal-leaning campus, well-intended inclusivity and reductive blanketing blur into each other. There might not be anything inherently wrong with orienting oneself to a gay man — playing fairy godmother or relationship curator — but such actions implicitly confine the constructions of queerness on campus. Critic Michael D. Warner famously argues that queerness exists in relationship to “heteronormativity,” the body of social perceptions that envision heterosexuality as the default. Queerness thus encompasses everything beyond the heteronormative and is something queer people should hold agency over.

Labels are convenient. They allow us to deconstruct complexity, to take multifaceted people and reduce them to the components we understand. Those who supplant their inexperience with queerness often defer to agents of reduction, molding the queer “other” into their lexicon. We invalidate the recipients of imposed labels at the expense of our own comfort. The onus is on others to confront their discomfort around the notion of queerness. That begins with freeing ourselves from the language of labels.

When I’m courted as a gay best friend, or forcibly introduced to other gay men, I feel inhibited, not liberated. I find myself re-encountering the tug and tussle between queerness and heteronormativity, the constellation that maps where I am queered and unqueered. Sometimes, I wonder if the YouTube clips cased in the little metal box entrap my own identity the same way others have done, perhaps unwittingly. Maybe I am the gay boy in search of his on-campus mother. Maybe I am destined to confine myself to the queer people I meet.

Often, we scrutinize popular media for metrics of progress. It would take more than ten fingers for me to count the video essays that argue, in kaleidoscopic permutations, that “Heartstopper” finally brings an unabashed joy to queer television. Finally, high school-aged boys uncover their queerness. Finally, two boys are accepted for being gay without one dying in the end. Finally, queer people of various identities navigate their own queer stories. Their individuality lends them depth and dynamics beyond a single archetypal relationship — they are all queer yet distinct.

Films examining queerness in isolation, such as the German-made film “You & I” or the recently released “All of Us Strangers,” spotlight intra-queer relationships as opposed to ones between queer and non-queer people. Three boys driving across Germany in the former, or the intimate depiction of queer discovery in the latter narrows the lens of storytelling in a growing pool of gay cinema. In other words, they can focus on individuals who experience a particular facet of queerness. Their experiences are simultaneously queered and unqueered by the very fact that they can be examined both in broader comparative terms and in intense detail. You don’t view them as gay characters attached to straight ones. They just exist.

But “Mean Girls” and “Heartstopper” share similarities as products of realized progress: They embody our ongoing pursuit of better representing queer people. Inclusive queerness falters at our failure to realize it. Maybe it’s time to challenge ourselves to be more original — to see radical inclusivity as something that reaches beyond gay fraternity and GBF tropes. Our inclusion must see queer people as individuals, in the fact that we, like everyone else, want and aspire toward different things. We exist in multitudes. Our task is to engage with queer possibility on its own terms.