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Queer in Quarantine

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Austin

Queer in Quarantine.

Capturing Northwestern students' thoughts on sexuality and gender after a year in isolation.

by Maia Spoto

If gender and sexuality are a performance, what do you do when you have no audience?

This project focuses on the geography of identity. It wonders how abrupt physical and social pandemic displacement has affected the way Northwestern students experience and perform gender and sexuality. This project also questions what might come next. Queerness defines itself in part through its unboundedness and unpredictability. In a world that is similarly in flux, what will happen when the audience returns?

 

I am a queer person who came out during the pandemic. I spoke with 12 other queer Northwestern students on the record this month, and I present slices of eight of their stories here. Through our conversations, we mapped out the pandemic’s queer geographies and its ensuing series of performances. We discussed virtual relationships, clunky earrings, yellow shirts, unsettling mirrors, homemade haircuts, gay posters, flirting in bars, childhood bedspreads, ear piercings, queer-coded Instagrams, and more. We laughed, cried and thought together. 

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The most common geography that knit their narratives together was the video app Tik Tok. Gay Tik Tok, specifically. One student told me the app’s algorithm ultimately pushed them to come out: ““My For You page was like, ‘Oh, this video is here because you’re bi. And I was like, ‘Sure.’” Queer digital space is robust, but queer physical space was shrinking even prior to the pandemic. Between 2007 and 2019, 37 percent of queer bars and nightclubs in the United States closed, and as of 2020, fewer than 20 lesbian bars remained in the United States. At Northwestern, the current Gender and Sexuality Resource Center only holds 10 people. As vaccination rates rise and people begin to gather in person again, I wonder how our geographies will continue to evolve. 

 

I am grateful for our queer communities. I am hopeful for the future. 

 

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Some names have been changed for safety reasons. All pseudonyms are indicated by an asterisk.

Austin 

Austin will wear a bright yellow shirt this summer.

He’s embracing pastels because over the past year he’s grown comfortable being outspoken.

 

“Outspoken in a political sense … but also just advocating for myself in a greater sense, for who I am as a person,” Austin said. “That’s a lot of work.”

Daisy

A painting of a nude girl lounging on a lily pad stands out amid a collage of posters in Daisy's college apartment bedroom. 

In her room at home, she wouldn’t have felt comfortable hanging any of those posters. That space, she said, doesn’t feel like it is her own. She still remembers the day she first started questioning her sexuality as a young teenager.

 

“I remember coming home to my bedroom and freaking out,” Daisy said. “Just looking at myself in the mirror, telling myself that I was crazy, that I didn’t like girls.” 

Luan*

Big, clunky lesbian jewelry. hand-made during quarantine, haunts the corner of Luan’s room.

At the start of the pandemic, they were presenting like a "stereotypical femme lesbian": acrylic nails, full makeup, winged eyeliner, bandanas, clips. But after they moved from their Texas home back to campus for the fall, Luan found femininity quite uncomfortable.

 

“When I was at home … it was very much a drag performance for myself,” Luan said. “I said I liked it on myself, but that was not the truth. I was just projecting it onto myself.” 

Sadd

Before he started his transition, Sadd would tear the mirrors from his bedroom walls and put them on the floor. He couldn’t look in them. 

When the pandemic hit and Sadd returned to that bedroom, peering back into those mirrors unsettled him.

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“I remember coming home for that first time, looking in the mirror and being like, ‘Holy shit, I look like a man,’” Sadd said. “‘I’m so hairy, compared to how I used to be. My whole body has changed.’ It was really validating, but also really weird.” 
 

Tanisha

As a teenager, Tanisha attended an all-girls boarding school in Dehradun, India.

That space, they said, was at once extremely gendered — structured along the dimension of a binary — but also free from gender. There was no male “other” to juxtapose femininity against.

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Her conceptualization of gender sharpened when she came to Northwestern. In a white co-ed institution for the first time, she started seeing herself not as “Tanisha, a human” but as “Tanisha, someone who’s affected by misogyny.”

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At the same time, they felt they could not attain femininity.

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“Am I trying to distance myself from it because I truly don’t feel that way, or because I’m conditioned to be masculinized in a white space here at Northwestern?” Tanisha said.

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Leo

Leo felt “kind of trapped” when they moved home at the start of the pandemic.

“I would think about gender a little bit, but I’d just kind of be sitting in my room,” they said. “Being like, ‘Do most people feel a gender when they’re sitting alone in their room?’” 

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Kay*

When Kay moved back home at the start of the pandemic, she immediately painted the bright purple, flower-adorned walls of her childhood bedroom a neutral color and purchased a new bedspread.

Sitting in that room, she said, felt like “too much.” Her mental health took a hit. For the couple of months before she moved back to Evanston, Kay journaled, thought hard about her sexuality, and found herself on bisexual Tik Tok.

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“My For You page was like, ‘Oh, this (video) is here because you’re bi,’” Kay said. “And I was like, ‘Sure.’”  
 

Sam*

Sam's closest friends from high school are “all generally very gay.”


So when he returned home to the West Coast in March, conversations about queerness surrounded him, and questions about his own sexuality bubbled up to the surface. 

 

“(At first) I was like, ‘Oh, maybe? Yeah. I don’t know, maybe I’m straight lite,’” Sam said. “And then I was like, ‘No, no honey. You’re just gay.’” 

Daisy
Sadd
Luan
Tanisha
Leo
Kay
Sam
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