Beyond The Path Of Least Resistance: Trauma Recovery and Queer Liberation

One of the most beautiful parts of my work helping people heal from trauma is bearing witness as they connect to parts of themselves they had to marginalize for their own survival. Their reclamations each have an energy of their own which is powerful to experience. A fundamental aspect of trauma recovery is the resurrection or those marginalized parts—or sometimes their first appearance.

One of my own such reclamations happened, of all places, in a DEI webinar with some colleagues.

I sat in my old home office at my computer on a zoom webinar about the intersections of systems—family systems, community, culture, nation. The systems around us can support of limit our full expression of self in both overt and covert ways. We were asked to reflect on what parts of ourselves have been marginalized in an environment where that was the path of least resistance.

I experienced a moment of exceptional embodied clarity; an internal lightning strike. I gasped and began to weep.

I’m queer, I thought. What have I done to myself?

I’ve been around queer people my entire adult life. In high school, I was the only one who knew that one of my closest friends was gay. I used to be a performing artist. My social circles were and continue to be queer as hell. As a young adult in New York, I once went to bed with a casual friend after a party. We’d both been drinking. Neither of us was very experienced. We were kinda into each other, but there weren’t strong feelings. It was meh sex, and in my youth and naivete I took that as evidence that I wasn’t very gay. So I kept dating men even though I low key hate men. In every relationship I was super aware of gender dynamics and power imbalances that frankly made me want to scream. I froze through more sex than anyone should have when they’re enjoying themselves as little as I was.

My sexual history is a gnarly fucking patchwork; meh sex, sex I was theoretically into that wound up unsatisfying, and literal sexual assault—a lot of it. Sometimes sex was good. Sometimes. My breakups were generally characterized by a repellant mix of rage and deep disgust. I didn’t know what that meant. My friend Jess responded repeatedly over the years to my anguished post-breakup ranting about how men are the worst with “but Laura, why do you keep dating straight men?” and I kept responding;

“Because I’m not that gay.”

And I was wrong.

I’ve since worked through guilt that isn’t mine to hold. It’s become clear all that badness around my romantic and sexual relationships had happened because I’d taken what was presented as the path of least resistance despite many, many pieces of evidence to the contrary. I was never straight, not “straight-ish,” not “a little bisexual but barely enough to count”—which were all ways I clumsily tried to articulate my sexuality in a culture where straight is still presented as the default setting.

It turns out I am totally, emphatically, that gay.

For me, there has been no joy like queer joy. Falling in love with my first girlfriend felt like someone had turned on a light, illuminating this hidden part of me that was glorious and bright and powerful. I was present in that relationship in ways I’ve never been in my life.

We are living through a time when our government is telling us all with some insistence that we do not all have identities and lives that deserve respect. We are living through a time when there’s quite a bit more resistance to knowing that we are queer or trans. We’re seeing erasures of things we know to be true.

It would be the path of least resistance to get quiet. To marginalize those parts of ourselves that our government wants to erase. I will not.

During the 90s at the height of the AIDS epidemic, my queer siblings and ancestors engaged in amazing acts of resistance that ultimately turned the tide of public sentiment and policy. In the span of about three years, the widespread ACT UP protests sparked policy change that got AIDS patients lifesaving care.

The family that raised me didn’t present queer as a valid option for what I could be. The parts of me they didn’t understand were treated with minimization, shame and ridicule rather than care or respect. So I have really tenuous, painful connections to my own family of origin—and to my literal ancestral lineage.

But now that I know who I am, I suddenly have a whole culture of queerness in which I find myself accepted as I am. I can relate to chosen family, and I can relate to queer ancestry in a way that is powerfully fortifying.

I call on the resilience and resistance of my queer ancestors daily, knowing that in the words of Dan Savage speaking about the AIDS epidemic time, “we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced at night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we were going to win then and we did.”

I never thought I was going to win, not in a family where I was shamed for stupid shit like using too many q-tips as part of my own abuse. I didn’t really grow up believing happiness was an option.

But I’ve felt it, and I am not going back, not when I know I have the option to stand in the light and on the shoulders of folks whose lineage is love, is acceptance, and is the fight for liberation. Healing, learning to be more fully my whole self has connected me to my personal power, to the power of community, and to the possibility of healthier relationships. It’s connected me to self-esteem. It’s connected me to pride.

In our journey toward wholeness and healing, each of us has many such reclamations—where we are able to grow into more of our whole selves. Where we cultivate a deepening of ourselves, expanding our capacity to more skillfully be present and navigate the world.

I am so proud of my own healing, and I’m proud to guide others on the path. We all deserve wholeness.