She’d just come back from a hockey social, while I’d been round to my friend Lily’s house for dinner with a few people that we both knew. Nothing too special. I asked my flatmate if she’d made my excuses, to which she replied, “Don’t worry – I told them you were with your queer friends.”
“Your queer friends.” It was a phrase that stuck with me, mainly because I hadn’t thought of it that way. Of course, technically speaking, it was no different to saying “your hockey friends” or “your course friends” or “your home friends”. All are subcategories of friendship which are not necessarily diminishing. But it felt different to me. The associations I had with the phrase “queer friends” conjured up a whole world of chosen families and safe spaces that I’d never directly associated with that particular group of people with before.
University can be an odd place when it comes to forming friendships. I have friends I live with, alongside friends from my course, and friends I’ve made through extracurriculars like the university paper or sports teams. But, as my flatmate had pointed out, I belong to another, more informal group at university – the LGBTQ+ community. Like a university society, we have our own club nights, our own unspoken dress codes, our dramas and our inside jokes. On paper, besides being LGBTQ+, we had very little in common between us. But somehow, we always managed to find one another.
Of course, being part of a particular group makes you noticeable. One of the most popular posts on my college’s anonymous ‘confessions’ Facebook page was entitled ‘third years as freshers’, in which the anonymous poster paired up people they thought were similar. I was paired with a girl whose name I didn’t recognise. Upon further investigation, we had very little in common. Apart from one thing – we were both openly LGBTQ+. It’s not uncommon for things like that to happen to me. On multiple occasions I’ve had friends say, ‘Oh, you’d love XYZ, they’re gay as well, and really cool!’ At the beginning of this year, I had so many people tell me that I should start watching Warrior Nun that I began to strongly suspect there must be queer women in it (spoiler alert: I was right).
Being LGBTQ+, most would agree, is about more than just sexual orientation or gender identity. It is a way of being and knowing. The group of friends that gathered at Lily’s house that night had talked about art, theatre, politics, fashion, climate change, and so much more. It would be strange, and wrong, I thought, to say that the core of our friendship relied only on our LGBTQ+ identities.
Upon reflection, I realised that although I had never thought of myself as having a ‘queer’ friendship group, our queerness had undeniably been at the core of our togetherness and played a hand in forming my own ‘out and proud’ identity whilst at university. I remembered how isolated I’d felt at school, in the closet with no openly LGBTQ+ peers to look up to and very little media representation and felt a rush of thankfulness that having an LGBTQ+ friend group was something that I could now safely contemplate. Then again, I also began to resent the implication that queerness was some kind of extra-curricular activity for which a club was needed, like football or chess.