Subscriber to an 'Alternative Media'

I always knew I wasn't quite normal.

While the neighbourhood kids were outside shaping their masculinity with 'war games', I was inside playing my older brother's CD collection. I was surrounded by boys who collected action figures. I collected beanie babies. They all idolized baseball and basketball superstars and I was infatuated with Miss Piggy. I was a member of my own imaginary society in which there were no gender roles to conform to.

Commercials on the television showed boys playing with GI Joe and girls playing with Barbie. I had no interest - I wasn't big on Nickelodeon anyway. I always preferred the music channels (MTV, VH1 and Much Music) because the tunes were so unfamiliar to what I would hear around me in my suburban setting. I remember seeing No Doubt's video for 'Spiderwebs' and seeing Gwen Stefani thrusting her crotch towards the camera and not thinking anything suggestive, just... 'she rocks'. I watched MTV until all hours of the night trying to see that video, which had turned me on so much visually. One night a parental advisory warning came on the screen, the television stayed black, white fonted and silent for what seemed like an eternity and faded into a shot of people on an elevator staring with such intrigue and disgust - who knew these looks would become familiar to me.

The video was for a song by the band Garbage, entitled 'Queer' - who knew that this was what I actually was. Shot in black and white, with soft, sensual rock music soundtracking the visuals, and a seductive voice serenading the viewer. The video featured a camera following an attractive young woman singing these words to the unknown character - after an extreme makeover, the unknown one is revealed as a slender, offbeat-looking man who moves in a flamboyant manner - then the video colours in. The evoked feeling was one similar to 'Spiderwebs', but this one still felt extremely different, almost unsettling.

'Queer' was not a term in my vocabulary, nor did I ever hear it being used. There was no internet to find the definition for, and the word was absent from the children's dictionaries that I had in my house. Growing up in the suburbs of New York, it wasn't a commonly used word in the least. I didn't realize the metropolitan epicenter that I was out on the outskirts of contained the many possible definitions to the word.

When I reached my adolescence, I was granted entry into the city to see the live shows of the bands that were the soundtrack to my raising. The neighbourhoods that contained these musical gatherings were so magnificent in that they were so unusual and foreign to someone like myself, who was used to rows of houses with nearly identical layouts. One day before a show, I had some spare time before a show and I led myself to a bookstore that identified itself as 'radical'. The genres ranged from feminist theory to anarchist politics to sexual identity. I picked up a book whose title included the familiar (albeit undefined) 'queer' word in its title and consumed it. It was almost like a tall tale - all these sentences that I wouldn't read in newspapers, all these descriptions that I wouldn't see illustrated on the television - so unsettling.

I began submerging myself deeper into this literary underground and with each line I read, I felt an unusual connected feeling. I realized the culture that I was born into was that of a heteronormative society and that I wasn't "normal" because I didn't fit those standards - almost as if I was displaced when my residency was to be chosen. The word that I found so intriguing was actually a word I could be defined under.

To say that mainstream media didn't influence me is silly and I feel its impossible for anyone to say that commercial media didn't shape their lives somehow. While it did not influence me directly, it led me along to an alternative media source, which aided me in choosing an identity - one that is queer.

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