Romeo & Juliet, Trans Cringe and The Lie of Straight Romance.

R&J is queer coded and I don't care if you disagree.

“NO! hE iS a CiSgEnDeR bOy AnD sHe Is A cIsGeNdEr GiRl! Blah blah blah”... I don’t care. If y’all can be okay with Shakespeare adaption after Shakespeare adaption set anywhere from a post-apocalyptic wasteland (Warm Bodies) to motorcycle gangs (Sons of Anarchy) to high-school rom-coms (10 Things I Hate About You) then I can say shit like: “Romeo and Juliet is super fucking gay!” 

In this obnoxious queer’s opinion there’s a key defining feature that draws a line between “straight love stories” and “queer love stories” and it is all to do with the expectation of ‘change’.

Picture it, a mash up of every heterosexual film you’ve ever seen. The entire span of guy-on-girl romance always seems to boil down to a stunningly narrow set of circumstances. She loves him, but he doesn’t notice her. Or we have the other flavour of heterosexual romance (it’s the same flavour but now in a masculine blue wrapper), the one where he’s in love with her and she thinks he’s just some loser. That is until she sees that he’s kind and sensitive and then suddenly his flaws (physical or personality) don’t really matter. Whereas for the pink-branded-romance she isn’t one of the pretty, popular girls and it’s only when she takes down her ponytail and discards her glasses (bitch, I am blind without my glasses!) that he changes his mind.

Side note: I’m so damn conflicted here. The feminist in me wants her to tie her hair back up and be like, “No! if he can’t love you like this honey, then he doesn’t deserve you!” But the transwoman in me is like, “Yaaas slut! Shake that hair out! Show ‘em what you got!”. It’s a strange time inside my head. 

Regardless, in both variants we get a classic storytelling structure. The hero embarks on a process of self-examination and comes to the conclusion that they need to change in order to find love. And because we are a species of dumb apes that like a comforting structure we need to see a character inauthentically change first in order to see them do it authentically later. Without those initial stumbling attempts, those Toby-Maguire-dancing-spider-man moments of cringe, the true change later feels unearned.

And so what do we see played out again and again? Stories about dorky women trying to be sexy. Stories of nerdy guys trying to be cool. And they fail. Usually hilariously so. There’s pratfalls (we seem to really like watching women fall over as a way to signify they are trying to change inauthentically) and general embarrassment. But once these second act trials and failures play out we then get to see our hero make another attempt.

This time it’s the authentic one. 

They have realised that the thing that makes them worthy of love has been there all along. Like a pair of ruby slippers that could send you where you belong at any point, deep down inside of them has been the source of their happiness the whole time. They didn’t need to change… they just needed to believe in themselves… they just need to spot apologising for being the person they’ve always been. And even though they stumble through it, the object of their desire overcomes their initial dismissal (or revulsion) at the thought of them as a sexual partner and the “hero gets the girl/guy”.

Yet another side note: I just typed that and now I wanna see a film where some anxious bisexual is torn between loving two different people only to discover it’s the same person just boy-moding and girl-moding.

Oh! How sweet! Finding self-worth, changing how you feel about yourself becomes the key to having people fall in love with you? Frankly I think that’s some straight people nonsense. Let’s put aside the fact that the vast majority of love stories we’re sold about love aren’t as gentle as the “how you gonna love somebody if you can’t love yourself, honey?” crowd would have you believe.

Fuckin’ spare me. 

We all know that most romantic storytelling is no more sophisticated than Sandy at the end of Grease in her vacuum-tight leathers turning herself into a sexpot to please a boy. Whereas Danny gets to be the sensitive guy we learnt he always was on the inside while Sandy needs engage in the performative femininity that Danny is attracted to. The contrivance is clear, writ large in the way she discards her cigarette and awkwardly crushes it into the ground. Apparently this qualifies as “authentic character change”. I know, I know, little-miss-hot-takes-finger-on-the-pulse is citing a film from 1978, but this shit is baked in now. All through the intervening decades we are still the sort of dumb apes who credulously accept Sandy Olsson supplants her identity in favour of Danny’s wants. Nothing has changed. I think think it’s worse now. A major studio can spend $100 million on a turd like Passengers in 2016 where a dude gets to “soft-kill” a woman with no consequences. That studio genuinely thought that we would swallow a story where a woman loses her entire life because of “a man’s loneliness” and he just gets to be, what? Forgiven? Celebrated as a sympathetic hero?

And guess what? We did.

That movie, despite the flurry of online leftist weirdos (ahem), went on to gross over $300 million. It was a success. It was considered “good”. A story where a woman gives up her entire existence because “a man likes her” (bitch he doesn’t even KNOW you). What a load of fucking bullshit. 

So what the fuck does this have to do with Romeo & Juliet being super fucking gay? In straight storytelling the challenge is to overcome the flaws of who you are. In the case of Passengers, the woman, Aurora (the laziest-ass piece of character naming outside of a JK Rowling novel) has to overcome the flaw of wanting to have agency over her own life (how dare she!). A generous assessment would be that in straight love stories the message is that you need to change yourself (or change the person you love), but in reality, straight love stories are more about framing a woman’s self-worth as being the enemy.

We don’t question that Juliet and Romeo are in love. The celebration of their love is a celebration of the power of cupid’s arrow. The purity of their total acceptance of each other through “love at first sight” and the tragedy is that their worlds prevent them from having it. The opinions of parents, brothers and lawmakers (all men) are the villain. As opposed to straight romance films where the villain often ends up being the one the woman is doomed to be with. But queer love stories? Stories about queer love are different. Queer love stories are about secret feelings. Queer love stories are about forbidden desire. These stories unify the characters in their love for each other. Queer love stories are about having to make a decision between the life you have and the life you could have. Do you choose your safe and comfortable life with your friends and family? Or do you give it all up for a chance at happiness. In queer stories the circumstances of the world are such that you cannot retain the life you have AND get the lover you want. And so the struggle is not to change yourself, but to change the systems that prevent love, the challenge is to change the world so you are allowed to BE IN love.

Just like in R&J. 

Two houses, both alike in dignity, both hell bent on preventing the two lovers from having anything to do with each other. The circumstances of the young lovers, evading discovery, their team-up work together to have what they know is true and pure. We don’t need to see either them “earn” the love like we do in straight love stories. Juliet doesn’t need to fall in the fountain while trying to be sexy to lure her man in. Romeo doesn’t need a make over and a quick dance lessen to cushion his dorkiness. There is no demand to first see some inauthenticy to justify their authenticity later. Their love is instant, fully formed and present. This is what queer love feels like. And this is why I say things like “Romeo and Juliet is queer as fuck”! 

And it’s also one of the reasons why I think straight people have such a hard time understanding what it’s like to be trans.

From the outside it looks like I’m going through my “second act inauthenticity”. I’m dressing in clothes that don’t fit very well, trying outlandish things with my hair. I’m stumbling around on heels I have no experience in, trying to express sexiness with a body that’s not accustomed to doing so. There are some who will see this as forcing a change to occur and I need to wake up to the realities. “You had such a great looking beard!”, “You looked fit and strong and have cool tattoos!”, “But you were so handsome the way you were before!”

It’s almost as if “the straight world” hopes that eventually, after enough “transgender cringe”, after enough humiliation that people like me come to the realisation that we are embarrassing ourselves. That the world is waiting for us to realise we were fine all along the way we were before. That because there are people who would love to have a body like mine, I shouldn’t be so ungrateful.

But that’s the fucking point!

I don’t want it. 

I won’t ever want it. 

And while this process of transition may bear some passing resemblance to the tropes of shitty romantic comedies it is not some inauthentic slapstick story full of pratfalls and clumsiness. This life I’m living is not the second act of anything. It is just a life. And if it bears any resemblance to a story then it would be a story about pushing back against the expectations of the world. It would be a story about secret lives and secret desires. Stories about having to make the decision: Do you choose your safe and comfortable life or do you give it all up for a chance at happiness? 

This story, my story is queer as fuck. 

Everybody understands the tale of Romeo & Juliet. Everyone understands the tragedy of it but also the beauty of it. The same such sentiment summed up in the words of another notable queer “’tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”. So it goes with transitioning… It might be awkward. It might be embarrassing or humiliating or cringe-as-fuck… But it is worth doing. And I would rather have done a bad job of it than to never have done it at all.

–S