# data[].attributes.body
By finding this community and seeing both friends and idols of mine (like Gerard Way from My Chemical Romance) expressing their queerness openly, I have come to a place of comfort with myself. I realize that I don't need to dress or act a certain way for my queerness to be genuine, and I can express myself queerly however I want to. I can queer my own gender and sexuality in my own unique way, and nobody can take that away from me.

# data[].attributes.body
Despite the negativity I was feeling from others and myself, I didn't let myself hide my identity. I became more involved in the local music scene, mainly in punk music. While many people have an image of punk as cisgender, heterosexual white men, the smaller bands and touring scenes are much more diverse and showed me people expressing their queerness in such diverse ways that it helped me feel better about my own identity. I especially got involved in emo, pop-punk and hardcore scenes, where many fans and bands are queer, and it led me to feel a sense of true queer comraderie and radical queer politics that I had never experienced before.

# data[].attributes.body
While I now tend to reject strict labels on my sexuality and gender identity, I usually call myself bisexual if asked for simplicity. This has led a lot of people to seem to think that I'm engaging in a sort of performative bisexuality, as there would be periods of time where I would be involved in straight-passing relationships. This also ignores the fact that I consider myself non-binary as I don't really feel any connection to masculinity, yet because my expression can be read as male by default, people often don't see me as queer or acknowledge my queer identities. This led me to feel somewhat alienated, as I was having my queerness questioned both by cishet allies but also other queer people.

# data[].attributes.body
In high school, some of my queer friends invited me to come with them to the Chicago pride parade. I wanted to feel a sense of community so I went with them and we had a lot of fun, and it felt great getting to meet and see other queer people living happily and without exception. However, something that my friends and I all were put off by was the amount of corporate sponsorship at the event. We had all been educating ourselves online about how so many companies were involved in funding anti-queer legislation, and while we may not have had all the words to describe it yet, we all had understood deep down that capitalism and pride didn't seem to mix well. Seeing the parade go between wonderful queer artists and performers and then seeing a rainbow flag with a Walgreens logo made me feel a little offput, while still enjoying the event as a whole.

# data[].attributes.body
I first came to find my queerness through the internet. At the time, none of my school classes touched on queerness at all and the only thing my parents had told me about LGBTQ+ identity was that they support gay marriage. I found queer communities through decentralized social media sites such as Instagram and Tumblr, and despite the constant discourse, came to realize that that was something that resonated with me. This was how I first began to queer my own gender and sexuality and met other queer people at my school.