[“While many of us today take queer individuals at face value and view them as authentic, this has not historically been the case, and plenty of people still insist on viewing us as “phony,” “counterfeit,” and “fake.” This presumed “fakeness” arises directly from straight assumption, and it comes in two general flavors.

The first is delusional fakeness, which occurs when perceivers who are ignorant of, or in denial about, a particular LGBTQIA+ identity conceptualize the individual as an otherwise “normal” person (typically straight, although sometimes gay) who is pretending to be something they are not. Because the individual’s identity, desires, and behaviors are presumed to be “fake,” they are often imagined as engaging in purposeful artifice. For instance, perceivers may presume that the queer individual is merely “seeking out an alternative lifestyle,” putting on an “affectation,” or staging a contrived “performance.” Alternatively, the perceiver may imagine the individual as a victim of “self-deception”: They must be “confused” about their gender or sexuality, or merely going through a “phase.”

Then there’s deceptive fakeness, which often occurs in perceivers who are at least hypothetically aware that LGBTQIA+ people exist but nonetheless discount our potential presence. In such cases, the perceiver initially presumes that the individual in question is straight, as per straight assumption. But when they later learn that the individual is queer in some way, the perceiver will view this new information as a “surprise” or a dramatic “reveal,” one that leads them to consciously reinterpret the individual’s past presentation and actions as merely an “act” or “ruse” intended to “trick” or “deceive” the perceiver into thinking they were straight.

In all likelihood, the queer individual was not purposely hiding that information; rather, their queerness was simply erased by the perceiver’s straight assumption. But you would never know this from the language we tend to use in such situations, in which queer people are often described as “passing,” “closeted,” or “straight-acting.” These phrases give the impression that the queer individual is the sole active party who is single-handedly engaged in purposeful deception, while simultaneously discounting the perceiver’s own active (if unconscious) processes of categorization and straight assumption. Of course, if “deception” is supposedly involved, then there must be some kind of underlying motive. Often the motives attributed to queer people in these cases are fairly banal (“Julia was pretending to be straight in order to avoid discrimination”), but sometimes they can be quite nefarious, as we will soon see.

The two types of queer “fakeness” that I have just described are not mutually exclusive—for instance, one can believe that a “deceptive” queer person is also “delusional” about their identity. Furthermore, the rationales that people propose to explain our supposed “delusions,” and the motives attributed to our supposed “deceptions,” are often illogical and may even contradict one another. After all, their purpose is not to reflect reality but rather to reaffirm that straightness is “natural” and “real.” Indeed, queer “fakeness” and straight “realness” are intrinsically linked: Straight individuals are presumed to be “natural” and “authentic” by default, but as soon as anyone begins to question their desires, or colors outside traditional Predator/Prey roles, onlookers will begin to label them as “queer” and perceive them as “fake.”]

julia serano, from sexed up: how society sexualizes us, and how we can fight back, 2022