1-800-DREAMBOAT is a monthly advice column for paid subscribers of the Boys Love Poetry newsletter. You are always welcome to leave comments, submit anonymous questions, and share screenshots on social media xx

Hi lovers. This week, we are getting back on the 1-800 DREAMBOAT saddle after my whirlwind engagement a few weeks ago. For those who are new here, I answer anonymous questions in an advice column every month. It’s free to ask questions (do it) and all it costs is the price of one oat milk latte a month to read the answers. I’m currently accepting new questions and eager to read your problematic desires, darkest, secrets, and polyamorous drama. 

This week’s column comes in hot with a poignant question about what tf to do when straight people are out here killing our vibe by being super fucking straight. Heterosexuality has a death grip on this world, and it’s sucking the gay life out of us. Even though it’s 2024, it seems that some people are still obsessed with being straight and assuming that everyone else is straight in the process. This question is about how you deal with the complex emotional baggage of being in a “straight passing” relationship.

A few winters ago, I was in a bad way in London and my best bruv Marlo suggested that we get out of the city and go to the sea on a little holiday together. We got a room in a carriage house in a seaside town with a hot tub we could jump in when the night turned wet and cold. I rented a car, and we took our time driving down to the coast, first to Portsmouth to visit Samo in his studio in Southsea and get my T4T tattoo before chasing the sinking sun east across the coast to Hastings. It was a perfect vacation—laying shirtless on Samo’s cold tattoo table in my acid-wash sweatpants, surrounded by my trans boy hunnies, getting our credo inked on my chest. Marlo and I cracked jokes and gossiped on the drive, laughing until I swerved into the right lane, listening to only the good Kanye songs, the old ones. 

We spent hours soaking in the garage sauna, slept hard, woke up early, grabbed brekkie at a café, and adventured down to the beach under the cold morning sun. We scrambled down rugged paths to reach the sea with our beanies on and balanced on big rocks while the freezing waves bit our ankles. Marlo brought their silver point-and-shoot camera fully loaded with a fresh roll of black-and-white 35 mm film to document everything. We were so in our bodies, buzzing from the coffee, just two boys in nature. When I got home, still high off the time away, my phone vibrated on the nightstand. Notification from Airbnb: a new review from Marianne and Steve. “Nice young couple. Pleasant to talk to.”

My jaw could have broken the floor with how hard it dropped. I’d love to give her the benefit of the doubt and say that she was clocking us as a faggy T4T couple who lovingly called each other ‘bro,’ but let’s be honest, Marianne wasn’t that up to speed. It dawned on me that she had likely assumed that Marlo was my girlfriend, that I was their boyfriend, and that we were a nice, young heterosexual couple on holiday for the weekend. I can’t tell you how much I am cringing as I type those words. But if there is one thing that I’ve learned during my time on this planet, it’s that people will do anything to convince themselves that you are a straight, cisgender person. 

Sometimes when I have to piss on a road trip, I pull over to the side of the road and just squat while the semi trucks pass me by. I figure it’s more likely that the truckers will think I’m a cis dude who pulled over to take a shameless, massive shit on the side of the road and honk in solidarity than even consider for a second that trans men might exist. The mental gymnastics of the cis-hetero-patriarchy are Olympic-level insane. Like, 10s across the board.

So how do we survive the straight-cis-ification of ourselves and everyone we love? I’ve got some answers for you. Let’s get into it. 

👫 HOW DO I COPE WITH EVERYONE ASSUMING MY QUEER RELATIONSHIP IS STRAIGHT?

I’m not a therapist or a mental health professional. I am an artist, writer, and trans masculine sage with a penchant for supporting others to live the life they dream about. I try to answer these questions with a critical eye, from my heart of hearts, with a fierce passion for community, accountability, and love. Take what you like, leave the rest, and feel free to talk back in the comments.

💌 Dear Dreamboat, 

I'm a trans masc who's 6 years into physical transition and pretty cis passing (this is weird for different reasons). I've been dating mostly men and masc presenting people for quite a while but have just started seeing someone who's more femme and despite both of us being trans and queer we're mostly read as a cis het couple in public. As a genderqueer person who's now (mostly accidentally) bloke passing being read as queer has been an important part of balancing my identity. As much as I wish I didn't care what people think how do I manage the part of me that's uncomfortable with being seen as cis het with my new boo?

Signed, 

No less of a fag in North London

Dear No Less, 

Accidental bloke might be my new gender. Thank you for writing in with this question—it plays on my mind constantly. I know all about the balance you speak of. I have been trying to maintain a certain gender equilibrium all my life, and it sounds like you are at a pivotal moment in yours. As much as gender and sexuality can function as two distinct parts of ourselves, I find they often intertwine and wrap around each other like vines on a trellis. 

When I first transitioned, I was so afraid of losing my queerness. As a gender non-conforming masc person who has always had a soft spot for femmes, I knew that my desire and relationships were queer to the core. I’ve always been attracted to polarity. But I was terrified of losing the visibility and recognition I had fought tooth and nail to earn. I didn’t want to have anything in common with straight people. I had no interest in joining their little club of weird gendered jokes and expectations. 

Your question reminds me a lot of the baggage and internalized homophobia that comes with the history of butch/femme relationships. Whether in the T4T masc/femme legacy of MTF4FTM or the butch/femme culture of working-class lesbian bars and dances in the 1950s, the butch/femme dynamic has had its fair share of persecution and mischaracterization from both within and outside of the queer community. Leslie Feinberg put it perfectly when ze said: 

“If I'm not with a butch everyone just assumes I'm straight. It's like I'm passing too, against my will. I'm sick of the world thinking I'm straight. I've worked hard to be discriminated against as a lesbian.”

Lesbian, faggot, tomato, to mah toe. During the first year of my transition, I would go to therapy on Tuesday afternoons with Colin (the same trans therapist that every masc in Portland was seeing in 2015) and cry my heart out about everything I was afraid of losing. The misandry of the third-wave feminism rampant in the mid-2010s queer scene had done a number on me, and I was terrified that by transitioning I would be aligning myself with the enemy, so to speak. I had internalized somewhere along the way that medical transition was more of a corrective mechanism for gender non-conformity rather than a natural continuation of it. I didn’t know what I would do if people thought I was a cis man or a straight man or worse, both.

Being perceived has to be one of the strangest parts of the trans experience. I used to spend hours fixating on what type of guy people might think I was if they thought I was a guy at all. Was I giving nice guy? Bro? Short king with a complex? I suppose it depends on who you ask. Did people clock the way I move my hands when I talk and think I was gay? Or did they see my broad shoulders and backwards hat and assume that I was heterosexual? Metrosexual? Bi? 

My distrust of men from years of being harassed, intimidated, and infantilized often came off as a defiant provocation in public. As if by not giving cis men the compulsory respect they believed they deserved, I was somehow challenging them to a duel. Men began to pick fights with me for seemingly no reason, tiny disagreements escalated into verbal sparring matches much quicker than I was accustomed to. At the same time I went out of my way to help older women carry things at the grocery store, lugging strollers up the stairs for exhausted moms and checking in on women at the bus stations when strange men would linger for too long. 

Not being able to predict or know how people would read me used to mess with my head. Earlier in my transition, the fact that people might think I was a straight, cisgender white man made me want to curl up and die. They/them pronouns seemed to be my best method of self-defense against the false accusations of manhood. I kept this up for a while, for about five or six years. I spent so much energy correcting others, pleading with people, standing my ground, educating clueless strangers, asserting my genderqueerness over and over again, trying to get other people to see me. And then I met Marlo. Sweet, sweet Marlo. 

Marlo is a lifelong lover of butches and a devout worshipper of the butch/femme dynamic. A beautiful writer who sees gender in light and color. Whenever I was around them, I felt like I could finally relax. We were speaking the same language. The barriers between being a dyke and a fag became nonexistent. We could talk critically about masculinity and men without bashing trans mascs, without punishing ourselves or each other. I wasn’t worried about being misunderstood or projected upon. We could whine about our girlfriends, go to the barbershop together, spend hours biking through the streets of London, chatting shit, just being ourselves. 

After I met Marlo, I became more comfortable with using he/him pronouns. I was still the same gender-freaky dude, but I started to embrace my own masculinity and love myself for it. I stopped putting all of my energy into attempting to control how other people perceive me. The more comfortable I became with myself, the more at peace I was with being misunderstood. My self-worth was no longer at stake. Trans masc culture was my culture. Butch/femme culture was my culture. And all of it was queer. I figured that the people who truly know me will know how queer I am and how queer my relationships are, and everyone else can believe what they want. 

I touched on this a bit in my last advice column House of Mirrors, but I do believe that a central part of the trans experience is about making a home in this liminal space of misconception. To be recognized and loved for who we are is a deeply human need. But our perceptions of others are always clouded by the judgments we have of ourselves. It is a superpower to know exactly who you are despite the world telling you otherwise. I believe that one of the hardest yet most rewarding parts of being trans is learning how to release yourself from needing to control how you are perceived to believe you are okay, worthy, and loved. It sounds like you’ve done this (to some extent) with your gender, but now you get a chance to do it in the realm of your relationships.

Now, if you want some more practical tips… my advice is to laugh about it. Laugh hard, roll your eyes, and troll people as much as you possibly can. If people are not reading you (or your boo) as trans, then they lack imagination and intuition. If you are feeling insecure or anxious in queer spaces, just remember, it isn’t your problem that people don’t know trans people exist or what we look like. It has also helped me to work on dismantling the hierarchy I had built in my head where all straight and cis people sucked and all queer and trans people were awesome. I used to think that was true. But believe it or not, some queer and trans people are shallow, clout-chasing losers and some straight and cis people are actually genuine and cool. Sometimes, it helps me to think that if people are reading AJ and I are straight, hopefully, they think we are the cool flavor of heterosexual.

It might be nice for you to connect with other T4T couples or chat with queer trans guys who are also in straight-passing relationships to talk about what a mindfuck it is. It is never going to feel quite right when people assume you are a dude or in a straight relationship or anything like that. Because that assumption is wrong. But it also sounds like you’ve been relying on your partners and the built-in visibility of being read as a “same-sex” couple to feel okay about your gender and mitigate the discomfort that comes with being read as a man. Now that you are dating a femme (even though you are both trans), the scaffolding is removed and you are being forced to sit with who you are and how you feel about your gender and sexuality outside of other people’s perceptions of you. 

It is a powerful skill to learn how to back yourself and believe in your own inherent queerness. Hell, AJ and I are getting engaged, planning a wedding, and trying to get pregnant! From the outside, what could be more heteronormative than that? But straight people don’t get to own those things. They don’t get to own masculinity and femininity or what those look like in a relationship together. This is the mantra I say to myself when I find myself worrying about what other people think. 

Cosplaying heterosexuality can be a fun way to reclaim it. I’ve discovered that I actually love BBQing and watching sports. AJ scrapbooks and loves to cook meals for me. I make our coffees in the morning, do most of the laundry and grocery shopping, while AJ is great at fixing things. We both love to work with our hands—garden, paint, and do DIY projects around the house. We work out together at our neighborhood rec center, lifting weights and pushing each other to do more reps. We both do a fair share of emotional labor, but I love carrying the bags. We have kinky, switchy sex, sometimes in the missionary position. But everything we do is queer because we are queer.

I’ve learned over time that it doesn’t really matter how people perceive me. I am both a different person and the same person in every relationship. You don’t need to feel embarrassed or ashamed of the way that other people view your relationship. Just be with your boo. Figure out how you flow together. Learn how to dance. Take the parts of masculinity and femininity that work for you and discard the rest. Keep it queer, keep it political, keep talking about it. Your relationship gets to be whatever you want it to be. 

xo