HAIR:
Chronicling My JourNey to Queer Joy
Written by Judah Castillo Illustrated by Christopher Ikonomou
The hardest part about being a Brown person who was socialized as a girl was enduring the constant jabs about my hair. I hit puberty at 9, which meant that there were years and years of constant insecurity about my hair. It was too much, too messy, and there was always hair in all the wrong places. The hair on my head was beautiful, thick, and long, but the hair on my body was ugly, thick, and wrong. As a Brown person, my facial and body hair were always under scrutiny, especially because my hair grew at faster rates (and was much thicker) than my other peers. I was tormented for my Frida Kahlolike brows, for my arms that looked like a werewolf’s, for my body not being up to par with white, cishet beauty standards. One time, my aunt cruelly joked that she was going to gift me money for laser hair removal because the hair on my arms was too much for her. My mom was always reluctant to let me cut my hair. She wanted me to keep it long when I was younger, mostly to symbolize empty promises of quinceañeras to other family
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members and to possibly help me find un novio. I despised the hair on my head. Although my hair was straight, I could never control it. It was thick, messy, unruly, and always tangled. Even when I brushed it out, I would come back home with some pretty gnarly knots in my hair. My long hair was inconvenient, and my mom’s claims that keeping my hair long would make me look more feminine did not sway my opinion. She’d make sure that the hair on my head grew out, but the hair on my face and on my arms were problems that needed to be fixed. In the winter of my senior year of high school, my relationship with femininity was becoming muddled by my blossoming inquiries into androgyny. My mom finally let me cut my hair after years of it torturing me. I remember looking into the mirror and noticing that the haircut made my face just a little bit sharper. My facial hair had grown out a little by then, and I looked the most masculine I had in a while. I remember thinking to myself, “I like the way this looks… A lot,
