Queer Identity + Skateboarding
I feel the wind blowing in my face. My right foot pushes against the ground for speed as my left foot stabilizes the deck. My body moves from left to right. I feel free.
I was called a tomboy as a kid. I hated that word; it was a label based only on my activities and what I wore. I loved movement and forward momentum. I craved team sports–soccer and basketball—but also took ballet and street jazz classes. In 1st grade, I medaled in a running competition, but I was also the kid who won first place in 2nd grade for reading 170 novels in a year. I should also mention that I grew up in two places–I’m half-Turkish and spent much of my childhood there, learning my grandmother’s superstitions and traditions. To this day, if I have a negative thought, I have to knock on wood and pull my ear and say Allah Korusun. However, my relationship with my homeland is complicated (see rest of essay).
At nine, I received a skateboard for Christmas, and, for the first time, I felt all the sides of me come together. I was moving of my own volition, literally and metaphorically. I was the only girl I knew who skated, but I taught myself to ride on Istanbul’s pebble-stone streets and select few smooth concrete areas. At 13, when we moved to America, I was excited to practice my tricks in the American skateparks I’d always heard about, but instead, I discovered that my skateboard became my only safe space. I was reckoning with a new sense of personal identity–that I was going to have to come to terms with the truth of my own sexuality. Remember when I said see rest of essay? Here’s where the complication starts.
Though I agonized on my own, having no idea how to tell my friends, and especially my parents, I discovered, eventually, that everybody already could sense it. Being queer as part of my American life was easier than I thought. So the question that haunted me in the endless hours I spent skating back and forth was, “What am I going to do in Turkey where who I am is taboo?”
My love for my Turkish roots goes deep. There is no other feeling like crossing over the bridge on the Bosphorus Strait, transcending a continent as I descend into Istanbul. When I hear the calls to prayer, I am home. I love the crowds of people, the sounds of the language, the way speaking Turkish feels in me, the way the marketplace makes the huge city feel like a village. I even get emotional when I think of Turkey’s origins: Atatürk turning the Ottomon Empire into a new republican country. Turkey is where I learned to walk, learned to do crossword puzzles with my grandpa, and where, regardless of which continent I live on, have spent every summer of my life. My grandparents are my favorite people in the world and I can never tell them. In the country that I love, I cannot be who I am. I have one friend there who is gay and whenever I am home, we talk in secret about this side of us. We both surround ourselves with the loving and supportive friends we do have, trying to forget that the general population would not accept us.
But, throughout all this, I still have my skateboard. Anytime I ride, I am reminded of how motion feels, of freedom. For years, the comfort that was nourished on my skateboard has allowed me to clear my head. Though I still don’t know how my relationship with my home will evolve, I know the internal struggle of figuring out where to fit is what makes me me. And in all these years of riding, I’ve also released any impulse to confine myself to a label. I’m not a tomboy. And I don’t have to know exactly who I am.
I feel the wind blowing in my face as I ride, free, while the sun glows the sky orange, I feel the labels being stripped away. And I can see only Yasemin ahead of me.