Can Someone Straight Be Queer?

By Warren Bugeja Community Officer with LGBTI+ Gozo

I did not set out to write this article. It arrived the way some truths do - sideways.

It began with a photoshoot.

Lucy LeBrok, a photographer in residence with The Bored Peach Club in Gozo, approached LGBTI+ Gozo to document queer lives on the island. As part of her project, she followed two of us for a day, asking gentle but unsettling questions about who we are, how we love, and where we belong. Those conversations shaped where we stood, what we held, and how we were photographed.

For me, at 54, the experience cracked open old layers.

I grew up on the Maltese Islands inside Catholicism, a culture soaked in guilt, moral policing, and quiet shame. I attended Catholic school. I learned early how to fold myself smaller, how to monitor my gestures, how to keep parts of myself hidden. Even now, decades later, I am still unlearning. You never really finish unlearning.

This year, working as a freelance community officer with LGBTI+ Gozo forced me to examine something else too: my privilege. I am white. I am male. I am cisgender. I pass. If I wear a shirt and jeans, the world reads me as safe, respectable, invisible. I do not carry the risk that a trans migrant teenager on Gozo carries. I do not walk through the world with the same danger in my body as a Black queer man does. I did not even know what ‘cisgender’ meant until recently, or what many of the letters in LGBTQIA+ stood for.

But one word when I encountered , felt like coming home.

Queer.

I took to it like a duck to water.

Not because it made me trendy or political,  because it finally gave language to what I had always felt. I had never belonged in neat categories. Not in straight ones. Not even in gay ones. I have always felt more at ease in spaces that welcome contradiction, softness, uncertainty, fluidity, like the word ‘pansexual’ a word I wish I had in my vocabulary as a teen. Queer spaces felt less like clubs and more like breathing.

Many gay bars I entered in my life felt harsh: hypersexualised, appearance-driven, ruled by sarcasm masquerading as humour. There was judgement inside the very spaces meant to protect us from judgement. Queer spaces, by contrast, felt gentler, less about proving and more about being.

And yet.

As I began moderating talk circles at LGBTI+ Gozo, I learned something uncomfortable: the word queer is deeply divisive.

Many of the gay and lesbian couples I know on Gozo, mostly in their forties and beyond, don’t come to our events. When I ask why, the answer is often the same:

“We’re gay, not queer.”

For them, queer still tastes like an insult. And I understand that, because of the term’s history. Words carry wounds. But here in Malta, the slur that did the most damage was not queer, it was pufta. That word still floats through playgrounds, pubs, and politics. Among heterosexual men, pufta often meant “you’re unreliable, not a man of your word.” But when thrown at gay men, it carries a second violence, the implication that queerness itself made you inferior, feminised, ‘less’ of a man and unworthy of respect.

Yet queerness is often blamed for something else now.

Some LGB people believe trans, non-binary, and pronoun politics have brought backlash upon the community. That ‘queer’ has diluted their struggle. That Gen Z doesn’t appreciate how hard older generations fought for marriage, safety, and legal recognition.

But history tells a different story.

The rights so many enjoy today were not gifted politely. They were fought for, often by the very people now treated as inconvenient. Trans women of colour ignited Stonewall. They bled so others could wear wedding rings. And our rights are not carved in marble. They are written in sand.

Which brings me back to the photoshoot.

I stood on the steps of the Gozo Cathedral, in the Citadel, holding a trans flag over my head. I was afraid. Would someone shout? Spit? Throw something? Would I be accused of disrespect?

But when the camera clicked, something shifted.

It felt like claiming my right to exist in the centre of my own culture. As a queer Maltese man living on Gozo for eleven years, I was saying: my story belongs here too. I was no longer apologising for being Maltese, for being queer. I felt empowered. I was no asking for permission for my ‘otherness’.

And then something beautiful happened.

A young man and a young woman approached and asked if they could be photographed kissing beneath the pansexual flag beside me. Watching them stand there, relaxed, playful, unashamed, set something in motion inside me.

If they were straight… were they queer too?

What does “queer” even mean?

Once, queer meant strange. Then it became a slur. Then activists reclaimed it. Today it means many things at once.

For some, it is an umbrella for LGBTQIA+ identities.For others, it is a political stance against patriarchy and rigid gender roles. Anyway, who decided that blue was for boys and pink for girls? For many younger people, it is simply space, room to be without labels.

In the 1960s and 1970s, as sexual and gender minorities fought for civil rights and new ways of living openly, they also began to rename themselves. Gay liberation activists reclaimed queer from its past as an insult, turning it into a word of pride, chanting “out of the closets, into the streets” and declaring, “we’re here because we’re queer.”

Later in the early 1990s, queer began to take on a new meaning, not simply as another word for gay, but as a political and critical identity that challenged the idea that any sexuality or gender is natural, fixed, or “normal.” Drawing on thinkers like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant, queer theory showed how sexual and gender norms are shaped by history, culture, and power. For many, identifying as queer became a way of refusing rigid categories altogether, a way of living beyond the binaries that society tries to impose.

We cannot be 100% everything, so if a person identifies as “straight”, they might have attraction to different sexualities or genders even if they are exclusively dating a person of a different gender. As my co-worker Cat Camilleri states “a queer person is still queer even when they are passing, even when they are feeling more feminine and dating a man as opposed to a woman.”

Writer Jaydee Seaforth, a Black queer woman, described it similarly after entering a heterosexual relationship:

“I’m still queer and polyamorous. I just happen to be in a heterosexual monogamous relationship. Being with a man doesn’t make me any less bisexual. My queerness exists regardless of how I’m perceived.”

Her queerness was not cancelled by love.

Neither is anyone else’s.

Consider a woman whose husband transitions into a woman and she stays. Did her sexuality change, or did love outgrow language?

Consider drag artists who are straight but queering gender through art.

Consider asexual people who refuse society’s insistence that intimacy must be sexual.

Queerness is not just who you sleep with. It is how you refuse the scripts you were handed.

Can straight people be queer?

This is where the discomfort lives.

Some people identify as “straight queer” or “heteroqueer”, meaning they are mostly heterosexual but queer in gender, politics, or relationship style. For some, claiming queer is a way to reject patriarchy, to step outside compulsory heterosexuality, to resist ownership and hierarchy in love.

Others worry this is appropriation, a form of ‘cultural tourism’ taking the beauty of queerness without its cost.

Both concerns are valid.

Queerness is not a costume. It is not an aesthetic. It is not something you borrow for a season.

But neither is it a gated community.

Queer has always been about unsettling ownership. About questioning who gets to belong.

So maybe the question is not “Are you queer enough?” but “What are you doing with the space you take?”

Are you dismantling gender roles, or benefiting from them? Are you making room for trans people, or pushing them aside?Are you challenging patriarchy or quietly protected by it?

The ‘verdict’

I am queer not because I am trendy or radical, but because I refuse to live inside the narrow architecture of what a man, a lover, or a Maltese person is supposed to be.

I know my privilege. I know I can step in and out of visibility when others cannot. That is why queerness, to me, is not about identity alone, it is about responsibility.

Queerness is not who you are in private.It is how you show up in public.

Because ‘queer’ means so many things to so many people, it’s almost impossible to police. For some LGBTQI+ people, a straight person claiming queerness feels like picking up the cool parts of queer culture, the art, the clothes, the language, without carrying the pain that came with it: the bullying, the shame, the risk.

As an agency LGBTI+ Gozo does not condone appropriating the word queer and the LGBTIQ+ history and culture of lived queerness’ After all the whole point of being queer, to many people within the community, is that you are not straight. A straight person may identify as queer because they are challenging different gender norms and societal norms. However, it may be argued that assuming ‘queerness’ is setting your self outside those norms, not just combating against them. Lived queerness is also about facing the insults and discrimination that people who inhabit the frontiers of gender norms inhabit. Where does the overlap between queerness and allyship end? An ally may be supporting the LGBTI+ community and be engaged with it, calling out people for their discrimination but does this make them queer?

As writer Hollis a contributor on reddit observes:

“Society needs to be deprogrammed, subverted, or queered, and that involves unlearning cisnormative and heteronormative behaviour. Straight and cisgender people engaged in that work could be considered queer, but it’s not a label they’re automatically entitled to. It’s something that must be earned.”

Just as a cisgender man doesn’t become a feminist by declaration alone, or a white person doesn’t become intersectional merely by saying so, queerness carries accountability. It’s not just an identity.

So, can a straight person be queer?

If queer means LGBTQIA+ by gender or orientation, then no.

If queer means actively dismantling the systems that privilege straightness and gender conformity, then sometimes, yes.

Queerness is not about proving difference. It is about practising empathy.

And maybe that is the queeriest thing of all.