Never Quite Fitting In: Being Queer in the Car Enthusiast Community
Cars, those silly tin cans that propel people to work, vacations, friend's places and whatever errands your heart desires. Everybody has one, everybody needs one. Thanks, United States Transportation Infrastructure!
But cars are mostly just nuts and bolts with a funky air pump powering it and making various noises. As time went on, people tinkered with them. Changed things, exhausts, suspension bits. As time went on, the cars got better and so did the sorts of parts that people used to modify them. But why? Why bother spending money on your car when it's not broken? Because it's cool! Lowering your car with a set of rad looking wheels and tires? Heck yeah, go for it! Got a sweet cat back exhaust that sounds awesome? Slap that thing on!
Cars As A Hobby
My own love for cars started long before I got my license or my first car. Video games and watching TV filled with motorsport, car builds and whatever else I could watch made my interest take off. But in my later high school days where I knew I would soon have a car of my own, the excitement built on the mere idea of having my own car to not just drive, but modify. There was one issue standing in my way of that. My parents.
My parents were very much not car enthusiasts at all. So hearing me talk about my interest in them, they often couldn't relate or even help with questions I had at a young age. But as I grew closer to graduating high school, I didn't just make cars as a hobby but I wanted to fix them. My thinking was simple: I can understand how to modify them better if I know how to fix them. My parents were not exactly on board with the idea of their oldest kid becoming a car repair tech, mostly because they did not understand what I was doing. Their lack of understanding of the trade and cars in general made them feel helpless in the sense of being a parents and making sure I did "the right thing" and other assorted good parental things to do I guess.
Despite that, I knew what I wanted. Not long after that, I did get my first car. It was free as well, coming from a friend of my mother's at the time. It was a 1989 Toyota Tercel DX Coupe. It was the sort of teal color you saw a lot of compact cars from the late 80's and 90's in, though cheaper looking as the bumpers, mirrors and door handles were unpainted plastic. But after sitting in it for the first time, I realized this was originally from Canada as the gauges were all metric. I also learned how much rust the body had, though luckily for me I was going to a trade school during high school and learning the art of auto body repair. I got the car dragged 20 miles away to that shop and there I was able to fix most of the rust and repaint it! Sadly the engine let go after I got it back home. I sold it to somebody for $300 as I did not have the means to put a new motor in it.
My next cars would be ones I had to buy on my own. Next was a blue 1995 Dodge Intrepid, which sadly met its demise after somebody hit me on the highway. The next car after that was a 2003 Pontiac Grand Am GT. I modified that car as well as excessively repair it. It taught me a lot about engine repairs as well as tinkering with various modifications. Though while owning my Pontiac, this is when I got into the local car scene where I lived. Car clubs, meets, shows, cruises, those sorts of things. The era of forums was also on it's downfall around this time as well, as Facebook started to become more of a thing and took it's place, sadly. As those things changed, I got more into the community of car enthusiasts in general. But something always felt, off with me being around this all.
Figuring Out Being Queer While Around Car Enthusiasts
Around 2014, I started to question a lot of things I thought I knew about myself. My sexuality, my identity, that sort of fun stuff. Juggling this while being around a community that tended to be hyper masculine and behind their closed community space doors, sexist, homophobic and sometimes racist. But considering the majority of car enthusiasts I came across were cishet white dudes with some sort of wealth behind them, whether it was their family or some sort of inherited wealth, it ultimately was not much of a surprise. But with every passing year, I felt more and more isolated in various car enthusiast spaces, both online and off. A combination of me learning about bad behaviors I was observing and myself changing to root out bad choices in vocabulary and thought added to this isolating feeling. Was this necessarily a bad thing? Looking back, hell no.
By 2018 I ended up cutting myself off from the majority of car enthusiast spaces after being fed up with the bad behavior overall. Past all the fancy cars, the sorts of hierarchy with the people in all these different social groups was exhausting. It was tiring seeing the same sorts of people not be held accountable for being shitty to one another. Whether it was being weirdly gatekeepy about things or putting down others because they don't like how somebody else modifies their car, you were either apart of the in crowd or you would be at the receiving end of their negativity. While it further isolated myself from being around the car hobby community as a whole, it was for the better.
After that, the next couple of cars I bought I did not modify. I still admire cars the way I always have, but wanting to be around large swaths of cishet dudes that can be utterly exhausting with what they can say or do has pretty much kept me away. But what about other queer people that enjoy cars? They are out there, though mostly in splintered groups here and there. I know I have relied on things like #weirdcartwitter to find other like minded car people that I can befriend and enjoy car talk with. Even more on bluesky with people using #WeirdCarBS for a feed filled with delightfully strange, odd, even regular cars.
My love for cars will always be around, despite not being a car repair tech anymore and not being around the large portions of the car enthusiast community, I've still managed to find spaces online and off where I can talk about a strange passion I've had ever since I was little. Where I can share and talk about the stuff I've seen, experienced and just maybe, make some new friends along the way. See ya next time!