As a straight white guy, it kinda feels like "stolen valor" to claim it, but I feel like I know what being an oppressed minority is like because I'm a cyclist.

This isn't a new thing, by the way. Cycling has been considered sort of subversive against the patriarchic social order going all the way back to the Victorian era and suffragettes and whatnot:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycling_and_feminism
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7C9YUwPtGk

What Queer People and Cyclists Both Know

Why do angry men in cars yell at queer people, women, and... cyclists?

Robin L Owen

18 hours ago

18

8

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Gay bikes. Photo by Stefano Ghezzi on Unsplash

Have you ever read queer theory and thought to yourself, “I don’t even know what you mean by queer, man”?

I’ve been there, but I’m here to clarify for you: they mean cyclists.

You might be surprised to know that when rightwing freaks talk about how leftists are grooming your children, they are also referring to cyclists. After all, cyclists want your child to learn how to ride a bike, which is also what queer theorists want.

If you thought riding a bicycle, the simple act of getting around on two wheels, was a largely agendered experience, I’m here to tell you that cycling is a little, well, queer. Not necessarily because of anything inherent to bicycles, but because of what happens when you do something that makes other people question the rules they take for granted.

When I started riding a bike to get around in college, I experienced a familiar kind of harassment: frat boys rolling down their truck windows to yell at me from the comfort of the driver’s seat. Off of my bike, these frat boys could see my half-shaved head and masculine clothes, so they knew to call me a dyke.1 When I rode past them on my bike, helmet covering my dykey hair, they didn’t know to call me a dyke, but it didn’t stop them from yelling. Instead of homophobic slurs, they settled for the more universal misogynist slur: bitch.

You can see why they called me a dyke.

Now, ten years later, I’ve started bike commuting, and it seems that the behavior of men in cars hasn’t changed. Earlier this week, a man sped up toward me, feigning that he would hit me, then swerved out of the way. He opened his door to yell at me: “Get out the street, bitch!”

I look a lot less queer now, and so I’m less used to being yelled at by strangers in cars. But when he yelled at me, I thought: oh yes, I remember this. It was familiar, like slipping into your coat for the first time in the season… If you coat was kind of scary and very aggressive. He didn’t know to call me a dyke, but the same sentiment underpinned both this harassment and the homophobic slurs I’ve gotten in the past.

But why is that? Why do aggressive men in cars want to yell at queer people, women, and cyclists? Cyclists feel like the oddball in this list; two of these are about sexual politics and the third is about… transportation?

Obviously, cycling and queerness are not the same thing. One is a way of getting around, and the other is a way of describing, among other things, who you are and whom you love. Most cyclists aren’t queer, and (unfortunately) plenty of queer people don’t ride bikes. I’m not suggesting that every driver who harasses a cyclist is secretly motivated by homophobia, which would be a wild reason to yell at someone on a bike.

But there is, I think, a common impulse at work in both kinds of harassment: the desire to put people back in their place.

A cyclist on the road is a violation of an unwritten rule. The road is for cars. Cars are how people get around. A person on a bicycle is an obstacle, an inconvenience, an intruder in a space that drivers have come to regard as their own. Never mind that cyclists have a legal right to use most roads, or that a person on a bike is trying to get somewhere just like everyone else. The cyclist is wrong simply by being there. This is what Dr. Ian Walker called “motonormativity.”

Often, drivers are mad at cyclists irrespective of how people behave on the road. Drivers become angry at cyclists in bike lanes, in the right lane of streets or squeezed onto shoulders; when we pass them in traffic, when we move with pedestrian walk signs, or when we’re on sidewalks. Faster or slower, in the road or on the sidewalk, some people are angered at the mere sight of a person on a bike.

There are legitimate disagreements about how people should share streets, and cyclists aren’t incapable of making mistakes. But the intensity of some drivers’ anger seems disproportionate to any particular behavior.

I recognize this from being queer.

There are plenty of ways to be queer incorrectly, according to people who think queerness is something that needs correcting. You can be too masculine or too feminine, too visibly gay or insufficiently discreet. You can hold your partner’s hand in the wrong place, wear the wrong clothes, or simply be recognizable as someone who doesn’t fit the expected arrangement of gender and sexuality. The rules are often contradictory, and you can follow them as carefully as you like without ever being assured of safety.

What makes these experiences feel related to me isn’t that a bicycle is somehow inherently queer; it’s that both can put you in the position of being treated as though your presence requires an explanation.

Who said you could be here? Why are you doing that? Don’t you know that’s not how things are supposed to work?

And then, sometimes, a guy in a truck decides to enforce the rules.

The man who threatened to hit me with his car had a considerable physical advantage over me. He was inside a vehicle weighing thousands of pounds. I was sitting on a bicycle. He could have seriously injured or killed me, whether or not he intended to. He could make me afraid with a quick acceleration and a turn of the steering wheel, all from the safety of his car.

A cyclist is physically exposed in a way a driver isn’t. When a driver uses a car to intimidate a cyclist, the threat comes with the possibility of actual violence. Even worse, the driver can feel relatively confident that if they go too far and harm the cyclist, they will likely face few consequences for their actions, if any at all. Motonormativity is violent.

And I think about how familiar that arrangement feels. Being queer doesn’t make someone physically vulnerable in every situation, and the dangers queer people face vary enormously. But queer people know something about the experience of having another person decide that your presence is an offense, and that they are entitled to punish you for it.

I remember being a young queer woman in college, working at the University of Tennessee’s brand new LGBT center. One day, we found that the windows of the center had been broken. Someone had driven by and thrown a brick through our window; on it, they had written “fags get aids and die.” Eloquent, and to the point. Other times, our flags were stolen, and once the State of Tennessee threatened the University’s funding because of our existence.

Other times, I would be walking through the streets of Knoxville with queer friends. I remember the men in trucks who seemed to find our existence an invitation to shout at us — dyke, fag. They were never very creative, the frat boys in trucks.

In each of these situations, we had not done anything to anyone except exist, but it was our existence that was the point. By merely being there, we were a threat to the meaning of their own hypermasculine gender and sexuality. If someone could opt out of the strict gender roles they abided by, what would that mean for them? Like the cyclist in the street, we rejected a status quo that made others feel safe and secure. The roads are for people; sexuality is defined and meant for domination.

I don’t know what the man in the car was thinking when he threatened me. Maybe he was angry about traffic. Maybe he thought I was breaking the rules. Maybe he was having a terrible day and decided I was an acceptable target. I can’t know what was in his head, but I don’t need to know to recognize the behavior.

He felt entitled to use his power to make me afraid, and he expected me to accept it.

There’s something here about masculinity, too. In a culture that treats dominance as a sign of strength, the ability to intimidate another person can become a way of proving yourself. The truck, the road, the raised voice, the threat: they all become ways of demonstrating that you have the power to decide who belongs and who doesn’t. You can see a version of this in the harassment of queer people, too, when someone treats gender nonconformity as a challenge to be answered or a boundary to be defended.

I don’t think all hostility toward cyclists comes from this place. But I do think that the culture of machismo makes it easier to see another person’s vulnerability as an opportunity rather than a reason for restraint.

The politics of bike lanes and the politics of queer life sometimes collide in such strange ways. Both challenge the idea that public space belongs most naturally to a particular kind of person, and that everyone else is there on sufferance. A protected bike lane says that a cyclist’s safety is worth building for. A public world in which queer people can live openly says that they shouldn’t have to shrink to make other people comfortable.

Neither proposition is radical; both, in fact, are the bare minimum. But both require us to question whose comfort we have organized the world around, and whose discomfort we have decided doesn’t matter.

I still think the comparison is a little funny. Unfortunately for the straight cyclists, riding a bike won’t make you queer (sorry y’all!). But I do think that being queer has taught me something about cycling: sometimes, when a stranger gets furious at the sight of you going about your ordinary life, the problem isn’t really what you’re doing. It’s that you’ve challenged their worldview by simply being.

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A gay female pastor?!?!? Yes! I am!

I don't like substack :(

Riding a bicycle really equalizes acceptable velocities in a community. I’ve found that my driving has become considerably less aggressive and my maximum tolerance for speed has reduced considerably since riding became my primary means of transport.

Spandex fetishes and CBT?

Ride with a camera, most people won't be shitbags on video

I can relate as a straight guy whose best friend in my 20’s was a gay man as well as being a bike messenger. It gets crazy out there. I would also say being a vegetarian also causes some people to become so enraged that they want to hurt you .