I wore a tuxedo to a family wedding instead of a dress, and it was liberating. The most memorable part was how my family responded.

• When I came out as queer, I started dressing more masculine and wore a tux to a family wedding.
• When I first tried on my tux, I felt powerful and more like my queer self.

Getting dressed for a wedding used to be easy: Slip into one of a few black dresses hanging in the back of my closet, slide into a pair of spiked pumps or chunky sandals, and run a flat iron through my hair.

When I came out as queer, it got harder. I started to question everything: Did I dress how I did because it was what I liked or because it was how I'd been told to dress in order to be desirable to men?

I realized patriarchal standards have been instilled in me since birth. Those standards are braided with my own need to be desired and loved.

But at 26, I wasn't dating a man, so I didn't feel the need to look feminine for the first time. I thought about how I genuinely wanted to present myself to the world.

I started small: a pair of short purple overalls, too loose to show off my breasts. I then went for sunset-colored Crocs, which a lot of people find ugly. Then it was an oversize orange-creamsicle button-up shirt — too masculine to make it into my former closet.

But when I wore a tuxedo to my family member's wedding, that's when I felt truly liberated.

When my partner's cousin got married, I couldn't stomach the idea of performing femininity as I'd done so many times before

By 2022, the rituals of dresses, makeup, and heels had grown foreign. The wedding was black tie, and my partner, a nonbinary trans-masculine person, decided they would be wearing a tuxedo. I wanted to join them.

When we walked into Men's Warehouse, the nice lesbian in a striped, collared shirt and tie met our eyes right away. She knew we needed her. She wrapped a measuring tape around my waist, found a shirt big enough to fit my chest, and gently pinned cuff links into my sleeves.

When I looked at myself in the mirror in the tux for the first time, it felt like my queerness and burgeoning gender queerness were announced to the world.

My feet were sweaty inside the stiff dress shoes, but I felt powerful.

Without my partner by my side, I usually passed as a straight girl, but in my tux, men would see me and know that I wasn't interested. Women would see me and not expect me to perform the usual rituals of cis-heterosexual femininity with them: the curling of hair, the complaining about boyfriends. Other queers would see me and know I was one of them.

I couldn't wait to see our grandmother's reaction when she saw me in my tux

My partner and I loaded our backpacks and garment bags into the car and made the two-hour drive from Philadelphia to the Baltimore suburbs where my partner's grandparents lived. When my own family couldn't accept me, Nanny and PopPop welcomed me into theirs as another grandchild with unprecedented ease, and we visited them often.

Nanny had always loved all things fancy. She was also a few years into her dementia diagnosis. She often didn't know she was in her own home, but she remembered that she loved us.

We planned to get ready at Nanny and PopPop's house, lugging our garment bags inside for a pre-wedding visit. With so much of the familiar now unfamiliar to her, anxiety and fear clouded her days. Maybe being part of our fancy day would bring her joy.

When we walked out of the guest room in our crisp tuxes and matching blue pocket squares, she gasped and beamed with joy.

"This is just wonderful!" she exclaimed, a soft hand thrown over her mouth. She thought we were getting married right then and there in her living room, and she was thrilled to be included.

Raised in Southern Baptist Christianity, no one in my family celebrates my queer love. So I'll never forget Nanny's hands clapping together and the grin that stretched across her face when she saw my partner and me in our outfits.

At the wedding, I felt truly myself in my tux

When we got to the wedding, most of our family only quietly tolerated our visible display of queerness. But it didn't matter. My partner and I weren't asking for their approval or excitement. We already had the celebration we needed.

At the wedding, we twirled and spun around on the dance floor, taking up our own space, being exactly ourselves — just the way Nanny liked us.