What If I Don’t Know?

This week was April Fool’s, and one of people’s FAVORITE jokes on April Fool’s is coming out as gay. Miri, a fantastic beast of a human being, decided to do the opposite yesterday. Her essay is hilarious and you should probably go read it.

But there was one element of Miri’s essay that stuck out to me as potentially damaging for those who are questioning or who (such as myself) are rethinking elements of their orientation and identity. I understand that within the context of the essay this paragraph is about the assumptions of many that bisexuality is fake, however this same rhetoric can be used to delegitimize those who might have questions or be uncertain, and to shut down conversations from those who are simply trying to understand their own sexuality.

“I’m straight because I started seeing guys long before I started seeing women. How could I have really known I was bisexual if I didn’t have “experience”? Unlike straight people, bisexual people do not have the luxury of being born with an innate and immutable knowledge of their own sexual orientation. Nothing–not their turn-ons, not their crushes, not their romantic daydreams–nothing besides Real Sex with someone of the same gender is sufficient to prove for certain that they are really bisexual as they say they are. ”

Because here’s the thing: there are some people who don’t have an innate and immutable knowledge of their own sexual orientation. There are some people who feel like they need to try sex to find out if they’re attracted or not. There are people who don’t know what their identity or their orientation is and who take a great deal of painstaking reflection, experimentation, and thought to figure out what it is that they feel they want in their lives. Sometimes feelings just aren’t clear: not all of us get crushes that come screaming at us that WE REALLY LIKE THIS PERSON. Sometimes instead it’s a slight inkling that we want to hang out more or a little bit of anxiety when we see the person.

In fact, even for those who might have a very strong attraction (or lack thereof), life itself can make it extremely difficult to recognize those feelings. As an example, my eating disorder certainly disguised some of my lack of sexual attraction for a long time: it’s easy to simply write it off as “I’m just self-conscious”. I imagine that there are similar intersections with race, gender, class, physical health, or any of the other ways that our lives differ from the basic script of “very white guy falls in love with very white girl, actively pursues, gets married and has babies”.

Sexuality and attraction are far more complicated than we give them credit for. Attraction doesn’t feel the same to everyone. Our sexual desires are not all the same. Not only do you have to determine who you’re attracted to (men, women, other), but you have to figure out what you actually want to act on, how attracted you are, what type of attraction it is, whether you’re attracted to multiple people or not and in what ways, what relationship style works best for you…each of these things can be clear or muddy, can be specific to one person or very generalized, can be affected or obscured by other things in your life. Maybe you are actually quite poly at heart, but you’ve grown up in a culture that deeply prioritizes jealousy as a healthy and good emotion and now even the concept of being attracted to multiple people doesn’t make sense.

I think sometimes it’s easy to forget that if you’ve never seen a template of what your sexuality might look like that feels right to you, you often just assume that you’re basically the same as what you’ve seen. You might have some weird feelings that don’t quite fit, but it’s fairly easy to write them off as something else, especially if there’s anything else about you that’s outside the norm.

This is not the narrative that we hear from those who talk about GLBT issues. We often hear “I knew I was different” or “I tried to be like other people but it felt completely wrong”. And that’s true for some people. But for some people, muddling through doesn’t feel completely wrong it just feels a little bit off. By no means do I think it’s inappropriate to assert that some people know right away. But for some people it’s really hard to figure out what the heck they are. It’s fairly invalidating to hear over and over that your sexuality is an innate drive that you just “know” because of your daydreams and crushes and attractions. What if it’s a hard process of learning to listen to your emotions, your boundaries, your likes and dislikes? What if you actually really don’t know you like/don’t like something until you try it?

Just like there’s no one way of having a relationship, there’s no one way of figuring out what kind of a relationship you want. I think it’s quite possible that some people’s identities are more fluid than others, just like some people are far more committed to a national identity or a career identity than others. It’s important that we learn to validate the experience of “knowing” without simultaneously implying that everyone should know, or that identities which are a little gray (like demisexual or gray asexual) don’t get blown off as special snowflake syndrome or stealing the real queer identities. The identities that are more indicative of uncertainty are just as valid and just as real: being straight up confused is a valid identity!

I seriously doubt that anyone is intentionally invalidating people who aren’t sure of their sexual identity, but simply using a little more care in how we talk about sexuality and being willing to multiply the possible experiences rather than close them off can go a long way towards validating those who are already confused.

Marriage is What Brings Us Together Today

Today the Minnesota Senate will be voting on marriage equality. There is a high likelihood that it will pass, and my lovely state will finally move forward into something slightly more resembling equality. I’m pretty excited about this, I think understandably, but occasions like this always make me stop and wonder why marriage equality is the huge push in the GLBT agenda. Obviously there are political and historical reasons for this: most of the people who organize this movement tend to be upper middle class and white, and the largest form of discrimination they tend to experience is marriage inequality. But in the larger picture of things, is it really useful to be focusing on marriage?

 

Many of the arguments that the right uses against gay marriage is that it will break down traditional family structures, and allow kids to be raised in different ways. They also are worried that it will destroy traditional gender roles, and leave us with a genderless society. Now to both of these things I say YAY. First and foremost, any family structure that allows for nurturing and caring of kids is a good family structure. Or even one that doesn’t involve any kids but just involves people caring for each other. Multiplying family structures is a great idea, because then people won’t feel frickin’ guilty for trying to appeal to different sources of help or building a family in the way they can. But a genderless society sounds even better! We’ll never get rid of the concepts of gender unfortunately (or at least I don’t think so) but the idea that we could allow for more fluidity, or the idea that both men and women could create identities that are both “masculine” and “feminine”, or the idea that people could be somewhere in between the two extremes of gender is great. People are suddenly not constrained by stupid arbitrary rules. People can go where their talents and interests lead them. Oh most beautiful of days!

 

But here’s the problem: marriage is not a particularly radical act. Getting married is about as stodgy and status quo as it gets. Continuing to create the family structure of two parents+children doesn’t really do a whole lot to expand the possibilities, and continuing the concept of pair-bonding with a single other person as your main form of commitment and connection doesn’t do a whole lot to multiply our conceptions of gender. The term gay even relies on the idea that there are two genders and you have certain relations to people based upon their gender. Marriage doesn’t do a whole lot to undermine a lot of the crappy structures we have in place. Particularly, it continues the idea that the government should reward those who choose to get married, which is a perfectly arbitrary thing to do. It continues to suggest that we can have only a single primary relationship in our lives and that it should be privileged above other relationships. And it continues a tradition in which women have been delightfully oppressed for centuries. LOVELY!

 

So while I think that marriage equality is a step in the right direction for society as it is now, and because it will make some people question things like the structure of family and the nature of gender, I hope that someday marriage will not be seen as privileged over other types of relationships, and that we can create a multitude of kinds of families and relationships that are viewed equally. I would love to one day see a family made up of a grandmother, a mother, and some children be treated equally to a couple who chooses to never have kids which is treated equally to a poly trio who adopted which is treated equally to a single individual who has many close friends. All of these are valid life choices and can probably lead to fulfillment and support in its own way. And I also hope that someday the labels gay and straight become fairly meaningless because gender is no longer our dominant form of identification. Maybe I’m red-head sexual. Who knows?

 

So kudos to MN for moving towards marriage equality, but for the rest of society…let’s try to be a bit more imaginative in our rebellion shall we?