Gay/Straight/Queer: NOT Sexualities

    Today I was asked a common question- how can you be heterosexual but not straight?  How can you be homosexual, but not identify as gay?  What does that mean? 

     Well, let’s back up.  To be fair, I use in everyday life a language usually saved for queer spaces.  Words your everyday straight-acting gay wearing plaid and a trucker hat don’t know, I elect to use in conversation with heteros whether they know them or not.

    Why?  Doesn’t that make me a little pretentious, knowing they probably don’t understand the language I use?

    NO.

    No, it doesn’t, because it’s not a matter of whether someone has understood a word or not, it’s matter of whether they have encountered it or not.  Any heterosexual with a critical mind can understand the word heteronormative, or twospirit- chances are they just haven’t heard it before.  Not using it around them, by the way- not helpful in changing that.

    So I use these words with everyone, because I respect their intelligence, and don’t need to baby them.  Living in a neighbourhood, now, where people don’t know the difference between transgendered and transsexual- hell, don’t even know what trans means, means if I’m really a part of this community at all then I have to represent the well of queer information.  How can we expect the unawares of the suburbs to know us if they are never told the word we ourselves choose?  Is describing oneself, as a genderqueer person (for example) simply as trans and no deeper not the same as calling a vagina a ‘peepee’?  I should say it insinuates the same level of intellectual respect.

 How can you be homosexual, but not identify as gay?

    This is most common with homosexuals who are extremely heteronormative- and fear identification with the gay culture for the reasoning that it will conflict with the straight privilege that they have previously enjoyed, and the conservative values that they have kept from their straight conditioning.  But they are not alone in their disdain for the word ‘gay’.  Not because it’s a label, but because of what it labels. 

    When one hears the word ‘gay’ one conjures the popular image- camp, hairless, muscle (read, body fascism) self-centered, immature (remaining a boy indefinitely) and involved likely to an unhealthy degree with alcohol and street and prescription drugs, as a normative culture.  By normative culture, I mean to say in the group that we are describing with the word ‘gay’ it is not unusual for someone to drink every night or use cocaine regularly, for example.  It is not questioned as outside of character.

    This description applies to the most visible culture of homosexual (and other sexually variant groups lumped in).  One could say that this is the ‘mainstream’ gay culture, or, as I do, argue that this is gay culture as it developed, and that they very word gay is a word for this culture, rather than describing the homosexual condition.

   In this same regard, I view the word ‘straight’ as a word describing the ‘mainstream’ heterosexual culture.  Straight, for me, implies so many things that feel ugly.  When, as a queer person, the word ‘straight’ is used, it has always been in response to one’s own queerness.  Heterosexuality is implied, inherent in mainstream culture, so if the word straight is used, it is only because it’s supposed ‘opposite’ is in conversation (or accusation).

    The word straight is the word we are asked in high school (“You are straight, right?”), it is the word that describes the antagonists (“We were attacked by straight guys”), it describes the thing were are expected to try to be but fail (straight-acting, “Why can’t you act more normal (read, straight)?).  It is the accuser.

    So I don’t like having to apply this word to people I love and care about, and whom I know love and support me- to my hetero friends, I will never, ever use the word straight.  They may never know why I refer to them as hetero, they may never ask- but I will never insult them with the word straight.

    Straight culture is, like gay culture, an unhealthy and oppressive mainstream code of expectations of conduct.  Straight culture is everything good ole’ boys- it is the machismo, sexism, patriarchy and homophobia we associate with all heterosexuals unfairly.  It is the culture that has oppressed us most- the one that seeks to destroy us along with all other deviations from the far conservative.  Luckily for us, gritty fuckers of the past have abandoned their privileges time and time again to fight for human and civil rights- so blacks and wimmen’ are people and queers aren’t hung (except in the pants, of course).  Lucky for us.

    Gay culture, straight culture’s bad-for-you shadow, straight culture’s younger brother, is at once an appropriation of straight values and images and a rejection of it at once.  It is best described as hegemony of validity in which the closer one is to ‘passing’ as straight, the more valid (and even sexually appealing, often enough) one can be read as.  In gay culture, even those that reject the straight image deeply inherit the straight values, and the more they live the ‘lifestyle’ of the mainstream gay, the more they hurt for it.  It is a self-abuse simply to be in the gay community, wherein no matter what everyone says, you cannot be whomever you wish without repercussions emotional, psychological, and social.

    So what do we do?  Do we stay a circuit-boy until our brothers and sisters are raising their own ‘bois’?  Do we live like we’re straight people, do we cloister ourselves away with a calling and engage in no sexually variant community at all?

    I think not.  As a vivaciously[i] queer person my association with the ‘mainstream’ gay community, which I refer to simply as the ‘gay community’ is marginal at most.  For this I am pleased- because I am part of a healthy community of sexually variant people who reject the two normatives offered between heteronormative (trying to live by the traditional alignment of biological sex, gender identity, and gender roles) and homonormative (trying to live by the gay ideals and lifestyle).  I am by no means saying we are perfect- but in rejecting the limiting structures we are offered for identification and community we engage in creating a new third community, one that seeks to include and respect.  I desire not a wife and three kids, nor a bag of Crystal, nor a gin and tonic nor a good bar but a community of people in solidarity with one another, recognizing each others oppressions and fighting together to empower all.  For our liberation is tied up with one another’s- and that is what being queer is about- not who we fuck, but a fuck you to telling me who I can fuck, telling me who I am because of who I fuck, a fuck you to making specials laws about the lives of myself and who I fuck, e ad nauseum. 

   Queer culture is a no thank you.  Queer culture is an attempt to create a reality of acceptance (not tolerance), equality, and diversity.  It means you can have a relationship with your opposite sex partner and have your two, three, four kids, and I can have a primary relationship with one man, a secondary with a pair of dykes, several lovers and a happy family with beautiful kids of my own, and that’s great.  It is a big ghetto girl on Maury Povitch’s television show getting up and saying ‘I’MMA DO WHAT I WANT!’, and then ditching her shitty job at Subway (where she gets minimum wage while some guy she’ll never meet makes more profit off her work than she does), and moving to a collectively operated garlic farm or art haus.

 Or law firm.

    And queers are, therefore, not just ‘super gays’.  We are homosexuals, yes- but we are so many sexualities and homo is only one.  Heterosexuals, homosexuals, bisexuals, trisexuals (no, not that try anything- that are interested in all three biological sexes, silly), asexual, pansexual, omnisexual, pomosexual, all the way to autosexual… what a sexy list!  And queers come in every one of those forms. 

 So there are gay homosexuals, and there are queer homosexuals.  And I’m sure there are other kinds of homosexuals.  Homosexuals that choose to identify as ‘straight’, even.  These words, though, don’t describe sexuality- they describe a politic of sexuality, a culture mixed up in concepts of sexuality, and communities clustered around these cultures and politics.

 With me still?

 Good.

 Choose your own adventure.

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[i] Flattering myself

Tagged: culture, culture clash, diversity, fag, gay, gay culture, gender, gender diversity, heteronormative, heterosexism, heterosexual, homonormative, homosexual, identity, language, lesbian, privilege, queer, queer theory, sexual diversity, sexuality, straight, trans, transexual, transgender

Posted in: Language, Queer