#i've got to stop hitting the really meaty questions on sundays

[pentanguine]

22) What is your sexual and romantic orientations? Are they affected by your gender?

Ah, the million dollar question.

Honestly, short answer, I have no idea. And maybe I’ll never have any idea! Maybe my sexuality and/or my understanding of it will shift every few years as I learn new words and ways of being, or as I have different life experiences. Maybe I’ll never settle down and “figure it out,” because there is no a priori sexuality living inside me like the solution to a puzzle, there’s just complex human feelings overlapping clumsily with a rigid society. Sexuality is totally made up, not because the feelings aren’t real but because the way we taxonomize those feelings is so particular to time and place, and I’m particularly bad at fitting into the structure of the time and place where I live! I’m attracted to people of many different genders, to different extents and in different ways across time, but mostly I seem to be into women, and I am not a woman or a man. This experience is well-nigh impossible to shoehorn into the schematic of modern Western sexual orientation.

I’ve had so many epiphanies about sexuality, and at the time, each one felt like a lightbulb going off and something finally settling inside me. But all of those experiences have shifted over time, and they’ll probably keep on shifting. First I thought I was bi, and then I realized that the thought of being a woman with a boyfriend made me feel bleak, so I jettisoned the idea of a boyfriend and called myself gay; then I realized that I was still attracted to men even if I didn’t want to date them and I read a lot of think-pieces on sexual fluidity; then I realized I was genderqueer and leaned way too hard into being a lesbian to justify my attraction to women (because if I wasn’t a lesbian, it would be Bad!); and then last year I decided I felt much more comfortable calling myself bi and just giving my sexuality the space to sprawl out and make itself at home, even if I do have a preference.

And my actual sexuality changes, too! The more I stop pressuring myself to be a neat little lesbian who was Born This Way, the more comfortable I feel acknowledging that my formative experiences with attraction in middle school involved guys, and not girls. It’s not just that I was oblivious (although I was also that), I was just into guys more often and more strongly, which is the same way I feel about women now. And yeah, it is really, really weird to have your sexuality do a 180 like that! It’s not like it happened overnight, but it does lead to this feeling of disjointedness with my past self, like I jumped through some kind of parallel universe portal and emerged in an alternate sexuality timeline. In retrospect, I guess the best way to describe what I was was a girlfag: I thought of myself as a girl, even if I wasn’t one, but I wanted other boys to think I was a boy, and I liked guys who were pretty and effeminate and possibly gay, because if they were gay that made them “better” to be attracted to. The first narrative for this is that I’m a straight girl who fetishizes gay men; the second narrative for this is that I’m a lesbian who has crushes on feminine, unattainable boys as a proxy for girls; the third narrative is that I’m trans and gay and so duh, I like queer guys.

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[A Tangent]

Also, you know what, it’s very important to me to not be a lesbian. Because I’m not. We can’t all be lesbians! And that’s ok!

I am not a man and I am mostly attracted to women and I have a very complicated relationship with my infrequent attraction to men, but that does not inherently mean that I am a lesbian struggling with comp het. Maybe I really am a bi person with a preference. Maybe I really am a genderqueer person with no affiliation or alignment or whatever the fuck to womanhood. Maybe my interest in men is so complicated by my own transmasculine gender that I can’t really access it. Maybe my experiences don’t need to be twisted to fit a Good and Proper Lesbian Narrative wherein I realize that Men Are Bad and Women Are Good and I’m not really attracted to the Bad People, and I’m absolutely willing to reduce myself to being Basically A Good Person so that the Good and Loving Light of Lesbianism will shine down upon me.

Look, lesbians are great. Lesbian is a word with so much political power, so much potential for self-definition and self-realization, and so much more fluidity than people give it credit for. It’s a beautiful word and sometimes I wish I were a lesbian. But I’m not, because I choose not to be. I will be mistaken for a lesbian for the rest of my life. The specifics of my queerness will never be legible to other people, because people will see me at my most visibly queer and think “she is a lesbian,” and they will see me with my hypothetical girlfriend and think “those women are lesbians.” And so while lesbian is a word that could fit me under its umbrella if I so chose, I don’t so choose, because it’s not the most accurate or fulfilling word for my queerness, and I will be lesbian until proven otherwise for the rest of my life. And so, when given the chance amongst friends and fellow queers, I want to prove otherwise.

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I’m also ace, which I see as the queer umbrella that covers all of my sexuality and gender under its scope. My feelings on how, exactly, I’m a-spec have shifted wildly between “gray-asexual,” “demisexual?,” and “totally ace” over the years, often multiple times within the same freaking week. Trying to pin down what sexual attraction even is when it’s something you rarely or never experience, and when it’s also something that you approach through a totally different lens than most people, is an exercise in futility. Words like “hot” or “turned on” or just “sex” don’t even make sense to me; I know broadly what other people mean when they say them, but when I try to find corollaries in my own experiences, I either come up empty-handed or with something that’s like a distorted reflection seen through fog.

I’m not aromantic, but the older I get the less I feel like romantic attraction applies to me, so at this point I’d consider myself sort of philosophically aromantic. I know I’m not actually aro, but the kind of attraction that I feel, while very normative (fluttering hearts; swooping stomachs; improbable daydreams; a desire to impress), also has nothing whatsoever to do with emotions or relationships. My body finds other people cute, and my brain tends to agree, but those feelings don’t lead to desire. They don’t go anywhere. Appreciating the experience of being attracted to someone almost never leads me to want anything from that attraction. I don’t know what that is (maybe it’s shyness or insecurity, or maybe it is some kind of queerness), but I do know that I don’t want to push through it and force myself to go through those rituals just because other people tell me I should want to. 

I guess a lot of the disconnect for me comes from calling that type of physical attraction romantic, when for me it has nothing whatsoever to do with sweeping romantic emotions or intimate relationships. I’d be tempted to call the attraction aesthetic, except I think that’s what I feel for forests and my friend Jonesy’s fashion choices (visual appreciation with no real attraction), and I doubt it’s alterous attraction because the symptoms seem so commonplace and archetypical. So I assume I do feel what most people, bafflingly, call romantic attraction, and the romance part is just a miss for me because I’m delightfully perverse or something. I just don’t understand why “person I find attractive” and “person I want to be intimate partners with” and “person I want to have sex with” and “person I want to cohabit with” all has to be the same person. The whole narrative of romance just doesn’t make sense to me.

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Good god, this got long.

To finally end up at the second part of the question: My genderqueerness is very closely intertwined with my sexuality, to the point where I wish we still had words like “invert” that combined the two and saw them as mutually constitutive rather than at constant odds with one another. Basically, I see myself as being fundamentally bi, but gay both ways: I’m similar-to-although-not-the-same-as women when I’m attracted to a woman, and similar-to-although-not-the-same-as men when I’m attracted to a man. (When I have a crush on a nonbinary person, I’m just really t4t.) At the moment, attraction to women is the most salient aspect of my sexuality, which is often fraught, because I’m a lot more adamant about Not Being a Woman than I am about not being a man. But I’m still gay for women, and I think I come from a long lineage of people with similar experiences (Vernon Lee, Radclyffe Hall, Leslie Feinberg, Rae Spoon, etc). Speaking of Rae Spoon, I think it’s very easy to assume that you’re not into men when you spend so much time being/trying not to be jealous of them. But I’ve learned that it’s possible for something to be both. Maybe when I love men hypothetically but find it difficult to translate into reality, that’s not because “ew, men bad,” that’s because “DANGER, gender bad.” Maybe (radically! shockingly!) I am actually bisexual and I have crushes on people of various different genders, and none of that negates my attraction to anyone else.

So in summary, I guess I’m just queer, with a side of bi (*gestures expansively*) and ace (*shrugs blankly*).