Why I’m Called Queer

It’s no secret that my sexual orientation has morphed over the years.  I’ve taken a number of different labels, each of which meant something to me at the time I adopted it, but as I switched between them, a gnawing falseness set in—a questioning of why I couldn’t simply stick to one identity.  I knew it confused people.  I often still use outdated labels with people who can’t keep up with the saga.  I’m bisexual to my friends and my parents back home, who’ve known me when I dated both my first girlfriend (a pan-romantic asexual, what a beautiful juxtaposition) and my two boyfriends, one of whom I loved with all my heart.  Bisexual still makes sense to them.

Meanwhile, I’m pansexual to many of my freshman year college friends, as a political statement about gender as much as an explanation of attraction, and I use the mouthful bi-romantic homosexual with my best friend, although that seems no longer accurate either.  Right now, I’m settled with queer, which feels hip and as close to concise and my own self-understanding can get.

And this whole timeline has the aura of something I’ve written down many times before, although I can’t remember if it was on this blog or in a journal or one of the multifarious word documents hiding on my hard drive.  But this article from Autostraddle reminded me why all these labels are important in forming the person I am today.

Reise from Autostraddle writes:

“So, what am I? I identify as bisexual because my relationships with men were not lies and I think that’s what bisexuality means. I loved them/sex…   “Lesbian” seems like what I am but “bisexual” honors who I was, too — it wasn’t just a filling station from there to here, it was another highway altogether. I didn’t evolve, I changed. But that girl was real, too.” 

“We want sexuality to be biological because we want sexuality to be instinctual and natural and out of our control… We don’t have faith in the rest of it because we doubt the permanence of anything we are capable of changing with our minds.”

And it’s true, isn’t it?  The scientific community is desperately seeking a “gay gene” that legitimizes our presence as LGBT people, because if sexuality truly is organic and predestined, it is also beyond our control and somehow…more ok.

I’ve had trouble in the past accepting that I am allowed to morph—that an identity doesn’t have to be something I stick with for the rest of my life, that I can shed layers and grow new ones, no matter what the rest of the world says.  But we are still accountable to them: the old friends, the grandparents, the family newsletter, those people and circumstances that do not closely follow our personal journeys and transformations.  And we have been taught to fear the idea of changing too much and returning home to find that the people who once knew you best no longer understand the person you’ve become.

And that is scary.

But sexuality, the fluidity of what attracts us to one another, embraces that fear and uncertainty.  It must, because its very idea is at the edge of society already.  I don’t have concrete answers for how you face that uncertainty and that fear and all the dynamism that comes with it, because goodness knows I haven’t completely.  But what I can advise is that you accept, at the very least internally, every label that you have ever ascribed.  You are who you allow yourself to be, and your integrated whole, which embraces your past love, your future possibilities, and your now- THAT is truly the most beautiful and authentic person you can be.

A Different Kind of Porn

I, personally, was never all that interested in anime, manga, or the zapanimation craze that swept through the early 2000′s, but I had many friends who were.  Thus, I was familiar with the vocabulary and the concepts of yaoi, yuri, and slash fictions, which inevitably came up in conversation, giggled about with girlish intensity.

I won’t use this blog as a platform for speculating about my high school friends’ sexual proclivities, but I will say that I did not understand yaoi or slash fiction at the time.  I had seen one or two books at Borders or in the library, tucked harmlessly into the comic book sections, but they never struck my fancy.  I certainly didn’t understand the connection between them and porn.  Which is why, in retrospect, I find this article by Heartbreak Nympho fascinating as insight into the way teens that don’t consuming “traditional” porn explore their sexual interests.

Although it personally doesn’t suit my tastes, I love yaoi and yuri as examples of the multitude of media outlets that help teach teens and young adults who don’t have access to good resources on sex and sexuality.  Yaoi, as the article explains, features relationships that resonate with a certain aesthetic– they depict beautiful, generally slender men going to extreme lengths to be with each other and show their devotion.  They are heart rending and sexy.  I’m happy that they exist for the men and women who read them that feel, perhaps, that there is not enough context, emotion, or commitment in traditional porn to satisfy them.

For me, sexual awakening was different.  When I was first stumbled across material that was sexual in nature, it was a set of descriptive

If your movie has no good slash pairings, no stars for you!

paragraphs advertising “adult hypno-tapes”: they came in standard fantasies, but could also be customized, and I read them over and over, internalizing these scenarios. In my early teens, this was perfect for me.  It was literary, rather than pictorial, which was less threatening.  It was mysterious, because of the emphasis on hypnosis, and it was completely separate from myself (for I hardly considered myself a sexual being at the time, having no interest in a relationship for purposes other than kissing and cuddling; I was also overweight and had bad body image, but that’s another story completely).

So for my middle school and early high school cohorts, yaoi was their hynotapes.  It was safe, it was literary, it was engaging, it was private.  It could have been a million things, but what’s important was that it worked for them.   I make the same argument for why porn is beneficial: this form of literature allows hundreds of thousands of  people to come to better terms with what they know and want from sex and sexuality as a whole, and that is a large debt that we owe to a highly under-appreciated subset of media.  So for that, I say thank you yaoi.  Thank you Japan, and thank you to the publishers who first made this new market available in the US.

Submission and Other Drugs

I’ve delayed posting this article because I found that every time I tried to write about it, I ended up talking in circles around the article’s original content.  That’s probably because “Adult Toy Story: Romance vs. Reality in Air Doll” is so complete in itself that it needs little (if any) commentary at all.  So before you start reading my ramblings, please take a minute to scan this incredibly well-written post. Air Doll is a remarkable movie by Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-ada that tackles some intense philosophical and sexual questions.  And the article above, by columnist Greta Christina (who is another great resource!), does an amazing job talking about the movie and how it’s characters struggle with their own desires for intimacy and the give-and-take which comes from a real, honest connection.

Rather than trying to summarize or expand on what Greta Christina already tackles so eloquently, I want to take this conversation in another direction, to talk about sub-space.

No, that’s not like deep space or cyberspace; sub-space is a place inside your head that many submissives in BDSM scenes go.  It’s different for every person who experiences it, doing everything from blurring the outside world to magnifying every detail of a particular moment, to some messy, beautiful combination of the two.  And what does that have to do with Air Doll and the article I linked you to?

Honestly, very little.  But what struck me about the plotline in Air Doll was this particular description, when the doll (who has come to life) becomes lovers with a video store owner who has recently saved her life by breathing air back into her from a puncture wound.

“The two become lovers, and she—still thinking of herself as an air doll—offers to be whatever he wants her to be, and to do, sexually, whatever he wants….

In offering herself to be, as she puts it, a “substitute,” to be and do any sexual thing Junichi wants her to be and do, the doll herself fails at intimacy. If she had an active, erotic desire to be his fuck toy, for him to use and abuse however he likes—if she was getting some genuine kinky thrill out of this—that would be one thing. That would be a path to intimacy. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t see herself as a sexual agent at all. She still sees herself as an air doll: an object of desire, not a generator of it. She sees herself as having nothing sexual to offer but her passive willingness to be the recipient of her partner’s sexuality.”

This is a brilliant distinction to be made between submissives and the kind of sexual persona that Air Doll represents.  For the doll, sex is not something she is ENGAGED in, but something that happens TO her, which is incredibly unfortunate- both for her own sexual self and for the relationship she attempts to form with her lover.  For submissives, on the other hand, the offering of one’s self to another for the fulfillment of their desires is a desire in and of itself.

Sadly, a lot of people don’t understand this distinction, and it makes feminists kind of cranky.  Feminists tend to accuse submissives of compromising their strength as women (ignore the fact that, of course, there are male submissives too) by allowing men to dominate them (again, a gender distinction that doesn’t hold up if you’re looking at the whole collection of sub/dom practicioners).  From that point of view, being a submissive looks a lot like what Air Doll was doing: unequivocally offering ourselves up for the pleasure of others, without any concerns or desires of our own.

But that’s what sub-space is all about- going so deep into our own desire to give that we lose track of where we are.  We become crystallized in moments, in sensations, in physical longing embodied.   And the act of being submissive is fulfillment of our own sexual desires, at once giving us the agency to decide what we want, and then relinquishing it to a dominant who will control how it is expressed.

And I think there are plenty of people out there who can benefit from understanding sub-space, from drawing distinctions between active submission and passive submission, which I think a lot of women (and maybe some men) are familiar with.

Passive submission is Air Doll.  Passive submission is the teenage girl who agrees that she’s ready for sex because her boyfriend wants to, but is nervous and doesn’t really enjoy it.  Passive submission is acceptance of what is coming.  Passive is this explanation from Scarleteen:

“ Once he asked if there was something else he could do that she liked. She said no because it was something she just didn’t have the answer to: she didn’t know what she liked or might like just yet.”

Passive submission is letting sex happen, rather than taking it by the horns.

And passive submission will never get you to sub-space.  Passive submission doesn’t create intimacy (although I know that romantic love can exist without it, but that is something for your own contemplation, not for me to tell you), it only creates complacency.  Sub-space, on the other hand- genuine, whole-body submission, can be one of the most beautiful, mutual, and intimate places a person can go.

There are places like sub-space in vanilla sex, in D/s relationships, and in non-sexual ones, even, so don’t despair if you aren’t kinky.  If you’ve ever had a moment, where your heart pulls so hard that your body tries to melt right into your partner, where you can’t stand the idea of being two separate people for a second longer, you’re in something like sub-space.  If you’ve ever cuddled up next to someone and felt time pause for a second and focus on just the sensations of your skin on theirs, you’ve found your sub-space.

Sub-space is different for everyone.  It’s kinky, it’s D/s, it’s intimate, it’s loving, it’s mutual.  It doesn’t matter what form sub-space takes for you, as long as you can find it, or its equivalent.  If you can tap into your own organic form of intimacy, rather than just submitting to sex, becoming passive and inanimate, then you and your partner can grow as sexual people.  And that’s what we all want, isn’t it?