Blake Morgan Is Bi!

Happy Monday! I'm on a roll this morning: lunches made, kitchen swept, laundry folded. I have a little over 30 minutes to drink some tea and write so I can exercise for 30 min. and still get to work at a reasonable time. Can every morning feel this good?

Because of my time crunch, this will be a short blog post in homage to the writers of Madame Secretary, which I've been watching solo on Netflix (Sonia avoids political shows).

After working together for three years, Blake Morgan, assistant to Tea Leoni's Secretary of State, finally came out to her. Any queer person watching knew this character wasn't just a straight guy. There was something truly satisfying about this revelation.

Blake Morgan is awkward. He's been burned. He maintains his right to hold some thing or things sacred, and decide himself when he wants people in his inner circle. He'll tell you what he wants you to know when he's ready, and not before.

Plus, he's a dashing dreamboat. He's a bi guy I would've gone for in a heartbeat.

One of my first books after beginning to date women was Look Both Ways (NYTimes review). It gave me confidence but not necessarily a language, or a way of talking about bisexuality to gay (especially lesbian) people I knew or my Christian parents.

Among lesbians, beginning in college, I was an outsider. If they suspected I had crushes (oh, did I have crushes!), I was dismissed as one of the silly straight experimenters. I even thought of myself that way.

Among my straight Christian family, I was already an outsider with my education and liberal views. Add feminism, then bisexuality and eventually moving in with a woman & the bisexuality tends to get lost. It becomes a fuzzy stepping stone rather than a part of my identity to choose and fully own.

Thank you, writers of Blake Morgan. It was a rare pleasure to see a bisexual character on television whose sexuality is secondary to his work ethic, determination and adorably anxious overachieving.

I liked this character because he bucks the "all-out, all the time" mandate from LGBTQ leaders like Dan Savage. I see where they're coming from, but I also think it's a little bit like asking your black friend to represent all black people whenever you have a question that concerns "the black community." It's not his or her job, just like it's not my job to represent all queer people, all the time.

Like "the black community," maybe the "LGBTQ community" is less a community and more of an umbrella that serves its political purpose. I'm under it. Is that enough?

Your Life Story Isn't Your Life. It's Your Story.

"Your life story isn't your life. It's your story."

I'm feeling that quote acutely as I sort through thirty-five years of pictures, handwritten correspondence (letters! notes from abroad! the best postcards!), awards, published and unpublished writing and other random keepsakes. The small, finished room in our basement is full of this shit.

While I have an occasional flash of joy a la "The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up," I'm keeping more than I want to keep. I'm keeping it out of a vague sense of obligation to my mother or unborn child (not sure which).

I'm keeping letters from my college friends because the humans themselves bring me joy, and I'm not inspired in this moment to reread every letter I've ever received from them. Does that mean I'll never want to do so?

I'm keeping the box of pictures from my mother because, while I've been completely happy cutting my own photo collection in half, I've run out of steam. I can't hold another 300-500 pictures in my hand, one by one, and decide what to do with them.

This weekend, Sonia and I went to Connecticut to visit one of her friends from law school. On her fridge was a magnet: "Life isn't about finding yourself. It's about creating yourself."

The friend is gorgeous -- tall and African American with perfect skin and amazing, long dreadlocks. She's from Virginia and told us the story of her husband walking into law offices where she was working and looking her up and down, clearly curious about her but clearly not going to do anything about it. Against policy if not the law, she searched in his file for his email address and sent him a message asking him out. They were married a few years later.

When I praised her bravery, she said, "Girl, I had to find my husband," and shrugged it off.

I don't know too much about this couple, but I liked that quote on their fridge. In the course of a weekend, we went to a winery, a cider mill, a casino and a corn maze. We made small talk easily and avoided politics and anything too personal. There was a sense of confidence in both of them, a sense of plunging headlong into the future together.

There are things I kept because I'm creating myself.

Because I kept the letters from a youth counselor named Mark, I'll remember lying on the floor of an elevator with him in a hotel near the Mall of America. I was sixteen, he was twenty. We didn't kiss. He wasn't my first taste of the illicit.

Because I kept the laugh-out-loud "communication contract" written by my ex boyfriend Dan, I'll remember how funny he was, how I probably would have chosen him if I was able to choose a man.

Because I kept a book constructed by Ari and written in a few months into our relationship, I'll remember the intensity of my first relationship with a woman, how it came upon me like a revelation.

There are things I didn't keep, too. But they're not a part of my story.

Recently, I sat in on a session about trauma's effect on the brain in young children. In all children, the neural pathways that are encouraged (i.e., "If I cry, I am comforted.") are the pathways that become set. Other potential pathways are pruned away. This pruning continues through our lives.

There were maybe a dozen letters from unrecognizable names. These completely forgotten intimacies -- both friends and lovers -- had been completely pruned from memory. Yet I'd been present with them all once, maybe more than once. Regardless, they were in Friday's trash.

It's both empowering and tragic, the relentlessness of time. The reality of so many people -- and each moment -- intersecting with your life so briefly. The constant need to create one's life, and the fact that each moment passes into the abyss if we don't seize upon it.

Parker (Part 1): New Frontier

When I first met Parker, we were 19-year-old undergraduates at the University of Westminster in London. 9/11 had just happened.

A few days before, I'd been sitting in a London hotel room with my mother the night of September 11, 2001, and I came out for the first time -- as agnostic. Through her careful protests, I shared my ideas about how the universe might work, based largely on James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy.

Then I put my mother on a plane back to the States. I was on my own for the first time.

Parker and I met in a drab college common room on the ground floor of a narrow building in the heart of the Victoria neighborhood in central London. A hundred undergraduates were crowded in for orientation, the anxiety and excitement palpable. We all sat in uncomfortable chairs in a circle around the edge of the room, international students and first year Brits. Our lives were just beginning.

I remember looking around the circle of faces, deciding whom to befriend. In my newly empowered state, with mixed results reinventing myself in my first two years of college, I was determined to do this study abroad thing right. I chose Parker, a gorgeous boy with the cheekbones of a god, and a young woman with a tie-dyed shirt and a pierced labret.

The three of us processed the aftermath of 9/11, ate mushrooms for the first time, head-banged in grungy basement bars and danced all night in cavernous clubs. We also ate meals together, watched movies and wondered about the world. By the end of my four months in London, they were my closest friends.

My senior year of college, Parker asked me with some reverence for a phone date. I was sure he was going to tell me that he was in love with me, which meant he was probably going to come out to me (that was usually how it worked).

Instead, he told me that he was exploring BDSM, that it was a part of him. He could share magazines to help me understand, if I wanted. It seemed important to him that I understand.

This was a new frontier, but I didn't flinch. It was like my friends from high school who came out as gay or admitted to abortions despite our years of Catholic education: I knew their hearts and knew all of the pieces of their decision-making. I could not find fault with them; instead, I needed to expand my perspective.

Something similar happened a few weeks ago. I shared my blog with Parker and he had some things to share with me, too: he'd taken up acting in porn in Berlin and working as an escort. I suspected he was queer or bisexual, too, so I asked if I could interview him.

Parker went to school for architecture and pursued careers in art writing and video game design before embracing a life of sex work within the past year. The new frontier for me here was not the fact of the sex work -- I've known anecdotally that there are plenty of people doing sex work who choose it and enjoy it.

The new frontier was that I hadn't loved anyone in the industry. I hadn't had the chance to see how the work fulfilled them in a way similar to how I feel fulfilled in my own work. I hadn't explored big questions like love, ambition and satisfaction with someone who is both a fantastic critical thinker and has found peace and presence in sex work.

I haven't let Parker speak in this first post, but you'll meet him and read his careful analysis and irreverent skepticism in the few that are coming.

It felt important first, to say: I love him, and I'm unsure if we can ever be truly fair to a subject we love. I'll do my best.

Jenny (Part 3): On Becoming Honest

Jenny and I had beers on her front porch Sunday afternoon, and I realized how much time you have to spend with a person to get a decent interview, to make sure you've covered all your bases and captured at least a little bit of the nuance of their experience. 

She was on fire for Rebecca Traister's new book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (review here). 

Traister argues that even for most straight women, relationships with women are more fulfilling in every way. "So I just felt so lucky," Jenny said, "that I'm also sexually attracted to women, too, because I can get so much more from those relationships -- physically, mentally and emotionally -- than I could with a man."

"I'm generally happier when I'm in a relationship," she'd said the week before. "When I'm happy, it's because my life feels full. It feels like the things I'm doing are honest projections of me, and what I want, and what I want to give to the world."

As a teen, Jenny remembers meeting gay women and feeling an inexplicable admiration for them, an awe for their bravery. She remembers being impressed when any woman -- gay or straight -- was able to present themselves as strong and down-to-earth, in opposition to a culture that wanted them to preen and pluck and perform. 

After she came out, she realized that this admiration came because she knew deep down that she wasn't being brave in the same way.

Now, she knows who she is but still finds LGBTQ labels -- lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer -- spectacularly insufficient.

"Meeting someone new, I say 'gay' because I'm dating a woman, so I feel pretty gay," Jenny said. "I do identify as queer, but I don't say that when I am first meeting people, because they're like, 'well, what is that? What does that mean?' If they don't say that, they're thinking it, and that's almost worse."

Queer, for Jenny, carries with it an acknowledgement of the men and the F-to-M trans people she's crushed on and dated. As she puts it, "It's a little more than just lesbian." Queer also gives her the freedom to embody her own version of the strong and down-to-earth women she's admired. 

Jenny is petite, with a tough and determined walk. I most often see her in straight-legged pants, button-down shirts and dangling earrings. She explained her thinking behind her look. 

"I don't like to portray a whole lot of feminine qualities. I've been cutting my hair shorter and shorter. I have a very strong aversion to portraying myself as super-feminine. I don't want to be masculine, just somewhere in between. The last time I dressed really feminine was Halloween. That felt really right to, only on Halloween, put on a dress."

Five or six years after Jenny first started to settle into her own identity and feel comfortable in her own skin, she met her current partner. They've been together for a little over a year now, and the five year plan involves a child. Jenny hopes it involves her current partner. But marriage? Not necessary.

"I'm not sure that marriage is super-important to me. It's a huge waste of money. I'll have to spend money on having a baby. But yeah, I think in five years I want a kid. Just one. Then I'll get another one in seven years," we laughed.

There was something in our laughter that hoped it would be that easy for her to become a mother.

At least some of the confidence and excitement around this vision -- of a child and family, in a few short years -- comes from her current girlfriend.

My relationship has made me feel more fulfilled. Sometimes, I'm overwhelmed by that feeling of being fulfilled, but I feel that I could be with her for a long time and never get bored. She makes me feel confident in myself. I can bounce ideas. She's a question-asker who challenges me without making me feel stupid. 

I feel better matched in my relationship than I ever have, in terms of us being able to talk about anything. She's the first person I've dated who I can see a really long-term future with. In the past, I have been terrified of settling for something that's not right for me, or getting stuck in something, but that has nothing to do with being gay.

Maybe there's a key in there to gay happiness, or to what Jenny called "grown-up happy": learning to separate the trials and dramas of life, the hang-ups and heartbreaks, from our sexuality. Or at very least, to not blame our sexuality -- or bigots' response to it -- for the challenges we face.

Few people lead truly charmed lives. Gay or straight, everyone has their inner and outer demons to face. We're all just working towards being, in Jenny's words, honest projections of ourselves and what we want to give to the world.

Going Into Strangers' Homes

When I wrote arts and entertainment and feature stories a few years back, my favorite part was the interview. I couldn't believe that there was a "real job" that allowed you to invite yourself into stranger's homes, sit down on their sofa, meet their partner and children and proceed to ask them questions about the business, art or hobby that was most central to their lives. I was young, and I rightly recognized it as a privilege.

As I talked to more and more people about this blog, a new project emerged: interviewing ordinary gay people who have found their "gay squared," gay to the power of happy. It looks a little different for everyone.

My parents' generation believed that to be gay was to be sentenced to a lifetime of sadness. That perception is swiftly changing, and it's changing because of the proliferation of gay and queer stories and role models.

There are infinitely many ways to live, and it's up to each of us to find a way to live authentically and get as close to happiness as we can. There can't be too many examples of how to do that: the more, the better.

An initial draft of my lead interview questions follows.

1. Can you tell me a little bit about the religious and spiritual background of your childhood? (Thank you, Krista Tippett.)
2. When did your sexual orientation begin to emerge, and what did that look like? 
3. Who were the key role models and influences in your life as an adolescent and young adult? 
4. How do you define your sexual identity now, and how did you come to embrace that identity? 
5. Has technology played a role in helping your find partners or like-minded communities? 
6. How have the swiftly changing politics around LGBTQ issues affected your life? 
7. What does happiness look like for you? 

I will always try to see the home of the person I am interviewing; homes can tell us so much about a person. I may offer some in Q&A format, but I prefer the flexibility and depth allowed by feature-style writing. I can't wait to get started.

For ease and momentum, I'll begin with friends and ripple outward into larger networks of diverse gay people of all ages. If you would like to be interviewed, email me at gayhappiness101@gmail.com. I look forward to hearing your story.

Sexual Orientation, Identity & Why I Choose "Queer"

From yesterday's blog: 

Sexuality is a dynamic and lived experience like age, career identity or political party. But if I'm truly committed to Sonia, does it make sense for my sexual identity to reference a bunch of hypothetical lovers I'll never pursue? 

This question merits a little more explanation. In particular, the difference between sexual orientation and sexual identity. 

While looking up definitions for clarity, I found out that the Kinsey Institute is still going strong, and it had a baby!

The mission of Kinsey Confidential is "to disseminate accurate, research-based information geared towards college students."

I subscribed to their podcast. One place this blog could lead me is to a future career in sex education curriculum or advocacy. We need to start educating about sex and sexuality a lot sooner than college, and better navigate difficult conversations with the religious right on the topic. But I digress. 

Kinsey Confidential defines sexual orientation as both sexual attraction and sexual behavior (where you land on the Kinsey scale between heterosexuality and homosexuality) "as well as sexual identity, romantic attractions and behaviors, membership in sexual communities (e.g., lesbian, bisexual, gay, kink, BDSM), sexual fantasies."

In other words, the big picture. Many things are contained within sexual orientation. As far as I can tell, sexual orientation has limitless labels. I can be a "woman-loving-woman submissive" or "a bisexual sex worker who works with men but only has romantic relationships with women" or "a gay man looking only for a couple of bears (exactly two) for a monogamous relationship."

Sexual orientation resists simple definitions. I wanted to offer mine here, but the best I can come up with is "queer cis woman in a relationship with a woman, with broad tastes in fantasyland."

When I think about listing each aspect of my sexual orientation, it's overwhelming in the same way writing a resume is overwhelming. It's difficult to remember and qualify each line item.

Sexual identity is simpler. According to Kinsey Confidential, sexual identity is "the label that people adopt to signify to others who they are as a sexual being."

Simply, I am queer. Sonia is bisexual (as she reminded me yesterday, mostly because of Ryan Gosling).

Sexual identity is the one that makes me feel like a grumpy, emo teen. A few reasons for this.

First, I resist the implied authority in the definitions. The terms themselves, especially lesbian, gay and bisexual, were defined in another time, probably by white men in power. The definitions haven't changed much.

Second, I resist the simplicity and historical weight in the words. The terms were coined when society had a different view of the fluidity of sexuality. These identities are perceived as static, and humans are not.

To call myself "lesbian" now would create a false narrative in which I was a lesbian when I had relationships with men and that I was being untrue to myself in those relationships. There is also an implied discovery that I'm lesbian, which suggests a lack of self-awareness.

This was not my experience, nor do I think it's the experience of the majority of broadly-defined queer people today. We know what sexual identities and orientations exist, and we try them on for size earlier and earlier. Then, we love who we love, with increasing impunity.

I choose "queer" for two reasons. First, in that it reappropriates a word that had a negative connotation in the past, it is pushing our language forward. Second, it is broad enough to encompass the fluidity of sexuality as it unfolds over a lifetime.