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.

True Sexuality, Insufficient Words

Two questions this morning.

Is sexuality an endgame or a lived experience? And who needs to know what you're practicing or what you're fantasizing?

Following last Saturday's family victory, I've been wondering about the word "bisexual." It seemed to get in the way of my parents', and perhaps other family members', willingness to accept that I'd chosen a woman for my partner. It allowed them to have a "this is just a phase" phase, when they could hope I'd eventually choose a man.

It made them less kind to the women that I've dated, and less accepting.

When I used the word "bisexual" when I came out to my parents in 2009, I thought it prudent. I'd just met the first and only woman I'd ever dated. I was 26. Chances were, we wouldn't end up together, and I was still attracted to (some) men.

Lately, I've discarded "bisexual" and been careful with "queer" because it seems that the most relevant piece of information that I want people to know is, "Sonia is my partner." So maybe, "gay"? For simplicity or even advocacy, do I need to embrace a "gay" (or "lesbian") label if I'm going to spend my life with a woman?

The short answer is, of course not. 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? Is it even fair?

On a recent Savage Lovecast, Dan Savage advised a poly guy to consider coming out in a way that gay people used to do in the (bad) old days. Basically, let the parents meet the partner as a friend first. They'll chat about vacation spots or dinnerware or job woes and grow to really like the partner without burdening them with the responsibility for your newly revealed sexual identity.

The guy is dating a couple, but he hasn't yet come out to his family as bi or poly. Dan's almost-always-100%-on-point advice is:

The first order of business is to come out to your parents' as bi. It's unfair to the couple that you're involved with to make them the focus of that. "Hey, here are my friends. I'm fucking them both. Ta-da!" That will put this couple that you're dating in a very uncomfortable position, particularly if your parents do the pivot that a lot of conservative parents do, and get angry at the romantic partner or partners of the kid who's just coming out. 

Dan advises the guy to come out as bi and introduce his parents to the couple as friends (in no particular order). Then, when he's ready to have the poly conversation, he can reference that nice couple they met the other night. "That can help lay the groundwork for creating the fissure, the little crack in your parents' brain that you can drive the wedge into, to open their minds."

I could have lived a parallel life in which I grew to be 34 without having once talked to my parents about sex (if we had anything like "the talk," I don't remember it). Talking about sexuality, in that it is proximal to talking about sex, is not done in our family. If you respect your parents, you simply pretend that it doesn't exist.

Dan's advice to the poly guy was comforting in that it reminded me that each of us can decide exactly how we come out to each person, what the steps are and how much we reveal.

The flip side of the coin is overwhelming. If I had to create a strategy like this one for each coming out -- to a coworker, to a cousin, to a new acquaintance -- I wouldn't have time for life or work. Perhaps parents are the only people worthy of a strategy.

For everyone else, you just have to decide upon the words, a little piece of wrought language weighed down with the expectations and interpretations of generations before you. An insufficient phrase that is as close as you can get.

Which is why I'm sticking with, "This is my partner, Sonia," until further notice. It's the thing I'm sure of.

It's as truthful as I can be.

Word Have Meaning. Period.

I sat uncomfortably with yesterday's post, Word Have Meaning, Unless They Don't.

Stephen Dunn is one of my favorite priest-poets. I found his work in my early twenties, and met him at the Dodge Poetry Festival a decade ago. I'd read everything he'd published. I know how people feel when they meet rockstars.

The ground was soaked with rain from the previous night. Large white tents with audiences ranging from 50 to a few hundred were erected in grassy fields, and I trekked through the mud and hay to reach the tent where he was reading.

He'd won the Pulitzer a few years before. He must have been in one of the bigger tents, but I remember his reading as small, off-beaten-path, sparsely attended. He was all the more magical because he was mine.

During his reading, I did this thing I used to do when I was a young poet, staring in such a way that I was sure I could see someone's aura radiating outward. I started doing this at Beatnik poetry readings as a teen in the late 90s. It was probably a trick of vision and light.

A few years later, in the tent listening to Stephen Dunn, his aura was white, the highest order of auras. I drank in every word. I loved him.

Afterward, I approached him to sign my copy of his book. I was going to tell him how his words had saved me, made me feel less alone. How I revered his nuanced thought and planned to use him as a model for the kind of poet I wanted to become.

I chickened out. When I reached the man, I thrust my book to him, stammering, "Uh -- could you please sign my book?"

I still believe in the poets of nuance, even if Dunn wonders, as he gets older, if the priests had something to offer all along. I came to poetry as a religion because it offered me what religion never had -- gray areas, rich questions, a land of no absolutes.

That 19-year-old wannabe Beatnik once wrote, "The only life that interests me is with the outcasts, in the gray areas, along the fringes."

Words Have Meaning, Unless They Don't

The second of my Happiness Project commandments, "words have meaning," began unraveling the moment I wrote it. For insight into the power and limitations of words, I turn to Stephen Dunn.

In a poem dedicated to his brother, he writes, "What is the past if not unfinished work? / Swampy, fecund, seductively revisable? / One of us has spent his life developing respect / for the weakness of words, the other for what / must be held onto; there may be a chance for us" (from "Our Parents" in Different Hours).

It is the poet, of course, who develops the reverence for the weakness of words. "Poet" was one of the first identities, at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, that I took on wholeheartedly. It felt like a spiritual calling.

IF THE POET

If the poet doesn’t yield to the priest,
as Stevens says he shouldn’t,
and if both reside in the same village,
and call on their powers to rectify
or explain the latest disaster,

does the priest become less persuasive
because his ideas are likely not his own,
and is the poet suspect for the same reason?
Would a good priest find the right words,
as the good poet would, in among the many words

passed down for centuries
on what to think, what to believe? Or would reverence
always get in the way of the true,
thus possibly giving the poet the edge?

That is, if the poet mistrusts words, as he should,
makes them pass hard tests, knows that they must
be arranged and shaped in order to convey
even a smidgen of truth, wouldn’t he,
although self-ordained, be more reliable?

But what if the villagers believed
they were saved by a prayer the priest said
on Sunday among the ruins? And all the poet
could do was elegize the ruins?
Would the real and the imagined fuse,
become something entirely new?

And what if the poet and priest were one,
each invoking the other as the crops grew
and rain was steady in rainy season, or,
just as confusing, things got worse
and prayers proved useless, and poems
merely decorated the debris where a house

once was? Would it be time for the priest
to admit he’d known but one book? For the poet
to say he’s read many, and look, it hasn’t helped?
Or has the issue from the start been a great need
that can’t be fully met, only made bearable
and sometimes served by those who try?

Stephen Dunn from Lines of Defense, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014

Religious zealots, Zen Buddhists, political activists, radio show hosts and poets all have different uses for language and different relationships to language. In this blog, I hope to expose the way language is used to silence and oppress and to highlight those occasions when it is used to celebrate and uplift.

The relationships will get dicey. The priests are everywhere, and many of them have good intentions. The poets profess to many faiths.

Still, priests and poets have different reference points for truth. I'm glad Dunn put these two in the same village. I might put them in the same room. It's time they talked face to face.