LY #26 My place in the LBGT Sandwich

 

From the time I first read the work of Mary Renault in 9th grade, I've identified with the "Queer" community.  But it wasn't until I tried to explain my gender identity to an ex- LA Cop that I adopted the label "bisexual" as a description of myself.

Before 1991, if someone asked me what I was, I would have given a long and often tedious disquisition about how identity is rhetorical and how my feelings and sexuality sometimes were directed toward individuals who were female and sometimes toward individuals who were male but that one's feelings really were less important than the use one made of identity for the accomplishment of particular political or social ends.   Or I just said the I was "queer" without identifying what that meant in my particular case.

But then one day I was talking to my new colleague Bill about a student who had punched another student in the Wagner Mall bathroom because she'd overheard the woman call me a "fag."  (I wasn't present -- it was just a student talking about me to another student.)  The student herself had told me the story because she'd appeared in class one day with a cast on her hand.  I'd felt it necessary to "come out" to her a few days later because I didn't want her thinking that the woman she'd punched was completely wrong about me.  (I still remember that conversation, held while sitting on the bench outside of the Metolius Building.)  As usual, my coming out with lengthy and complex, as it was when I told the story to Bill by email.  He just shot me back the response, "So you're a bisexual."

And I thought, "Wow.  It's that simple, is it?"

I have to admit that I still think the label is a bit limited because, like the words "gay" or "straight," it partakes of the notion that gender identity is a "fact" rather than a performance.  We are not "required" to act on our desires and throughout history many people have not expected to be able to have emotional or sexual happiness.  But Americans grow up with the belief that the pursuit of happiness is a right, nay, a duty.  It's that belief which underlies the arguments about marriage equality and gay rights.   

Kinsey Scale from Wikipedia

So I accepted the reductionist designation of "bisexual" because it was an easy label and politically expedient.  I have also called myself a Kinsey 3.

But at bottom, I am less a fan of the philosophy in Gaga's "Born This Way" than of that in Weird Al's "Perform This Way."