Thoughts on Queer
Jun. 22nd, 2018 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI've been away from home and sleepless and it's pride month. I feel awful. I've been having some thoughts about queer, gender, and marginalization.
The ace spectrum is pretty marginalized. I'm discovering some really helpful language, the term megasexual. To quote: "the way it was explained to me is that megasexuals use sex to get to know people. So it’s not necessarily about fostering a romantic connection at all. It’s like, you meet, you flirt and have sex, and then you might become friends who never have sex again. You may or may not want to continue having sex with that person, but the information you get from the experience helps you figure it out." This rings lots of bells but there's barely even a definition on the internet for it, and ace visibility (and the name of the ace spectrum itself) renders this stuff pretty invisible.
Poly is marginal. Solo poly is a marginal subset. I'm domestic-leaning solo poly. Poly folks don't want me because I'm non-hierarchical, solo folks don't want me because I'm domestic. Queers don't want me because poly isn't really queer.
I would have expected queer folks to be a supportive community. That's not the case. Individuals within it are great (#notallqueers?) However. Queer people spend too much time gatekeeping (hello, pride month, when everyone proactively posts about why I'm not part of their movement! I see you! Go have fun, I'll be hanging out with my geese! I'm glad you have words and parties with people who seem like you!) for me to be happy with the term queer, so I don't really identify as genderqueer. I don't like the term nonbinary because I probably fall into various parts of the traditional gender spectrum a small percentage of the time, and I don't want to relinquish my internal sense of masculinity and femininity. Maybe binary+? Either way I spend a lot of my internal time outside the binary. Also everyone I know who messes with gender is super into ID'ing as femme. I'm really not part of that club. And I know a few people who are out about struggling with the real serious difficulties of living within some form of masculine identification, and those people save me. You know who you are. I don't have nearly enough space to engage and talk and have community on that front. Because even if I only ID in that space 2 or 5% of the time, I struggle with parts of that and you all help me feel seen. But yeah. Feels super marginal.
At least the word pansexual already sort of exists in people's conceptual space?
And I'm pretty ok with being mostly-closeted (this is a public post, after all) at work and in my community about gender and mega stuff at the moment, but I basically refuse to be forever closeted about my partners. I've been working from a new location a bunch, and the process of coming out carefully, subtly, and diplomatically to people at just the right time is exhausting. Self-censoring and deciding who I'll talk about as the legitimate partner and who gets deleted from my life is exhausting. Hearing people talk about their great inclusive communities that just need to keep straight folks out or poly folks out or bi folks who date cross-gender or how ace is ok but never a mention of mega or whatever is exhausting. I'm going home to play with my geese with a giant pouty flounce.
The end.
The ace spectrum is pretty marginalized. I'm discovering some really helpful language, the term megasexual. To quote: "the way it was explained to me is that megasexuals use sex to get to know people. So it’s not necessarily about fostering a romantic connection at all. It’s like, you meet, you flirt and have sex, and then you might become friends who never have sex again. You may or may not want to continue having sex with that person, but the information you get from the experience helps you figure it out." This rings lots of bells but there's barely even a definition on the internet for it, and ace visibility (and the name of the ace spectrum itself) renders this stuff pretty invisible.
Poly is marginal. Solo poly is a marginal subset. I'm domestic-leaning solo poly. Poly folks don't want me because I'm non-hierarchical, solo folks don't want me because I'm domestic. Queers don't want me because poly isn't really queer.
I would have expected queer folks to be a supportive community. That's not the case. Individuals within it are great (#notallqueers?) However. Queer people spend too much time gatekeeping (hello, pride month, when everyone proactively posts about why I'm not part of their movement! I see you! Go have fun, I'll be hanging out with my geese! I'm glad you have words and parties with people who seem like you!) for me to be happy with the term queer, so I don't really identify as genderqueer. I don't like the term nonbinary because I probably fall into various parts of the traditional gender spectrum a small percentage of the time, and I don't want to relinquish my internal sense of masculinity and femininity. Maybe binary+? Either way I spend a lot of my internal time outside the binary. Also everyone I know who messes with gender is super into ID'ing as femme. I'm really not part of that club. And I know a few people who are out about struggling with the real serious difficulties of living within some form of masculine identification, and those people save me. You know who you are. I don't have nearly enough space to engage and talk and have community on that front. Because even if I only ID in that space 2 or 5% of the time, I struggle with parts of that and you all help me feel seen. But yeah. Feels super marginal.
At least the word pansexual already sort of exists in people's conceptual space?
And I'm pretty ok with being mostly-closeted (this is a public post, after all) at work and in my community about gender and mega stuff at the moment, but I basically refuse to be forever closeted about my partners. I've been working from a new location a bunch, and the process of coming out carefully, subtly, and diplomatically to people at just the right time is exhausting. Self-censoring and deciding who I'll talk about as the legitimate partner and who gets deleted from my life is exhausting. Hearing people talk about their great inclusive communities that just need to keep straight folks out or poly folks out or bi folks who date cross-gender or how ace is ok but never a mention of mega or whatever is exhausting. I'm going home to play with my geese with a giant pouty flounce.
The end.
