Queer travels

I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately. Somehow I ended up spending most of that time listening to queer and feminist podcasts. In fact, I got so caught up in one that I managed to get lost driving home from Byaduk. I don’t want to think about what that suggests about how much I am distracted from driving whilst listening to funny, quirky and political podcasts, because they make driving so much better.

Identity labels are controversial these days. I’m afraid I’m old fashioned. I know, it’s odd to hear me say that. Or maybe it’s not. Afterall, I am still a trad climber not driving around in a suburu and owning a cheap and nasty phone. Plus I can’t speak emoji, or say anything meaningful within 280 characters. But what I am oldfashioned about today is the label bisexual. I’m afraid I just can’t jump on board with pansexual. Even when I try and get over images of horny goat men ,

Who could forget Anthony's Pan from Feeling the Ceiling?

there are the fry pans. But other than my distaste for whatever the linguistic equivalent of aesthetics is, there is the somewhat more important issue of the politics.

People with non-exclusive sexual identities have long been invisible, ostracised and belittled by parts of both hetero and homosexual communities. We are too straight, too gay, undecided, pretending, dabbling, or judged by whatever partnership we are currently in. What useful purpose is there is fighting amongst ourselves over bi vs pan? The argument for pansexual is that bi reinforces gender binaries and pansexuality is about people not gender. Strangely enough, bisexuals have been talking about attraction to people not gender for, well, 50 years or so? In practice, bi identifying people are far from reinforcing gender binaries. But bi has been the rallying term in a long fought battle for recognition as an authentic orientation. Afterall, it's a phase some of us have been going through for a long time now! Bi was the word around when I was a young adult, and I've come to be quite fond of it. I don't want to give it up now, and I certainly don't want to be told I am reinforcing gender binaries through using it. Hell, I am a gender denialist. We have chromosomes, hormones and body parts. Physiological shit usually called sex, of which there are actually more than the standard 2 combinations promoted. All the rest is socialised nonsense and I can get ultra grumpy about what is called "feminine". But that's a whole other long rant.

You may have noticed Bivisibility Day last week. Or maybe not, in which case, the visibility aspect of it is obviously still lacking. But being bi can be a blurred road of passing and invisibility. You may never need to come out, or you have to come out again and again and again. Bi people seen with a single partner anywhere will always need to come out as not straight or not gay. Or to just let it pass. Did any of my workmates who met my male partners ever realise I have a history of female partners as well? Does that matter? Am I doing myself and the bi community a disservice if I don't care if they work it out or not? I do tend to not give a shit about what people think about me. I'd really like a world where people don't have to give a fuck about this stuff. One day, we might reach a point where no one makes assumptions about sexuality. But until then, is not coming out participating in heteronormalisation?

Coming out is one of those key passages in queer identities. No one comes out as straight. But when I think back on it, I don't think I ever came out. I don't have a coming out story. I just do stuff and I guess eventually people notice that I don't do the done thing. I don't even remember ever telling my family. But in the way that I also just talk about stuff, I expect I just told my Mum over dinner one night about the first girl I picked up. She turned out to be a little nutty, so I've entertained people over dinner with that story a lot since. I have no recollection of Mum's response, but, knowing my mother, she probably just asked if the sex was any good.

One of the things I love about modern teen fiction (for I have an embarrassingly large soft spot) is the way queer characters are completely normalised. They aren't token. They don't even stand out as a statement. They just exist. Major characters, minor characters, random cameos. Where were any of these in Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley High? This weaving of queer stories into popular literary worlds may be a powerful step in the move to noone having to come out, or for perhaps everyone having to come out. Perhaps it is a sign that we may yet reach a place where people don't make assumptions and are not shocked at whatever is revealed in the course of people just doing whatever it is they do. I expect I have been reading the outliers of modern teen fiction and that there's no shortage of heteronormative stuff out there, but let me have a little delusion that the world is changing. I am cynical enough already.

All this conflict over a few words brings me to the idea of solidarity. The LGBTIQ+ alphabet soup is continually growing. P and A are certainly on the agenda to be thrown in. There's a call from K and BDSM to join up too. A few extra Ps and Qs to mind. At what point does becoming all inclusive lose the power of solidarity? What are the common grounds we are rallying under here? The issues across this group are already super broad and this question would lead me off on another thousand word tangent, but my point is the P and B parts of the soup have an almost entire overlap. I don't go around arguing the semantics of whether pan as a prefix meaning all/everything really means you could be attracted to not only frypans and mythological creatures, but, say, dinosaurs or apricots. So please don't insist that bi reinforces binary sex and gender stereotypes. Instead, let's look at the shared issues arising from a non-exclusive sexuality in a world where people still assume an exclusive sexuality. A world in which bi/pan/omni/ambi/poly/whateveryouwanttocallit-sexuals suffer disproportionately high rates of mental health issues and violence. Fighting over semantics amongst ourselves seems an unlikely priority here.