Label-lover: Contents may vary

The following was first published in Sexis Magazine (March 24, 2010) under the title Labels and street signs, etc. As with most of what I’ve written for Sexis (particularly post Matt) this is redux maximus. I wish I knew what I’d done with the original. I always tell myself I’m going to publish them here in my free-spirited, unredacted blog. Then I never do. Rest assured that any arguments you may have with my thesis were addressed in the longer, waylaid version… brilliantly and wittily; perfect in the way only the missing can ever be.

“Labels and Street Signs: Navigating Gender & Orientation in the Global Village and Cyber-ghettos”

It’s trendy to answer the question “who/what are you?” with a smirk and “I hate labels.” I like my labels. Go to the pantry and rip the labels off every can you find. Dinner will be always be a surprise. Is wanting to know what’s inside just blind prejudice? When did blindness become lack of prejudice?

Love & DNA

You’ve been there done that and bought the t-shirt: Love sees no gender. Love is color blind. Well… okay? Does saying that makes gender and race disappear? I see no difference = we’re all the same. My soul curdles when I hear someone say they are “color blind”. “I never noticed you were black” is the same as “We’re all white to me.”I like differences. There’s room on my labels for small print. I call myself Lesbian*. You may have to write to the factory for a complete list of contents. But when I wear it, it means: this is my identity, history, family, gender, political affiliation, future, tribe and hardwired in my DNA.

  Ain’t I A Woman?

“…and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women.” – Monique Wittig

Monique Wittig is an important lesbian theorist and philosopher credited with starting the French feminist movement. (She also got kicked out of the French Academy for mocking Freud – which makes her uber-sexy in my book.) Assume the lesbians mentioned are both biological and chromosomal female without physical or psychological sex ambiguity. (A big assumption that’s only possible for a hypothetical abstract situation.) All variations aside, Wittig’s argument is that lesbians are not “women” because women are an invention of society to partner with men. Women exist as a better half, helpmate or sex object. ( Every sentence with an object has a subject. If a “woman” is a sex object then the subject is… ? You got it. “The Man.”) Women are mothers, wives, sisters, etc. They are salt to men’s pepper. Yin/yang. Book ends. What happens when the tool refuses to be used? When one book end becomes a windmill? When the salt shaker fills itself with dried flowers and runs off to live in a condiment-free commune? The shape of the thing hasn’t changed but its purpose, its use has. It is something completely new.

Lesbian in this context is a gender identity, a reinvention, a reject of the “straight world”. She is out of order. Not broken but breaking the old to be something new. Or something very old. She is an iconoclast.

By refusing to live inside the social contract, she is a rebel without a gender. Without a gender definition. She is free to redefine herself. As lesbians have been doing for a long time. Just what and who a lesbian is, is contextual. She doesn’t exist outside of her culture or era. Are the women who lived in Boston Marriages in the past century, lesbians? Was Sappho? What (if anything) do I have in common with them? I claim them as foremothers. Lesbian becomes almost an ethnicity.

As a gender Lesbian is truncated. There are so many sub-genders suitcased in there. Butch, femme, lipstick lesbian, Bull dyke, boi, stone butch, soft butch, androgyne, political lesbian, gay woman, WSW.

  When is a lesbian not a lesbian?

When she’s a fag (dyke or boi who has anal sex with other lesbian butches or gay men or transmen), a hasbian (lesbian who went straight), a boi, a lesbian who sleeps with men, a non-op transgirl, or any assortment of rainbow contradictions.“The term ‘sexual preference’ is misleading because it implies that this attraction is a choice rather than an intrinsic personal characteristic. Sexual orientation is not necessarily the same as sexual behavior.”

– from the Seattle Public Health web site

Check the can. Does it say what percentage of your tuna sandwich may contain dolphin? Not all tuna is dolphin safe. Not every lesbian is penis-free. She may have one of her own (or someone else’s). Or a drawer full. Remember contents may vary.

  The New Math

In a binary gender system (male/female) the sexual orientations available become a simple math equation.Same gender lover(s) – homosexuality
Opposite gender lover(s) – heterosexuality
Both – bisexuality
Neither – celibacy

But people aren’t that simple. If gender identity is multiple (add up the variations by individual and then factor in the genderfluid folk) then how do these dozens of possible genders converge to make potential orientations?

What is gender? What is gender identity? Me: Lesbian*. My personal asterisk includes at least one man. Why not call myself bisexual? It would be more orderly but less honest.

For example: I don’t believe in “reformed homosexuals”. Those who found Jesus or went for the cure and are suddenly heterosexual. Is not having gay sex what makes someone straight? Changing what you do doesn’t change what you are. If I understand this gay cure correctly then all heterosexual men must want to suck cock some just resist the urge better than others. Right?

  The Ghetto-ization of the Internet

The Internet is so specialized you can find whoever you are or whoever you want. There are newsgroups for lesbians in heterosexual marriages, deaf transvestites, Jewish Unitarian Wiccans, pot-smoking Furries, S/M Christians, etc and etc.Danah Boyd is a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She was the keynote speaker at recent conference on the impact of social networking. Her research suggests that in spite of the assumed inclusivity of the world wide web, people tend to gravitate toward persons of their own race, class, and socioeconomic status in virtual communities just as they do in life.

“When people are structurally divided, they do not share space with one another, they do not communicate with one another; this canon does breed intolerance,” Dr. Danah Boyd said. “People are already divided and we can’t expect technology to automatically integrate them and create cultural harmony.”

  Us & Them: Only More So?

Wherever we go it seems we are looking for ourselves. The more broadly we define ourselves, will we find ourselves seeking out a tailored clone with intense specificity? Or will we explode – expanding, rather than demolishing our labels – to better understand ourselves and other delicious, freaky, contradictory people.Should I define myself (gender and orientation) by what I am, what I am doing, who I am doing it with? If I were sleeping with multiple men or looking for male partners I would call myself bisexual (though I wouldn’t believe it) to protect other lesbians from the advances of men wanting to be “the next exception to the rule.” But when I say “I’m a lesbian” to a guy in a bar I mean the same thing lesbians (regardless of what they were called then) have meant for centuries: “Dude, you ain’t getting any.”

I’ve slept with 4 men in the last forty years. One of them was my child’s father who I married at 15. Another was an orgy impulse who lasted just long enough to get it in before I was like “Really? Yeah, I don’t think so.”

My son argues that I’ve had sex with over 200 women. The argument goes something like this:

Me: “Seriously? I was thinking more around 100.”
Him: “Are you forgetting the ’80s?”

We do agree that I lost count a decade or so ago. More than once I’ve flirted with an attractive stranger only to discover we dated. Okay to forget the names of one night stands or party girls I swapped spit (and orgasms) with at an event – but a relationship? That just makes lesbians (asterisk or not) look bad.

I’m a dyke in wheelchair. I have four wheels, a motor and try not to run down pedestrians. Why not call myself a car? Because you aren’t, Blanche. You aren’t.

Bigfoot

Oddly enough someone was making conversation at this adult toy review community with I play at (since its connected to this site that actually pays me or at least used to but now the editor seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel or I don’t know what but whatever and also because sex toys are expensive and are you really gonna pay a hundred dollars for that and then find out you hate it?) so this guy is chatting and trying to get people to chat back… in a non-troll way. And wants to know if anyone believes in Bogfoot. Um Bigfoot. But now due to a typo, a whole new species of urban legend is born. Bogfoot. I’ll have to think about that awhile. So here’s what I said to the guy, the guy who said the thing.

I have two Bigfoot stories. When I was 14, my crazy abusive stepfather (may he spin a little faster on a spit in hell every time I think of him) brought home a 23yr old hitchhiker by the name of Reno Gene Kennedy. He was the prettiest man I’d ever seen. Gorgeous. And he could make a noise like a cougar. Heady stuff for a hormone-addled, romance novel junkie teen. He was also insane and not very bright. He insisted he knew Bigfoot personally. Other things he knew: you couldn’t get pregnant unless the man and woman orgasmed simultaneously, being of mixed native descent he was the messiah meant to reunite all the North American Tribes to be one ruled of course by him, etc. Yes, I knew that just contemplating kissing him shaved ten points off my IQ. But I was 14. In yet another one of his bizarre punishments, my stepfather took my family but not me out of state the day before my birthday, leaving me alone with the sexy stranger. I rang in my new year with date rape that I thought was love.

My second Bigfoot story is when I was looking for work shortly after moving to Oregon. I applied for a position as a seasonal caretaker and editorial assistant for a youth hostel in Cave Junction, Oregon. The hostel was a renovated house and xmas tree farm way off the beaten track. It featured Bigfoot tours and had a hiking trail where visitors might catch a glimpse of the shy hirisute legend. The editorial assisting was basically making the memoirs (Bigfoot sightings, garden tips and rants) of the primary caretaker readable. Before my official interview, the caretaker insisted he needed a nap and suggested I take one as well. Although the hostel was empty and filled with beds and sofas, he insisted we should share a single bed. I declined and politely offered to look at his manuscript while he slept. After his nap, which he said was not at all peaceful because of my rudeness, he told me he was saving the job for a woman willing to sleep with him. Not me. He did offer to give me the Bigfoot tour for free. No thanks.

So if I did believe in Bigfoot, I’d have to conclude he was a pervert. And not the good kind.