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plounce · 4 years

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(1/2) god im sorry if this is weird but i really dont know who to talk to about this.. basically im having a wlw crisis because. ive never been in a relationship. i know i like guys. and ive always been questioning if maybe i like girls too? for like 6 years now :| and its so frustrating because im repressing everything because my vaguely homophobic mother is the most important person in my life (n im financially dependend on my parents) n sometimes i just wonder..if i would know a lot more abou

sorry for the delay - i like to answer longer asks on my laptop + i never got your part 2! so i will just ramble some “advice” on the general subject of being attracted to girls and dealing with parents.

to relate a part of my personal experience: when i was in high school i identified as bisexual. for my senior year i spent half my time freaking out over whether i was a lesbian (this terrified me because i was in a relationship with someone who was not yet out as a trans girl... so in the end the whole thing ended up being resolved fairly neatly lol. not relevant so anyway:) and then my freshman year of college i was like “i don’t think other bi women have told themselves ‘everyone has to learn what you’re supposed to be attracted to in men, i just have to learn and then i’ll understand’......... i think i AM a lesbian.”

that was about 4 years ago. the last two years have had occasional spates of “oh god oh god ive tricked myself into thinking im attracted to women oh god oh god im a fake lesbian im a lug” (this is due to my own weird relationship with sex and my neurodivergence and the difference between real men and fictional men etc etc. it’s extremely personal business that i don’t want to dig into very deeply publicly but that’s the general idea of it).

oh god i truly spent a stupid amount of text talking about myself in a way that isn’t super relevant to your situation. anyway my point is - attraction (romantic AND sexual) is very difficult to grasp for a lot of people, especially when you have issues that can interact with how you experience it - like your mom, for example.

something that has been helpful for me when i think about all this is like... imagine ten years in the future, married to a woman. idyllic domestic mornings. can you imagine going to a farmers market with a woman, holding hands? does that feel exciting, something to look forward to? untense your brain and just let yourself daydream. what kind of happy endings feel good and right to you? who can you imagine standing in the kitchen making pancakes in their pajamas and putting a smile on your face?

also, wrt to bisexuality - your attraction to women and men can manifest differently. you can also have different “amounts” of attraction - 70% attracted to men, 30% to other genders, etc. it can also be difficult to really quantify your attraction without actual data.

i’m sorry to hear you’re in that rock and a hard place. it sounds like there might be some difficult decisions in your future. you probably already know this, but you aren’t obligated to come out to anybody, and you aren’t obligated to come out as soon as you make a decision on your identity. it’s your personal business. but also, i have an uncle who runs a christian charter school and was terrified about coming out to him and he turned out to be extremely chill about it! even as my mother fretted about it and injected fretting into me (she also was like “don’t post about being gay on facebook if you ever want to get hired as a teacher” lol. it wasn’t malicious she’s just... a worrier).

it’s your choice to come out to your parents and it’s your decision when to do it - if you want to wait until you’re a bit more dependent and keep it in your back pocket til then and continue to let it percolate, that’s your choice! also, since you and your mom seem really close, she might take it better than you think. it might be a little ... awkward... for a bit, but in my experience “saying something vaguely derisive about gays on tv” and “my beloved child is bi” can be two very different things for parents. but again, i don’t know all the details of your life, so here’s a grain of salt.

tl;dr i get your pain on a couple levels and feel sympathy for the ones on which i don’t. figuring out sexuality is very weird, especially in a society that doesn’t give us a good idea of what wlw attraction is besides “the lack of attraction to men”, and you don’t even have that! i hope this at least helped you feel heard and i hope you continue along your journey happily + healthily. :)

prize for reaching the end of the post: ancient lolcat

#sorry if this is... rambly/leaves stuff out. it is 6:30 and i couldn't sleep.#Anonymous #chirps #long post

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chaoticoconut · 5 years

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1, 6, and 18! 💛

💛💛💛

these will be long as hell I'm sorry lmao

1. for as long as I can remember I've felt attracted to women and drawn to the community. I grew up watching Saturday Night Live with my parents, which I think is where I first encountered homosexuality but a close second was on this other skit show (whose name I can't find for whatever reason) where girl a was getting engaged to her boyfriend and girl b, the best friend and roommate, was freaking out and it ended with girl b kissing her and I don't know why its stuck with me for over a decade but I used to spend so much time up late at night thinking about what love was or why we kiss each other but I never once considered I was anything other than normal until elementary school. Everytime my friend and I stumbled across two girls kissing in pop culture or really any gay representation for that matter we'd tell each other about it and it became this weird fixation of ours until an older girl overheard us and called us weird and gay and I remember I went home and cried and cried because being weird and gay were obviously synonymous at my Texas charter elementary school and would have a negative impact on my life if people found out.

I didn't start taking those "am I gay" quizzes till about 5th or 6th grade. I had forced all homosexuality into a very taboo box for me and when I didn't like this one (very creepy, I might add) boy back in 6th grade and I told my parents, I remember getting this really adverse reaction from my mother ("well then what are you?") that perpetually kept me fully closeted for another year. That being said, I knew I was attracted to boys too. I think I had my first real crush on a boy in 3rd grade, but before that I had liked Wilbur Robinson and Peter Pan and Justin Bieber and Taylor Lautner for Christ's sake so I had it in my mind that even if I weren't fully straight I could pass as everyone else's normal and not face the repercussions of being weird and gay. I'd still marry a man and have kids like every other female role model I my life at the time. I felt a lot of guilt during puberty and had tremendous gay panic thinking I had to be one thing or another or even one thing in secret and I was lying to myself in some way about my feelings and then my dad's friend (or my self appointed aunt actually) came out to everyone after having been married to a man for several years. As 7th grade rolled around one of my friends came out as transgender. And the internet finally seemed to really give a shit about the LGBT+ community, and the world felt bigger, and I felt more comfortable giving myself exceptions ("maybe you could have a girlfriend in college but still marry a man"). I discovered flannels, I had gay ships (Harley and Ivy saved my whole life), all my friends were coming out at an increasing rate, and suddenly all sorts of people were attractive to me. The quizzes called what I was bisexual. A pretty girl I knew identified as bi/pan (I can't remember what it was at the time, she changed labels a lot those days) I had met at a birthday party just a few days before asked me over breakfast if I liked girls.

I damn near choked on my toast.

And against every voice screaming in my head to just say no and that it wasn't worth it, I told her the truth and within a few days we were dating. Granted, it was only about 3 days the first time, I finally had one thing straight: I was a legitimate bisexual (pardon the pun).

Then everyone found out and called me a lesbian and I was back in the hole. I didn't want to be a lesbian, not because somehow that was more weird and gay than being a bisexual, but because that wasn't who I was. And I knew that much about myself. I had a lot of internalized oppressive tendencies to confront but at least I had some solid footing in my identity. According to my friends my energy was much gayer in middle school and freshman year and I "struggled" with that (I didn't want to shoo away any cute guys but had to accept that even my bisexual identity was polarizing for some) and now I'm here. I'm 16. I'm very confident in my identity. I'm out to almost all of my friends (except for most of my elementary school pals (including the girl who talked about wlw stuff w me bc she's really homophobic now)), some of their families, and one other adult (she was my counselor in the hospital and after like 5 minutes she was like "and are you LGBT or am I mistaken?" and I had to make sure my mom wasn't lurking around the corner before I said yes, honestly my big gay energy is so powerful), and I may or may not tell my dad before I move out (probably not. I've never been very open with my parents about my social or romantic life. Telling him would probably only make things weird or harder for him to trust me going out and doing things lmao). I felt a part of the community for real when my friend came out to me as bisexual for the first time last month and told me my embrace of it helped her come to terms with her own feelings.

6. I don't know how popular of an opinion this is but finding a label that fit me was really empowering. I played around with the idea of pansexuality and demiromanticism and found that in my specific case they held me back more than they defined me. I felt pansexuality was an unnecessary title to hold with the updated and more fluid and forgiving definition of bisexuality and the biphobic tendencies the community had when trying to empower their base but at the same time who am I to tell someone that their label of choice isn't vaild. I don't give a shit. If it is part of you do you. Have your own normal. Everyone else is weird to everyone else anyway. It won't help to reduce yourself to something you aren't. If labels aren't your shit, splendid for you. If they are, that rocks too. Queer is another label I particularly love. It enforces this no confirmative ideal I have. I didn't even begin to rant about Gender & I. I find the word queer the most empowering label of all in the community, because in whole, we are queer, but we're queer together.

18. I love the memes. Lmao. I love feeling connected enough we can laugh about it together. Growing Up Gay memes in particular made me feel so much better about myself. Those memes where both the guy and gal are attractive. I love the sense of style/lack thereof too. There's this lez senior I already have a crush on who just wears whatever the fuck she wants and idk why but I love it and am so inspired.

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caughtupinbetween · 5 years

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Inspiration is an Odd Thing

It’s one of my in-between days. I found one of these...gender quizzes on my Pinterest. I took it with the mindset of “Hey, what the hell, right? What’s the worst it can say?” I did end up with the result of Androgynous or Gender Neutral. I’m not upset by it. In high school, I actually identified as androgynous. I talked to my teacher, in my sophomore year, about it. Keep in mind that I was in a charter school. I still had classmates, but I only had about a handful who were in the same grade as me. I was open about my identity, in school. I found that I felt free.

I learned to keep my mouth shut when I met one of the seniors. I actually liked the guy. He was cute, kinda popular-ish (for a charter school). I guess I didn’t look as feminine as I “should have.” One day, he gets this brilliant idea to follow me into the student lounge. He asks me why I dress the way I do. I ask him what he means, and he says I don’t dress “normal.” I didn’t think anything was wrong. I was used to wearing regular t-shirts and shorts. I didn’t dress to seem one way or the other. He pushed me up against a vending machine and asked me what I was. I pushed him back and asked him what the hell his problem was. He asked me again, “What are you, though? Are you a dude or are you a girl?” I was so used to being told I was a beautiful girl, I didn’t know how to answer him. Which I guess he took as his civic duty to figure out which one I was. He pushed me back against the vending machine and pinned me against it. He told me no one would believe me, if I said something. We were never seen interacting with each other. We never even sat near each other. I don’t think he even knew my name. I had a thing for wearing boots (still do). I saw an opportunity to kick him in body parts I don’t actually wish to possess. I booked it out of the lounge and I hid in the women’s bathroom for the better part of an hour and a half. Throughout the rest of high school, I never spoke about how I identified myself or even my sexuality.

That being said, the reason I say that is because I don’t want to have to be afraid of being myself, now, eight years after that incident. Two years ago, I saw that guy in a sporting good store. I was looking in a glass case of pocket knives (I collect). He was asking a clerk about getting a gun permit. He turned and saw me. I froze and I called him by name. He just smiled at me and walked away. I shouldn’t have to be afraid of living my life, anymore. I lost all my friends from the church because of my identity and my mental health. But, as un-Christian as it sounds, I can’t change this. My decision to not change my pronoun (for my comfort, not theirs) wasn’t enough. To my own family, my existence as both Kristine and Dominik is just my bisexuality. I can’t live my life for anyone else, anymore. I’m tired of letting people decide for me. No one believed me about being harassed, when I told them. I didn’t tell my mother until that day, two years ago, because I had a panic attack.

I was inspired a few things, today. One was the gender quiz. The other was that Johnny’s brother, Stephen, asked me if I was “Ruby Rose-ing it,” today. It’s something I used to think about. How she can move between the two, and be an extremely handsome dude or a gorgeous woman. I don’t have the same aesthetics, even though I wish I did. I wish I could be beautiful as both Kristine and Dominik. I wish I could look the way I feel. But I also know that doesn’t start on the outside. Self-love doesn’t just happen when you grew up in a constant state of self-loathing. Self-love doesn’t exist, if you grew up with self-hatred. I chose self-acceptance, first. That was the day I came out as genderfluid; the day I left the church, for the sake of my mental health. Self-acceptance, because no one else accepted me as Dominik; because I didn’t deserve the treatment I got in high school. Because I don’t deserve to live my life scared of being me. Self-acceptance because I have to start somewhere.

#gender fluid #genderfluid #love #help #advice #tw: assault #tw: bullying #inspired #ruby rose

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madhatterweasley · 6 years

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@morgandakotaq tagged me and she’s an amazing, supportive person.

I’ve never done one of these before and will probably do this one and the other ones that I was tagged in later lol.

I’ll tag: @strangerstuffandthingsimagines @cometoceantrenches & anyone else who wants to give this a go!

Name: Lo

Gender: Female

Star sign: Aquarius (today is actually my 20th birthday lmao)

Height: 5′0″ (i’m short af and will fight anyone who’s taller than me)

Sexuality: Bisexual

What images do you have set as your desktop/cell wallpapers?: My laptop wallpaper is Lana del Rey smiling from the Love music video. My homescreen on my phone is a Marina (aka Marina and the Diamonds) edit and my lockscreen is Steve Harrington with his bat.

Have you ever had a crush on a teacher?: I don’t think so? I don’t remember most of them honestly lmao.

What was your last text message?: "Love you” to my mom

What do you see yourself doing in 10 years?: Being happy and hopefully having started my acting career already. And if I started dating Dacre Montgomery then that it would be nice too.

If you could be anywhere else right now, where would you be?: Don’t have a specific place but I’d rather be with my cousin today since we share a birthday and it’s been years since we’ve been together on our bday.

What was your coolest Halloween costume?: Probably a clown when I was eight months old. Which is ironic since clowns scare the shit out of me (thanks mom for letting me see It when I was five.) I don’t remember any of my other costumes other than being a ‘witch’ for like three years in a row from ages 6 to 8.

What was your favorite 90′s show?: Rugrats and Goosebumps

Who was your last kiss?: This really piece of shit asshole when I was 16 (he’s also the one who suggested the thing in the second to last question)

Have you ever been stood up?: Never even been on a real date lmao.

Favorite ice cream flavor?: Probably strawberry if there are pieces of actual strawberries. If not - then vanilla.

Have you ever been to Las Vegas?: Yes, last year was the last time I went.

What’s your favorite fruit?: Strawberries (it would be better if it was chocolate covered strawberries)

Your favorite pair of shoes?: I only own two pairs of black converse - so my newer black converse

What’s your favorite book?: I haven’t read anything that wasn’t fanfiction in over a year so I can’t think of anything lmao.

What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done?: Ditched class to go smoke pot with my ‘new friends’ in my sophomore year of high school. We snuck out of the school during gym and went to some girl’s house to get the stuff. Then the fucking morons smoked it in some alleyway while I stood there thinking about my life choices. I decided not to smoke any since we were going back to school during lunch. When we tried to sneak back in, we got caught and were sent to the dean’s office. He called everyone’s parents except mine because I didn’t smoke anything and they all lied to protect my ass, saying that I had barely shown up to the school from my house and had walked there with them. That’s the only good thing they ever did for me and I’m glad that I haven’t seen them since I left that school. (a lot of other stupid choices were made in my time at that school. my whole time there was a mistake. that was also the only public school i went to for high school. the rest were charter schools.)(idk why i’m sharing so much on this one lol)

What loser?: If we’re talking 2017, Richie and Eddie. If we’re talking 1990, Bill and Richie. If we’re talking book, idk… Probably still Richie…(keeping dakota’s answer bc same)

#it took me forever to do this #i don't know why #enjoy getting to know me a little more #things i was tagged in #did i even do this right #someone validate me

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auskultu · 7 years

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COLUMBIA CHARTERS HOMOSEXUAL GROUP

Murray Schumach, The New York Times, 2 May 1967

Columbia University has issued a charter to a student group that seeks equal rights for homosexuals.

The organization, called the Student Homophile League, is reported to have about a dozen members, and it says it has both homosexual and heterosexual members. A girl from Barnard is reported to be a member.

According to the chairman of the Student Homophile League, this is the first such group ever chartered by a college in this country. He says that charters will be sought at other colleges including Stamford, tho University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Connecticut, Trinity, Buckncll and the University of Maryland.

The chairman, who used the pseudonym Stephen Donaldson, said in a telephone interview last night that the organization had been formed because "we wanted to get the academic community to support equal rights for homosexuals."

Before the university issued the charter, there were delays because the league refused to give the names of its officers and of five members. The charter was granted on April 19, after the names were supplied with thev understanding they would be kept confidential.

The charter was issued by the Committee on Student Organizations, which is made up of student and faculty officials. The chairman of the committee, Dr, Harold E. Lowe, assistant to the vice president cf Columbia, refused the petition until the names were supplied.

Dr. Lowe said last night that before the charter taas granted the eight names submitted the leagde were checked and found to be students.

"It is a bona fide student organization," he said, "and we saw no reason why we should turn down the request for a charter."

The head of the Student Homophile League said last night, in reply to a question, that before he first began campaigning for a charter his roommates had asked him to move from their quarters after they learned he was homosexual.

"But I should say," he added, "that they asked me with great apologies and said they realized they shouldn’t feel that way, but that they felt uncomfortable and uneasy."

The chairman of the league, who said he is bisexual, moved. He said that this incident was not the reason he decided to try to charter the Student Homophile League.

‘It was just the general situation that prompted this," he said.

In their effort to get the charter, the league members conferred frequently with the Rev. John D. Cannon, chaplain of the university.

The Episcopalian said in an interview yesterday that he pointed out to them that as members of such an organization they might subject themselves, eventually, to dangers of discrimination,

“They look upon this as a civil libertarian organization,” he said. “To my knowledge there has been no adverse reaction among the faculty.”

However, there has been a mixed reaction among the students, as indicated by letters that followed the appearance of the story in school’s paper, The Columbia Spectator, on April 27.

“At first,” said Charles L. Skoro. who wrote the story in The Spectator, "the students seemed to think it was some sort of April Fool hoax, but now they realize it is for real.” An editorial in the college, daily has praised the action, which has been defended and! attacked in letters from students.

In its declaration of principles. the league lists 13 points, including the following:

• The homosexual has a fundamental human right to, live and to work with his fellow man as an equal in their common quest for the betterment of human society;

• The homosexual has a fundamental human right to develop atid achieve his full potential and dignity as a human being and member of human society.”

The declaration then says that “the homosexual is being unjustly, inhumanly and savagely discriminated against by large segments of American society.

The first discussions among the students that led to the charter began about a year ago. For several months, according to the chairman, it operated as a completely “underground group.”

Funds Donated by Alumni Last October, the students got in touch with school officials and a closed meeting was held with administrators and counselors of Columbia and Barnard on Oct. 28. Three days later, the group began the first of a series of talks with the Committee on Student Organizations. The hitch developed on submission of the names of the three officers and five other members.

Funds were said to have been supplied for the organization by some Columbia alumni who were reported to have learned about it from advertisements in magazines for homosexuals. The chairman of the league says is not controlled by any other group but “maintains liaison” with homosexual groups.

With permission of the chaplain, the league has been using his office for meetings when he is not working there. In sessions since obtaining a charter, the league has considered the possibility of how to go about opening a drive for members. This is admittedly difficult since the members now in the league are trying to conceal their identities.

“But somehow,” said the chairman of the league, “we have to work out some way of interviewing persons who say they want to become members.”

#columbia university #civil rights #gay rights #lgbtq #colleges and universities #1967 #1960s #sixties #60s

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sidelpunchna-blog · 5 years

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lodelss · 5 years

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,422 words)

Should I be married to a woman? If today were yesterday, if all this sexual fluidity were in the discourse when I was coming of age in the ‘90s, would I have been with a woman instead of a man? It is a question that “The Bisexual” creator Desiree Akhavan also poses in the second episode of her Hulu series, co-produced with Channel 4 because no U.S. network wanted it. Akhavan directed, co-wrote, and stars in the show in which her character, Leila, splits with her girlfriend of 10 years, Sadie (Maxine Peake), and starts having sex with men for the first time. So, Leila asks, if the opposite had happened to her — as it did to me — and a guy had swept her off her feet instead of a woman, would things have turned out differently? “Maybe I would’ve gone the path of least resistance,” Leila says. Maybe I did.

This is a conundrum that marks a previous generation — one that had to “fight for it,” as Akhavan’s heroine puts it, and is all the more self-conscious for being juxtaposed with the next one, the one populated by the fluid youth of social media idolizing the likes of pansexual Janelle Monáe, polyamorous Ezra Miller, undecided Lucas Hedges. Call it a queer generation gap (what’s one more label?). “I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with the Internet,” 32-year-old Akhavan explains to a younger self-described “queer woman” in her show. “I just get the sense that it’s changing your relationship to gender and to sexuality in a really good way, but in a way I can’t relate to.”

***

This Playboy bunny is chest out, lips open, legs wide. This Playboy bunny is every other Playboy bunny except for the flat hairy chest because this Playboy bunny is Ezra Miller. The star of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald calls himself “queer” but it’s hard to take him seriously. What was it Susan Sontag said: it’s not camp if it’s trying to be camp? And for the past few months, while promoting the Potterverse prequel no one asked for, this 26-year-old fashionisto has been trying his damndest, styling himself as a sort of latter day Ziggy Stardust — the monastic Moncler puffer cape, the glittering Givenchy feathers — minus the depth. Six months ago, Miller looked like every other guy on the red carpet and now, per his own request, models bunny ears, fishnets, and heels as a gender-fluid rabbit for a randy Playboy interview. Okay, I guess, but it reads disingenuous to someone who grew up surrounded by closets to see them plundered so flagrantly for publicity. Described as “attracted to men and women,” Miller is nevertheless quoted mostly on the subject of guys, the ones he jerked off and fell in love with. He claims his lack of romantic success has lead him to be a polycule: a “polyamorous molecule” involving multiple “queer beings who understand me as a queer being.”

The article hit two weeks after i-D published a feature in which heartthrob Harry Styles interviewed heartthrob Timothée Chalamet with — despite their supposed reframing of masculinity — the upshot, as always, being female genuflection. “I want to say you can be whatever you want to be,” Chalamet explains, styled as a sensitive greaser for the cover. “There isn’t a specific notion, or jean size, or muscle shirt, or affectation, or eyebrow raise, or dissolution, or drug use that you have to take part in to be masculine.” Styles, on brand, pushes it further. “I think there’s so much masculinity in being vulnerable and allowing yourself to be feminine,” the 24-year-old musician says, “and I’m very comfortable with that.” (Of course you are comfortable, white guy…did I say that out loud?) As part of the boy band One Direction, Styles was marketed as a female fantasy and became a kind of latter-day Mick Jagger, the playboy who gets all the girls. His subsequent refusal to label himself, the rumors about his close relationship with band mate Louis Tomlinson, and the elevation of his song “Medicine” to “bisexual anthem”– “The boys and the girls are in/I mess around with them/And I’m OK with it” — all build on a solid foundation of cis white male heterosexuality.

Timothée Chalamet’s sexuality, meanwhile, flows freely between fiction and fact. While the 22-year-old actor is “straight-identifying,” he acquires a queer veneer by virtue of his signature role as Call Me by Your Name’s Elio, a bisexual teen (or, at least, a boy who has had sex with both women and men). Yet off screen, as Timothée, he embodies a robust heterosexuality. On social media, the thirst for him skews overwhelmingly female, while reports about his romantic partners — Madonna’s daughter, Johnny Depp’s daughter — not only paint him straight but enviably so. Lucas Hedges, another straight-identified actor who plays gay in the conversion therapy drama Boy Erased, somewhat disrupts this narrative, returning fluidity to the ambiguous space it came from. The 21-year-old admitted in an interview with Vulture that he found it difficult to pin himself down, having been “infatuated with” close male friends but more often women. “I recognize myself as existing on that spectrum,” he says. “Not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual.” That he felt “ashamed” for not being binary despite having a sixth-grade health teacher who introduced him to the range of sexuality suggests how married our culture is to it.

As a woman familiar with the shame associated with female sexuality, it’s difficult to ignore the difference in tenor of the response to famous young white males like Miller, Styles, and Chalamet and famous black women like Janelle Monáe and Tessa Thompson not only discussing it, but making even more radical statements. Appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone in May, Monáe said straight up (so to speak): “Being a queer black woman in America — someone who has been in relationships with both men and women — I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker.” The same age as Desiree Akhavan, 32, Monáe identified as bisexual until she read about pansexuality. She initially came out through her music; her album, Dirty Computer, contains a song called “Q.U.E.E.N.” which was originally titled “Q.U.E.E.R.,” while the music video accompanying “Pynk” has actress Tessa Thompson emerging from Monáe’s Georgia O’Keeffe-esque pants. While neither one of them has discussed their relationship in detail, Thompson, who in Porter magazine’s July issue revealed she is attracted to men and women, said, “If people want to speculate about what we are, that’s okay.”

The mainstream press and what appeared to be a number of non-queer social media acolytes credited Chalamet and Styles with redefining their gender and trouncing toxic masculinity. “[H]arry styles, ezra miller, and timothee chalamet are going to save the world,” tweeted one woman, while The Guardian dubbed Miller the “hero we need right now.” Monáe, meanwhile, was predominantly championed by queer fans (“can we please talk about how our absolute monarch Janelle Monáe has been telegraphing her truth to the queers thru her art and fashion for YEARS and now this Rolling Stone interview is a delicious cherry on top + a ‘told u so’ to all the h*teros”) and eclipsed by questions about what pansexual actually means. While white male fluidity was held up as heroic, female fluidity, particularly black female fluidity, was somehow unremarkable. Why? Part of the answer was recently, eloquently, provided by “Younger” star Nico Tortorella, who identifies as gender-fluid, bisexual, and polyamorous. “I get to share my story,” he told The Daily Beast. “That’s a privilege that I have because of what I look like, the color of my skin, what I have between my legs, my straight passing-ness, everything.”

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When I was growing up sex was not fun, it was fraught. Sex was AIDS, disease, death. The Supreme Court of Canada protected sexual orientation under the Charter when I was 15 but I went to school in Alberta, Canada’s version of Texas — my gym teacher was the face of Alberta beef. In my high school, no one was gay even if they were. All gender was binary. Sex was a penis in a vagina. Popular culture was as straight, and even Prince and David Bowie seemed to use their glam sparkle to sleep with more women rather than fewer. Bisexual women on film were murderers (Basic Instinct) or sluts (Chasing Amy) and in the end were united by their desire for “some serious deep dicking.” I saw no bisexual women on television (I didn’t watch “Buffy”) and LGBTQ characters were limited (“My So-Called Life”). Alanis Morissette was considered pop music’s feminist icon, but even she was singing about Dave Coulier. And the female celebrities who seemed to swing both ways — Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Bijou Phillips — were the kind who were already acting out, their sexuality a hallmark of their lack of control.

“I think unrealistic depictions of sex and relationships are harmful,” Akhavan told The New York Times. “I was raised on them and the first time I had sex, I had learned everything from film and television and I was like ‘Oh, this isn’t at all like I saw on the screen.’” Bisexuality has historically been passed over on screen for a more accessible binary depiction of relationships. In her 2013 book The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television, Maria San Filippo describes what has become known as “bisexual erasure” in pop culture: “Outside of the erotically transgressive realms of art cinema and pornography, screen as well as ‘real life’ bisexuality is effaced not only by what I’ve named compulsory monosexuality but also by compulsory monogamy,” she writes, adding, “the assumption remains that the gender of one’s current object choice indicates one’s sexuality.” So even high-profile films that include leads having sex with both genders — Brokeback Mountain, The Kids Are All Right, Blue Is the Warmest Color, Carol, Call Me By Your Name — are coded “gay” rather than “bi.”

Despite the rise in bisexual women on the small screen like Annalise in “How to Get Away with Murder,” Syd in “Transparent,” and Ilana in “Broad City,” GLAAD’s latest report on inclusion cited continued underrepresentation. While 28 percent of LGBTQ characters on television are bisexual, the majority are women (75 versus 18) and they are often associated with harmful tropes — sex is used to move the plot forward and the characters scan amoral and manipulative. This despite an increase in the U.S.’s queer population to 4.5 percent in 2017 from 3.5 percent in 2012 (when Gallup started tracking it). A notable detail is the extreme generational divide in identification: “The percentage of millennials who identify as LGBT expanded from 7.3% to 8.1% from 2016 to 2017, and is up from 5.8% in 2012,” reported Gallup. “By contrast, the LGBT percentage in Generation X (those born from 1965 to 1979) was up only .2% from 2016 to 2017.”

Here’s the embarrassing part. While I am technically a millennial, I align more with Generation X (that’s not the embarrassing bit). I am attracted more to men, but I am attracted to women as well yet don’t identify as LGBTQ. How best to describe this? I remember a relative being relieved when I acquired my first boyfriend (it was late). “Oh good, I thought you were gay,” they said. I was angry at them for suggesting that being gay was a bad thing, but also relieved that I had dodged a bullet. This isn’t exactly the internalized homophobia that Hannah Gadsby talked about, but it isn’t exactly not. My parents and my brother would have been fine with me being gay. So what’s the problem? The problem is that the standard I grew up with — in the culture, in the world around me — was not homosexuality, it was heterosexuality. I don’t judge non-heterosexual relationships, but having one myself somehow falls short of ideal. For the same reason, I can’t shake the false belief that lesbian sex is less legitimate than gay sex between men. The ideal is penetration. “That’s some Chasing Amy shit,” my boyfriend, eight years younger, said. And, yeah, unfortunately, it is. I have company though.

In a survey released in June, billed as “the most comprehensive of its kind,” Whitman Insight Strategies and BuzzFeed News polled 880 LGBTQ Americans, almost half of whom were between the ages of 18 and 29, and found that the majority, 46 percent, identified as bisexual. While women self-described as bi four times as often as men (79 to 19 percent), the report did not offer a single clear reason for the discrepancy. It did, however, suggest “phallocentrism,” the notion that the penis is the organizing principle for the world, the standard. In other words, sex is a penis in a vagina. “While bisexual women are often stereotyped as sleeping with women for male attention, or just going through a phase en route to permanent heterosexuality,” the report reads, “the opposite is presumed of bisexual men: that they are simply confused or semi-closeted gay men.” This explains why women who come out, like Monáe and Thompson, are considered less iconoclastic in the popular culture than men who even just make vague gestures towards fluidity — the stakes are considered higher for the guys. In truth, few feel comfortable being bi. Though the Pew Research Center’s survey of queer Americans in 2013 revealed that 40 percent of respondents identified as bisexual, this population was less likely to come out and more likely to be with a partner of the opposite sex. Famous women like Maria Bello, Cynthia Nixon, and Kristen Stewart have all come out, yet none of them really use the label.

“Not feeling gay enough, that’s something I felt a lot of guilt over,” Akhavan told the Times. It is guilt like this and the aforementioned shame which makes it all the more frustrating to watch the ease with which the younger generation publicly owns their fluidity. It is doubly hard to watch young white men being praised for wearing bunny ears in a magazine that has so long objectified women, simply because the expectations are so much lower for them. “I’m not looking down on the younger experience of being queer,” Akhavan said, “but I do think that there’s a resentment there that we gloss over.” In response, many of us react conservatively, with the feeling that they haven’t worked for it, that it is somehow less earned because of that. This is an acknowledgment of that resentment, of the eye rolling and the snickering with which we respond to the youth (ah, youth!). In the end we are not judging you for being empowered. We are judging ourselves for not being empowered enough.

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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lodelss · 5 years

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The Queer Generation Gap

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 10 minutes (2,422 words)

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

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