Dating After Coming Out as Queer Started Super Awkward
But first, I have more to say about labels.
Dearest Reader,
Since coming out more than two decades ago, my relationship with labels is the same as my relationship with jeans: Too tight in places; falling down in others; all in all, a terrible fit. While I wear my gay badge with pride, claiming a qualifier is more about external expectations than internal experience.
In the end, “queer” has stuck though I’m equally good with “gay” or simply swimming in the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ alphabet. “Pansexual,” “gender fluid,” and “sexual flexible” tend to invite unwanted conversation or awkward silence. I do not identify as cis or heterosexual or straight, even when with a male partner.
Not everyone likes this. Many don’t. Many prefer a neat label, a demonstrative claiming of pronouns, a place to put me in the imagined constructs of their own ecology. Or, let’s be real, their own taxonomy.
Everything has its place. I go there, in that box. I am that way now and now and always. Not much different, really, than my role as an addict or patient or problem. Naming others makes us feel better. Naming others makes us feel different, safe, removed.
In refusing to be boxed, in being awkward to wrap, I instead make it confusing. I make it even more uncomfortable for anyone who was uncomfortable with my coming out or their own coming out to begin with. That’s fair. I get it.
But also, my gender and sexuality has little to do with most anyone else, and I don’t feel the need to call myself anything. Labels are something I provide to accommodate. Ticking off a box is about identity attachment, performance, and politics.
I know when I’m attracted to someone: Sometimes that person is male. Sometimes, female. Sometimes, they go by he/him or she/her or they/them or tomato/tomahto, for all I care. Sometimes they, like me, are under construction. Pronouns: To Be Determined. That’s theirs (or his or hers). Except at the interface of what they ask me to hear, honour, and hold, that’s none of my business.
Even “attraction” covers a spectrum and, for me, doesn’t mean wanting sex. What’s more, I’m ever in flux. Some years feel more Yin; others more Yang. In Chinese Medicine, it’s not either/or. Yin-Yang share the same root and are indivisible. Each holds the seed of the other and transforms into the other. Between the most obvious, caricatured poles lies infinite variation, continuous transformation, unbounded expression.
Carving off one part—slapping on an acronym and calling it a day—is quintessential human. Also, it’s arbitrary. We’re talking sex and gender here, but same holds whatever your alphabetized affection of the moment.
In doing so anyway—in going through the motions for self or others—I come up not empty, exactly, but fraudulent. Or incomplete. Or even more removed from self and Source.
So, fuck labels. Call me whatever the fuck you want. In the end, I’m just a person experiencing self and others and attraction. In the end, I’m exactly and nothing like any of us.
But yes. Sex and romance are part of it. Sex and romance punctuate and accentuate this particular through line.
In my twenties, all the more so. In my twenties, claiming my place at the end of the rainbow was marvellous and freeing. And—like most marvellous, freeing things—started off super awkward. Exhibit A: transitioning from dance-floor make-outs to my first girl date in a crush’s condo.
The first time Karla touched me, kissed me, drew me near, I couldn’t stop shaking.
CONTINUED for paid subscribers after the jump. But first, a photo.
Not pictured: Me screaming FUCK at the world after trying for too long with freezing fingers to get wet logs to catch in my cabin wood stove this morning.
(They finally caught, life continued, I am now writing and warm.)
Also, I am still sober. And sober mornings, no matter what else arises, are always, always, always a gift.
Happy Saturday, sober crew. You’re doing it. xo