THE ABCS OF LGBTQ
Every Which Way But Straight
Imagine that you’re at a Sunday afternoon barbeque when your friend’s 11-year-old son announces, “I’m pansexual.” Now that’s an attention-grabber. After the hamburger fell out my usually unflappable friend’s hand, he asked the boy if he meant that he was bisexual.
“No,” the precocious youth responded. “Bisexuals choose the sexual identity of the person they’re attracted to. Pansexuals like me, are attracted by the emotions they feel for someone, not their sex.”
When we all picked our jaws up off the table (the kid is only 11 after all), I couldn’t stop thinking about the new world of sexual identity and how members of Generation Z will be different than all those that came before them.
I knew I was gay in fourth grade when I started to have strange feelings for my gym teacher and preferred playing with my sister’s Barbie dolls than baseball. But unlike my friend’s son, I couldn’t talk about those feelings to anyone. I hadn’t yet acquired the vocabulary of sexuality that would have allowed me to articulate the emotions I was experiencing and besides, in those days, a boy could get his ass kicked for playing with Barbie dolls. Today they become stars by emulating one on Ru Paul’s Drag Race.
Back then you were either straight, gay or lesbian. You might be butch or femme, a top or a bottom, a twinkie or a bear, but that’s pretty much where the conversation ended. Things are different today with actors like Kristen Stewart and Nico Tortorella blurring the lines between sexual stereotypes. Similarly, today’s glossary of sexual identities is far more robust.
Culture shapes language, which explains why the Eskimos have 50 words for snow and Americans have 13 to describe one type of sandwich (hero, submarine, hoagie, etc.). The number of words that exist to describe a subject indicates the importance that subject has to the culture. With that in mind, consider what the burgeoning list of sexual identities means to our society.
What started as LGBT morphed into LGBTQ and then into LGBTQIA – lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and asexual. With about 1% of people identifying as asexual, you probably know that it means devoid of sexuality, but If you’re wondering what intersex is, according to the University of California Davis, it refers to a person born with any of several variations in sexual characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones and/or genitalia. It’s not to be confused with an androgyne, someone with both male and female traits, like the character Pat on reruns of Saturday Night Live. Then there’s polygender, people who exhibit characteristics of multiple genders, kind of like the time I wore a black and red flannel shirt and my friends called me a lesbian.
Whatever the acronym for today’s non-heterosexual alternative lifestyle is, we might need to add a C for Curious to it. According to the book, Mostly Straight: Sexual Fluidity Among Men, in a government poll, 6% of men marked their sexuality as heteroflexible. Characterized by “minimal homosexual behavior in an otherwise primarily heterosexual orientation”, more than likely, you know a heteroflexible or two. Members of what The New York Times branded Generation Nice, they’re the “One night when I was really drunk, I made out with my college roommate” guys, the “We had a circle jerk” or “I cuddled with my best friend” and the “I let another guy give me a blow job” guys. If you haven’t crossed paths with one yet, don’t worry, you will because the majority of Millennials believe in a spectrum of sexuality.
That was not always the case. When my friend, John, had a sex change in 1981, he was called a lot of things but transgender was not one of them. Although that term was coined in 1949, it didn’t enter the lexicon until years after my friend’s mother lamented, “You’re confusing the whole neighborhood!” Today it defines anyone who lives fulltime in a gender other than their assigned birth gender. While John wasn’t quite Christine Jorgensen, the first widely known transsexual, in his own small way, he helped pave the way for the broader acceptance of people who undergo sexual reassignment surgery. Today, with role models like Laverne Cox, Chaz Bono, Gigi Gorgeous and Caitlin Jenner, it seems that members of America’s 1.4 million-strong transgender community are gaining acceptance everywhere except in the US military.
These gender outlaws, people who refuse to be defined by conventional definitions of male and female, join a host of alternative lifestyles that include monosexuals, those who desire only one gender; allosexuals, characterized by attraction for partnered sexuality; Latinx, not surprisingly, those who prefer people of Latin heritage; sizeism, the classic “no fatties need apply”; moneysexual i.e. gay-for-pay; Ursulas, butch dykes that participate in bear culture, and sapiosexuals, people attracted to another’s intelligence. You may have heard that Uptown Funk’s Mark Ronson recently came out as sapiosexual but quickly walked it back.
Considering all that, being Gender-binary, identifying with a sexuality based on the genitals you were born with, may seem passé. But consider the words of 17-year-old Brandon Allen, who recently made headlines when he was named Homecoming Royalty at White Station High School in Memphis, Tennessee. Accepting the title in a tiara and floor-length gold sequined gown, he said, “We’re on a move and if you don’t want to move with me, you can stay behind. Don’t you dare ever change yourself for anyone else but you!”
After all, as Shakespeare‘s Juliet asked, “What’s in a name?”
