Sexuality and sea change, and supporting everyone’s journey but my own
I am generally a kind person, especially around matters of sex and gender and sexuality, so if someone came up to me and said, “I’ve changed. I thought I was this and now I’m that,†I would be gentle. I would listen carefully, paying attention to cues about how they were feeling about the change in question, and I would support them in that change. Such things can be fluid, and second-guessing our feelings can be disastrous, and it’s okay to not know, or to suddenly know more than you did before. It’s okay, I’d say, people change.
And yet, I am being downright mean to myself these days, about my own sexuality and how it has changed, both in the past and also really recently. It’s still fresh. My head is still spinning.
In the last year, I swung from enthusiastically non-monogamous (using the sailor-in-every-port model) to a deliberate, chosen devotion to only one (as part of a power dynamic that thrills me to my core). Before that, I had slowly slid along the orientation axis from a butch, bearded dyke (20 years ago) to today’s tomboy-femme, clean-shaven babygirl, who has been attracted exclusively to cisgender men for the past 15 years.
And even while I feel deep satisfaction and profound joy and breath-taking excitement more than I ever have about my sex life, I can’t shake the feeling that I have failed. I don’t even know if that is a transitive or intransitive verb, like, do I need to specify someone or some cause that I’ve let down, or have I just, you know, failed?
I don’t know where this comes from. Maybe a sense that, because my stuff has slid more toward heteronormative, I just can’t speak from the margins anymore. Where am I getting that from? No one has ever said that to me. Do people actually say that? Would they? What would I say in response? Am I scared of being called a poser, a sell-out?
My tingling sense of unease is heightened because I generally have lived so publicly. For years, my sex life has been all out there for the world to see, both in life and in my art. But maybe, if no one ever knew that I ID’d as a lesbian those many years ago, then heteronormativity would ensure that no one would spend any time thinking about who I am now. There would be no change to notice or comment on.
Ditto the poly thing. After years of trying monogamy and tripping up repeatedly, I was DIGGING INTO THE BANQUET, I tell you. I went out on dates, and wrote bold lyrical status updates, and made a concerted effort to give full disclosure to new and potential suitors. I was IN IT, up to my fucking armpits. This is the way I prefer it; in general, I don’t like to hide things. The way I am with my one lover now feels right, but I can’t help thinking that if I had kept my personal life more, well, personal, then my current practice of cleaving to one man only wouldn’t feel like such a major break.
It’s the damnedest thing. I still feel queer as fuck and poly as hell, at least in theory. People still look at me, or listen to me, and make all kinds of assumptions, most of which were true at some point in the past. But I don’t see any of it in my life anymore. I followed my bliss, and this is where it has taken me: into a pool of quiet intensity that, to the outside observer, at least, looks “normal.”
Why do I even care what I look like? None of those things that have been part of my identify are contingent on behavior or appearances anyway, right? There are lesbians who have never yet touched a woman, there are poly people who still call themselves poly after years of being in a monogamous relationship, there are trans people still with the genitals they were born with. It’s what’s in your head and in your heart.
At least, that is what I’d say to someone who came to me with this kind of story. And it’s the right advice. It’s the right understanding of the fluidity of human sexuality. Fluidity is the right word.
My desires feel like currents; sometimes they have rushed along until I almost drown in them, and sometimes they stir, still but deep. I wouldn’t want to fight them, nor do I want to deny everything that got me to this point, because I really do like where I’ve been and I like where I am now. I just wish I could internalize it for myself a lot faster.
REPEAT TO MYSELF UNTIL I BELIEVE IT: I haven’t failed anyone, not even myself. I’m just good at feeling and riding the flow.
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