Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Alia's avatar

I have always felt allied with gay culture and kink culture (though not committed to either) and I guess it’s just a feeling of being sexually non-normative (a lot of which is just being very horny.) The older I get, the more vehemently I believe that the patriarchal model of heterosexual relationships is toxic garbage and I am drawn to the idea of alternative models of how to have relationships and exist in the world in general. I also feel like I’ve become almost embarrassingly fag-haggy of late and a lot of it (I think) is that I relate more to how gay men approach relationships with men than the way straight women do (never been slut-shamed by gay men, either.) How queer I am on a scale of 1 to queer is debatable, although I usually describe myself “mostly straight and pretty annoyed about it.”

Expand full comment
Aris Merquoni's avatar

This is an interesting one since I'm one of those cishet people who feels more comfortable hanging out in queer spaces, specifically I spend a lot of time in transfemme spaces, but I'm pretty comfortable in my cis-woman-ness. I am definitely a gender nonconforming woman - I'm tall and broad shouldered and have been misgendered a fair few times throughout my life - but I've only been more sure that I'm cis as I've grown older.

That being said, I've also definitely embraced the "aromantic" label, which is a spectrum that also doesn't get talked about a lot. My ideal relationship doesn't look a lot like the standard het relationship we're presented in pop culture either. I don't know if that's enough to explain that particular kinship, but it's there.

I think there's something to be said for those of us who feel uncomfortable in our bodies or in our desires clustering together whether or not we find complete correspondence there. That being said I've also had a period of "Funny all my friends have ADHD and depression, whoops, turns out that's me too" so who knows, maybe I'll discover some other kind of gender identity in the next few decades that works better than "cis woman". For now though... enthusiastic ally is where you've got me.

Expand full comment
12 more comments...

No posts