I often feel like other people’s sexual and gender identity labels are a bit like their dreams: I want them to feel good about them, I want them to feel fulfilled by them, but I also don’t need to hear about them in great detail. There are only so many deeply involved descriptions of the nuances of gender that I can take into my head: if you are a benitoitic neutrangi and those identities help you feel seen, help you understand yourself, then I am thrilled about that. But at the same time, I, personally, feel my eyes glaze over when I read through many LGBTQIA.wiki pages, I feel the limits of my ability to truly grok each and every way of being a person that there is.
Which, to be clear, I can understand other people saying about me and my whole deal. It matters a lot to me to understand myself as a homoromantic bisexual (or a sapphic bisexual if I’m feeling poetic), but I wonder sometimes how much value those labels hold for other people when they are trying to comprehend me as a person — or, more to the point, I wonder how much of that is my own private business and how much of it is stuff I owe to other people, stuff that they need to know.
To my mind, there are two main functions of these labels we all wield: the first, as I’ve referenced above, is to make sense of the self, to sort through and categorize the mess of chemical signals that spark in our brain when we perceive others and are perceived by them in return. The second function is the trickier one for me: we use labels to form community, to connect, to forge a public identity. And that… that is where I think it can get fraught.
I mentioned above that I struggle with this myself, that I question how much other people need to know about the contours of my own specific sexual identity. It’s one thing to talk about it on Twitter, or in this newsletter, because these are spaces that are specifically crafted to indulge my navel gazey explorations, places where it feels useful to say, “Hey, just so you know, you can want to have sex with people of many genders but really only feel romantically attracted to your own gender” (not least because I wish, at times, that I had really understood that as a possibility for myself far, far earlier than I did!). But when I am out in the world, flagging my identity (whether figuratively or, you know, literally, like at a Pride parade) what labels matter? What do I need to reveal?
When I ask myself that, my gut immediately has an answer: bisexual. Not because it is the most important part to me, personally, but because when we’re on a need to know basis, that’s the label that feels politically important. The specific details of who I want to fuck or date? That’s my own personal business. But demanding visibility for the fact that many folks exist outside a homo/hetero binary, that identities that aren’t so easily categorized exist? That, to me, feels like a public identity because it feels political. And that, to me, feels like a reason to be out.
I’ve been thinking about this lately in part because of my Google alert for “bisexual”*, which currently has my inbox flooded with stories of eighteen-year-old Heartstopper** star Kit Connor coming out as bi after an aggressive pressure campaign that, among other things, insisted that if he weren’t out (which would obviously imply he was straight, apparently) the show’s queer storyline was nothing more than queerbaiting, no matter how well it was done.
I think this question of who gets to create and star in queer art, or art with queer themes, is way too thorny to get into right here (though maybe some day, at some point!), but in seeing how this all ended, in seeing a queer teen who clearly didn’t feel comfortable talking about his sexual identity feeling forced to do so lest he be labeled an evil straight man taking roles that rightfully belong to the gays, I find myself asking a variation on the same question I asked above. What do we owe each other? Where are the lines between what is personal, and optional to share, and what is political, and necessitates a public statement***?
What troubles me, specifically, is this conviction that queer celebrities have an obligation to be Queer Public Figures™️, that people who are still sorting out their own landscape have a responsibility to be the representation that matters to the rest of us. And… I dunno, man! I want people to be able to be openly queer without being punished for it. But I also want people to have the freedom to decide when and if they are ready to do that all for themselves. I want people to have the right to be messy, to be confused, to be sorting it out, without needing to find the perfect LGBTIA.wiki page that concisely packages their whole deal for other people’s consumption. I want these public statements, public reveals — so different from the private journeys that each of us are on over the course of their life — to feel intentional and like they are helping to build a more just, more equitable society. I guess I want them to feel like they have a purpose beyond this collective desire to just know everyone else’s business just because we can.
* Most depressing Google alert I’ve ever set up, for real
** No I haven’t seen it, yes it’s on my to watch list
*** In before someone reminds us that the personal is political