I talk about sex a lot. I write about it. I speak about it. So far, I participate in a fair bit of it as well.
Over the years, I have found that rather than becoming more enlightened about sex, the general public has become less interested in enjoying it and more interested in policing how others have it.
The current spasm of fear of transgender people is just another example.
Granted, much of that fear is stoked by politicians seeking the latest scapegoat they can use to frighten an ignorant voter base — a voter base, and for that matter, pretty much a whole country afraid of all things sexual, even though many of those same people most likely harbor sexual fantasies that would make me blush.
Most of those fears come from anything outside the boxes, we so neatly contain our sexuality and gender identities. Heteronormative folk are often suspicious or afraid of anyone who finds sexual pleasure in any way other than P/V (penis in vagina) couplings.
Their sexual boxes don’t have room for other arrangements.
Sadly, a lot of LGBTQ folk also get stuck in similar boxes.
I blame the whole Kinsey Scale on that.
Dr. Kinsey did a lot of ground-breaking research on human sexuality, but most of it was based on interviews. He relied on the people he interviewed to self-identify and was, therefore, inviting them to check a box.
The problem with that kind of research is that people may or may not be honest, depending on how they want to be seen, not necessarily how they really behave.
Much later, Masters and Johnson would do more groundbreaking work of human sexuality including observations not just interviews. What they got was a lot of mechanics of how sex works, but not so much as why.
All the research has been designed to categorize, quantify and define boxes for us and our sexuality.
For me, I began using the term “queer” as shorthand for my sexuality and orientation.
“Queer” is less a box and more a cloud. It can encompass a lot of things including leather, kink, bisexuality, gay and lesbian.
It’s the only way I can make sense of what sexuality means to me.
In fact, a lot of what I would consider sex involves no “part A into part B” at all, but, at its heart, is Eros, that fundamental part of our self that seeks out not just pleasure but connection.
I do a lot of educating and speaking across North America, and I often have the opportunity to interact and “play” (the term used in the kink/leather/BDSM community for our activities) with a lot of different people. I have had wonderfully exciting and often erotic scenes with gay men, straight women, lesbians, straight men, transmen, transwomen and people who identify as asexual or gender-fluid.
The spectrum of what might constitute sexuality is far too broad to be contained in any single box, and I believe all of us, if we are truly honest, would actually find ourselves living in that Queer Cloud far more comfortably than a box.
By refusing to be neatly categorized, we truly blossom into our potential as living beings.
As a queer, I am living outside the box, no matter what some academic might say. As a queer, I embrace the word so often tossed at me as a slur when I was young because my desires were never as focused as my peers. As a queer, I kick out the walls of the box. If it can’t hold me, then it is just an artificial construct designed to make my existence easier to tabulate.
I was the former co-chair of the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, and for years I worked to achieve its primary belief, that “sexual freedom is a basic human right.” The whole organization was named for a woman whose work for Women’s Sufferage in the 19th century inspired me. She was also an advocate for “free love,” a radical idea at the time.
She once wrote, “I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right, neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.”
Though I suspect she never envisioned the kind of Queerness I have been speaking of, I think her sentiment was clear. Our sexuality, sexual orientation and more is no one’s business but our own!
It is in that spirit that I urge you to examine the boxes you are living in, and how much freer you might be if you joined the Queer Cloud. Let your spirit and erotic self float out of the constriction of definitions and embrace queerness.
Do it ethically, safely and consensually, and I believe you will never regret it.
Oh, you may frighten a lot of people who will resent your refusal to submit to their classification. But in these times, that is what we need: a big, joyful, sexy queer cloud of people to take the wind out of the sails of oppression.
Hardy Haberman is a longtime local LGBT activist and a board member of the Woodhull Freedom Alliance. His blog is at DungeonDiary.blogspot.com.