I’m Here, I’m Queer???
I have lately given much thought to labels and how we choose and use them. I have for sometime used the label “Pansexual”. I use this to indicate that my sexual appetite is not limited by gender barriers. I am in fact sexually greedy and find I have desires and the will to have sexual contact with just about any gender configuration imaginable. I intentionally avoid “Bi-Sexual” as the binary term irritates me and also seems to indicate a sort of switching back and forth. At least to me.
Lately there has been a word, no an idea that has been bouncing around my head. Queer! Wow, what a loaded word. A word I am drawn to but yet cannot decide if it fits.
I am not going to get into the etymology and origins of the word. I am only concerned with it’s current usage as a word of empowerment.
I am going to think aloud a bit and invite you as I so often have to take a front row seat to the bizarre thought process that is me.
My first question; Am I Worthy? On the one hand I am not only a greedy fucker, but I so completely support the politics that is the Queer movement, that I am almost certainly a part of it. But make no mistake. My current state of being is the result of a personal epiphany in my early twenties and a slow evolution since then. It is not easy to say this, but previous to the above stated revelation, I was a sexual bigot. I make no excuses but I was raised in an environment of Racial, Religious, and Sexual Hate. For reasons I have not yet discerned I was able to completely refuse to accept the first two, yet embraced the third. One theory is that it was a way to externalize a reaction to being sexualized by a male relative at a young age, but even that smells like an excuse, so I reject it. What is true is I accept responsibility for my attitudes and have spent the rest of my life trying to correct them.
Next question; How can I be Queer and look and act so appropriate for my gender? OK, maybe a bit of a silly question, but think about it. How many “Queer” Uber-Butch Cis-Males do you know? On the other hand, I have spent my entire life setting myself aside from the crowd appearance and action wise. In Xtian School I refused to sing hymns or kneel and pray. Not that either of these would have been hard to at least fake, but I made conscious choices to set myself apart in every way I could. In my teens I had both of my ears pierced in multiple locations. Now for this to have full impact you need to know that I am as old as dirt and this was before George Michael made this look at least remotely popular. And until my growing forehead made it just silly looking I had hair to my waist for decades. And now long after such things are sensible, I have started wearing gauged earrings. Of course none of these things makes me even remotely Queer, but do speak to a lifelong desire to set myself outside the crowd.
In the end the biggest question is one that I find the hardest to address; Do other Queers want me using their word, their empowerment, their symbol of struggle? This is an odd position to find myself in. Caring what others think, but I do. As someone who has married into the Native American community I am painfully familiar with how a people that are proud, yet steeped in struggle can have their culture and symbols of power appropriated by those who neither understand nor deserve these things. In using the title Queer would I be no better than a New-age Shamanist with a dreamcatcher hanging from my car mirror, telling folks that my great grandmother was a Cherokee Princess? This one Is the greatest hang-up.
In the balance I am quite aware that it does not matter what I call myself. But yet this is the itch on my brain these days.
