Posts tagged Questions
I’m Here, I’m Queer???
Aug 23rd
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.
Polyamory; What If. . . .
Jan 16th
After reading The Ethical slut and then passing it on to Jewelgen to read, we realized that at least in some form this idea, Polyamory, was something we had to consider for our own lives. On an intellectual level it made so much sense, but even more importantly that that we both could sense that it fit with what we believed about sex. That it did not have to be related to an emotional attachment. We also knew that as it related to our Kinky lives that moving into the area of other partners would greatly expand our ability to explore.
However, the question of how, and how much to implement into our lives loomed overhead. I think we both feared that our own ideas of where this could lead would frighten the other. So for a time we knew in our head that our future would include some sort of “Poly”, we did not move forward.
That was when we began a mental exercise or game that we call “What if”. We would each bring up scenarios that occurred to us and ask the other one, “What if _____ happened? How would that make you feel?” This discussion could occur at any time but most often happened in the car when driving together or in bed, late at night or on a weekend morning.
We initially agreed to some rules that were comfortable but with the understanding that everything could be discussed. We began to refer to Kink, and Poly as “Our Journey”. That was exactly how we thought of it, as a journey with no particular destination. We decide that for the time, all we were comfortable with was Co-play. That is introducing other partners to play with both of us at the same time. It was simultaneous to this that we were coming out to each other about our attraction to other genders, so this also became part of the “What if” game.
A typical conversation may go something like this;
Me: So what if we were playing with another man and he was going down on you but then sucked my cock?
Jewelgen: Well, you know I like that idea, but I don’t think I would be comfortable with seeing you suck cock.
“What ifs” could sometime be traded back and forth for hours like that, and through this exchange we came to trust that we had a fair idea of what the other found comfortable.
It was during a particularly full weekend of these discussions that Jewelgen came up with a brilliant way to expand the discussion and further address our internal feelings about knowing the other was with someone else. Even though neither of us was comfortable at these early stages with the other having solo intercourse with someone else, we acknowledged that this was a likely eventual outcome. Jewelgen suggested that we each take a day of perusing Fetlife and pick out a top 5 people of each male and Female that we thought would be likely someone that the other would want to be with. This was an exploration on two levels. It would see how well we understood what the other found attractive and it would force us to think deeper about the idea of the other being with not only someone, but someone the other was very attracted to.
Of course Jewelgen was far better at this than I was but after 24 hours I had done a fair job of picking out some men and women that Jewelgen said she found attractive. A very interesting side note to this particular game is that even though the people we picked were not anyone we had ever had contact with, nor did we anticipate having contact with, and the lists we made we set aside on our desk somewhere. The number one Female that Jewelgen picked for me, and at the time admitted that she had picked because of how much she was attracted to, would through a completely unrelated series of events, become the one person we have opened our relationship to. That is right, almost a year before I would meet IceEmpress on Twitter and flirting would lead to her having dinner with us 3,000 miles from her home. IceEmpress was the person Jewelgen predicted I would find attractive. Of course she was right.
We have in Baby steps and Stutter steps moved far beyond those early stages of exploring Polyamory, however the “What if” game is still played and serves us well.
Recent Comments