the more comfortable in my own queer skin I get the less comfortable I am with this weird thing where it’s faddy on tumblr to think heterosexuality is boring and talk like queer people run in very exclusionary packs
like
why would I even care who someone else has sex with, unless I’d like them to be having sex with me
(also are het trans people boring or does their transness make them interesting again? and if it does, how is “your transness makes you interesting!” not exoticizing and gross?)
I’m very baffled by this belief that being gay makes a person interesting. My old roommate was the most boring person I have ever met. And he was gay.
I mostly hear it as “cishet people/relationships are boring,” which is less hypocritical but not much more defensible overall.
I mean I feel like it’s a thing that pretty much all marginalised groups do – as part of a kind of bonding and self-affirming thing, some members of the group will start being all ‘Hey, we’re not just as good as them, we’re better.’
So white people are boring and can’t cook or dance, boys are stupid and think with their dicks, cishets are boring and have boring sex, allistics are less intelligent, neurotypicals are boring, etc, etc
It’s probably healthy in small amounts?
I do this; and I am not proud. It just comes out. My worst one is “that girl/woman is way too awesome to be straight”.
I mean…what a shitty and dismissive thing to think. Not ok. And, I hope, not representative of my politics or how I express them. And yet my brain throws it up automatically…bleh.
I think it bothers me on a bisexual level. Because like, I spent years feeling like a terrible person for not naturally being an aggressively queer person who almost entirely prefers women. I don’t have a particularly strong feeling about my gender or my sexuality. Like, I don’t IDENTIFY! as anything. I just sort of exist as I am and have sex with who I find attractive at the time. But back in my less self-assured days, I didn’t just feel guilty for not being a Pure Queer, I also felt like everything I read about how boring/pathetic/etc straight people are technically applied to me. Because my sexual attraction to other people didn’t actually matter, did it? It was my lifestyle that mattered. And not dressing or talking or acting like a Pure Queer meant I was really just a boring straight person, and the only way I could really be bisexual was to have politically acceptable sex, dye my hair, and be as obvious as possible. And when that didn’t come natural, in the same way Womanhood-As-Identity didn’t come natural, it just left me feeling like a shitty person.
This is why I didn’t come out as bisexual for many years. Because I might just be EXPERIMENTING! Which is the end of the world. And I didn’t feel any particular ties to the gay community and was mostly convinced I’d embarrass myself if I ever showed up.
The only reason I feel more cautiously optimistic about the lesbian community now is that since finding publishers I have made lesbian writer friends, and feel comfortable going into spaces where MY FRIENDS will be.
I still don’t feel like ALL GAYS ARE MY FAMILY, and I definitely don’t feel like all trans people are my family,despite being pretty confident I have body dysphoria (and, similarly to the aforementioned lesbians, have a crap ton of individual trans friends I feel quite comfortable around even when we disagree.)
OMG YES THIS 99% OF THIS. (The part I don’t agree with is that pretty much everywhere I’ve ever visited, and I’ve traveled a lot, and lived in 2 different countries, everywhere I’ve ever visited, the lesbian community (or the “women & trans community” as they called it, but never bothered to truly live up to) has been CLIQUISH AS FUCK and has contributed to my dysphoria.)
(In fact, I often times say that the only place I’ve really had any problems with my sexuality (pansexual queer, formerly identified as bisexual) was in exclusively queer space… my cishet friends were always totally cool and accepting of me.)
And as per “cishets have boring sex”, man, ppl who say that have never met any kinksters, have they? I know cishet kinksters who have WAY more crazy sex than the monogamous homosexual butch/femme couple down the street. So… yeah.
But, yeah, that “we’re different, but we’re BETTER” thing gets SO. OLD. after a while. It’s like “Grow up. What are you, 8 years old? Everyone’s just as good as each other. We don’t need to put others down to feel good about ourselves.”
I can definitely see it being valid in the context of popular fiction: “oh, another het pairing – didn’t see THAT coming, etc.”
Mooncustafer 