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PoMoSexuality

Last night, I attended a talk by Carol Queen, a cultural sexologist. The topic was a book she was the editor of, PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality. PoMo meaning, of course, postmodern. It’s a collection of essays that challenge the notion that homosexual, heterosexual, and even bisexual are adequate labels to describe the wide spectrum of human sexuality. In addition, such labels make the implicit and inaccurate assumption that one’s sexual identity cannot change over time.

For instance, an example my wife brings up is Bornstein and Harrison. Don’t remember their original first names (and perhaps I’m getting this whole story wrong, but it’s how my wife told it to me). Bornstein was a biological male who identified as gay, while Harrison was a biological female who identified as lesbian. Yet they had a relationship together. Would you consider that a heterosexual relationship? And then, if that didn’t defy existing labels enough already, Bornstein realized he really identified as a woman, so became Kate Bornstein, and the couple stayed together. Is this a lesbian couple? And then, of course, Harrison realized she really identified as a man, so she became David Harrison. So can you really categorize this as a heterosexual relationship? I think David Harrison details their relationship in an essay in the above book, which I’ve yet to read (although from a couple of reviews I’ve seen, while the book is good, his particular essay is not all that great). But you get the idea.

And if you were wondering why either of us were at this talk, my wife originally identified as a lesbian, and indeed when I first became good friends with her, I never really considered a romantic relationship with her a possibility because of that very fact. Of course eventually we realized there was more going on (of course, this was after most of our friends figured it out). So that actually worked out to our advantage, since we didn’t go through that phase in dating where both people are on their best behavior and so they don’t really get to know each other. Anyway, so she came to the conclusion, firsthand, that a person’s sexuality can be fluid. She still identifies as queer (but if you push her to pick one of the usual “sanctioned” labels, she’d pick bisexual) and remains very active in the GLBT community. In fact, she was the one who organized Carol Queen’s above appearance at her school.

We’ve been married for two an a half years, and no, I don’t worry that she’ll leave me for a woman, while knowing full well that (heaven forbid) if we ever get divorced, her future relationships would be more likely to be with women. So despite appearing to be a normal married couple, ours is a relationship that also doesn’t fit into existing labels quite so neatly.