50 Shades of Gay

I remember seeing my first identifiable lesbian in 1973.  I was in high school and had been crushed out on girls since 4^th grade, but didn’t have the words for my identity.  There she was, Jill Johnston, in all her glory, unapologetic and fearless, being interviewed on the Dick Cavett show at 11 p.m., wearing jeans, a button down men’s shirt, and black work boots, talking about writing for the Village Voice and being a lesbian. I was smitten.

In those years and the decade to follow, we would have said that she was on the “butch” side, and then may have modified that to call her a somewhat “femmy butch.”  Things were much simpler then, very binary.  Lesbians or dykes if they chose to refine their taxonomy were either butch or femme, or butchy femmes, or femmy butches.  Some lesbians were offended by even using these delineations, as they saw them as a throwback to limiting heterosexual roles.  Then there were the outliers like the Patti Smith and Robert Mapelthorpe, impossibly adorable artists whom we labeled “androgynous.”

When I was writing for lesbian/gay newspapers in San Francisco in the late 70’s to mid 80’s, it seemed that every year we were required to add another initial to the community designation.  First it was the “G” for gay community, then LG, then LGB, then LGBT.   Today there’s so many letters that there’s no street wide enough to fit the damn banner:  LGBTTQQIAAP (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, transsexual, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, ally, pansexual).  

Cut to 2015.  I’m jumping waves in the Pacific Ocean in Maui with my teenage daughter and listening to her explanation of the term “gender fluid.”  She tells me that a gender fluid identifies at any time as male, female, neutrois, or any other non-binary identity, or a combination of identities.  Depending on the moment, or the circumstance, their gender can vary.  Kind of like a chameleon, except I don’t think they can look in two directions at once.

We stay in the ocean discussing the panoply of terms that folks use to place themselves on the gender continuum, within the context of being queer, or not.

There’s genderqueer, (also termed non-binary or gender-expansive), a catchall for gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine. Those with non-binary genders can have an androgynous (both masculine and feminine) gender identity, such as androgyne, have an identity between male and female, such as intergender, or have a neutral or non-existent gender identity, such as agender or neutrois.   

You can be bigender (male, female), trigender (male, female and/or any non-binary identities), or pangender (a multiplicity of genders that transcends the current knowledge of genders).

Cisgender (often abbreviated to Cis) describes people whose gender experience agrees with the sex they were designated at birth.

Transgender (people who have a gender identity, or gender expression, that differs from their assigned sex) means that you get beat up for going into the “wrong” bathroom by straight men who despite having a record for harming young children that surpasses any other group of humans, have decided that legislating bathroom access is their top priority.

And along with all these distinctions, come the pronouns. Some genderqueer people like to replace the pronouns him and her with gender neutral pronouns like one, ze, sie, hir, co, ey, or singular “they,” “their,” and “them.” “Mx”is used instead of Mr. or Ms, and in Australia, you can even put it on your passport.

I must admit that despite my best intentions, I often stumble over the pronouns, get confused, and think we are talking about more than one person at a time when we aren’t.   And I did make the mistake of asking if one of my daughter’s lesbian friends had a girlfriend.  “No, she has a boy girlfriend.” I stood corrected.

It’s complicated and nuanced.  And I know that your average heterosexual cisgender person over the age of 30 probably has no idea what I’m talking about.  Although I am beginning to think that there is no such thing as the average heterosexual cisgender person over the age of 30.   That’s because they don’t have a flag!

Gertrude Stein, the quintessential butch lesbian wrote, “A rose is a rose is a rose." Celebrating all of us on the eve of pride weekend 2016,  I declare, “A spectrum is a spectrum is a spectrum.”