This Book is Gay (3 page)

Your identity is as individual as your fingerprints. Frankly, if you want to identify as a carrot, I will march in the Carrot Pride parade with you. Your identity is your business. It's all gravy. In fact, pigeons and carrots with gravy sounds delish.

Now that we've been label shopping, it's worth noting that the one you bought has a return policy. Sexual preference and gender are
fluid
, meaning just because you feel one way now, it doesn't necessarily mean you'll feel the same way in five years' time. Plenty of people change their sexual identity, and that's fine.

So if everything's changeable, and if we all exist on a fluctuating, wibbly-wobbly spectrum of sexual desire (something very hard to define at the best of times), why do we bother with labels at all? Why don't we all just skip around with flowers in our hair making out with the people we fancy, regardless of their gender?

Well, probably because that's quite hard to describe. At the end of the day, it's easier to have a single word to use to define yourself when talking to other people. People will ask you how you identify and, although it's tempting to launch into a tirade about the tyranny of labels, it's far simpler to say, ‘Oh, I'm bi,' and let that be it. Still, even that doesn't mean you HAVE to adopt a label; plenty of people don't.

With this in mind let's take a look at the most common labels on offer at the Identity Shop.

The word lesbian is derived from the name of the island of Lesbos, where a Greek poet called Sappho ran her own sixthcentury ÔÖversion of
The L Word
. She gathered a whole gang of girls in the sunshine and wrote poems about how hot they were. Fast forward twenty-five hundred years, to around the turn of the twentieth century, and women were seeking a name for a growing subculture that was gaining visibility and status. Until this point, historically, gay women were almost considered a myth – probably a sign of how little women were regarded or thought of as sexual creatures outside of marriage.

But now, gay women, inspired by Sappho's island of lusty ladies, coined the name ‘lesbian', which before then had been used to describe anything ‘of Lesbos'.

Today the word more or less means ‘a woman who has sex with women'. Some such women don't like the word ‘lesbian' and prefer ‘gay woman'.

‘I prefer “gay” to “lesbian” – I think it's something about the noun vs. adjective thing, i.e. “lesbian” sounds a bit more central and defining, whereas “gay” is just one of a number of adjectives that could be used to describe a person.'

J
, 28, Brighton.

Now. You may have heard some people calling lesbians ‘dykes'. This is a touchy subject because it originated as an insulting term.
Unless you identify as lesbian yourself, you should never use the word ‘dyke' at all.
The word is pejorative unless it's being reclaimed as slang by gay women themselves.

The word ‘gay' started life meaning joyful, carefree, bright and showy, from the French term ‘gaiety', which is still used. However, by the seventeenth century, the word had evolved: a ‘gay woman' was a prostitute, a ‘gay man' was promiscuous, and a ‘gay house' was a brothel. Nice.

So, by the mid-twentieth century, gay still meant ‘carefree' – as opposed to those who were ‘straight' or a little square – and started to take on its homosexual connotations. Given that at the time ‘homosexual' was a clinical diagnosis, it's no wonder that a term meaning ‘bright and showy' ironically became shorthand for men who wished to exist in a secret subculture.

By the 1990s, it was decided that ‘gay' was the preferred and politically correct way to refer to men who have sex with men (and, of course, also women who have sex with women).

Sadly, at about the same time, the word ‘gay' was also twisted to mean something that was weak, crap or rubbish. I don't care what anyone says, this usage stems from homophobia, so don't do it. YES, I KNOW IT'S IN THE TITLE, BUT THAT'S BECAUSE I'M MAKING A POINT – EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK IS ABOUT ACTUALLY BEING GAY (or lesbian or bi or trans or *, but that wouldn't have been nearly as attention grabbing, would it?).

This is nothing new. The people of ancient Greece and Rome were generally pansexual (people who are sexually attracted to people regardless of their gender or sexuality), and no one batted an eyelid. Sadly for us, we like things to be binary: black/ white, good/bad, male/female. And this isn't great for anyone.

Broadly speaking, a bisexual is someone who likes to have sex with both men and women. There are a plethora of misunderstandings about bisexuality, the most prevalent being the ‘bi now, gay later' theory that all gay men and lesbians have a brief period in Bi-Town before catching the last train to Gayville. While this is the case for some actual gay men and women, there are plenty of people who have no intention of travelling all the way to the end of the line. AND THAT'S FINE.

The idea that bisexual people ‘are kidding themselves' or that they are ‘being selfish' and/or ‘greedy' is hurtful. Why is it so hard to accept that someone might be attracted to both sexes? If someone is willing to identify as bi, then surely they'd be just as happy to wear a ‘gay' label. What would be the point in lying? Why do we so badly need people to be gay or straight? Bisexual people might be misunderstood, but they have the right to be PROUD of their identity and sexual preference.

‘I identify as lesbian, because I don't like to admit I'm bisexual.'

Blaz, 34, Bristol.

‘I identify as bisexual, though I rather like to describe it as “People are beautiful, people are hot, people are attractive, and if I fall in love, I fall in love.”'

Mickey, 18, Michigan, USA.

‘I tell people I'm bi because it's easier to understand, but I think I'm pan – I'm concerned with personality not genitals.'

Anon, 24, Brighton.

‘[I say I'm] bisexual when asked. Varies depending on the day, who I've been around, what I've been reading and so on. A description I found on Tumblr that fits perfectly goes along the lines of “If you think of sexuality in terms of music, where the low notes represent being attracted to boys and high notes represent being attracted to girls, I am a Slayer guitar solo.”'

Nina, 16, UK.

‘Queer' originally meant someone or something a little unusual or out of the ordinary. In the late twentieth century, it became a derogatory term or abuse word aimed at homosexuals.

However, more recently, following the AIDS pandemic, the word was reclaimed (at first by the group Queer Nation) as a catch-all phrase to represent the full spectrum of sexuality and gender but later as more of a criticism of identity than an identity itself. Basically a label for people – gay or straight – who were sick of labels!

Nonetheless, it is now used as an identity. In the broadest possible terms, as there are a number of groups under the ‘queer' umbrella, being queer means not having to define your sexual identity or gender with just one label.

In a world in which your sexuality and gender are open to change, it does sometimes seem silly to use labels. Even classing yourself as bisexual adds to the idea that there are only three choices, which clearly isn't the case – nor should it be an automatic term for someone who is neither gay nor straight.

Queer theory is a fascinating and expanding subject, and there are many, many books and theses written on it.

‘Defining yourself with a deliberately slippery word might seem like a contradiction in terms. For me, that was the point. I feel that ‘straight', ‘gay' and ‘bi' don't adequately cover or include the way I feel.

For one thing, those terms suggest a rigid and inflexible take on gender. For people who see sex and gender in any way other than binaries, the options of “one, the other or both” simply don't fit.

In addition to that, I find that gender/sex is a relatively small part of sexual attraction for me. It seems odd to define my sexual identity by a small facet of it. While some people – some LGBT people or people into kink, for example – choose to solve this problem with more specific identities, I'd rather not try and sum it up in that way.

For me, identifying as queer is a way of placing myself outside straight, mainstream sexuality without having to identify with other ideas I can't relate to.'

Kerry, Brighton.

Curious, or questioning, as is often now used, means just that – someone who is in the process of asking the big questions. I think all young people should spend time thinking about desire. I think everyone would be a lot happier if they took a few weeks to dwell on what does it for them. It'd resolve a lot of tension and grief, I expect. A whole lot of people ‘experiment' – they give it a little go to see if they like it. Some do, and do it again, and some rule it out, happy in the knowledge that they're not missing out.

Like anything in life, sometimes you don't know until you try. I wouldn't eat prawns until I was eighteen – the mere idea of them freaked me out. But then I tried them and it turns out they're DELISH. Don't worry, I've more than made up for it since.

(I stress, in this instance, that ‘prawns' is not a euphemism for anything.)

There are two ways of looking at asexuality. The first is as a lack of, or little interest in, sex (with anyone). The second is as a refusal to define your sexual orientation or uncertainty about your sexual orientation – a more modern use of the term. Asexuality is not celibacy (abstaining from sex). Asexual people MAY have sex – to have kids, to try it out or to experiment – but asexual people will characteristically have little desire for either men or women, so if you go back to our flow chart, they would typically lose interest after the first question.

Asexual people will often have romantic feelings towards people, and they may well have boyfriends and girlfriends and do all the lovey-dovey, holding hands and hugging parts, just without the willies and mimsies.

This is – you guessed it – FINE. Some people just aren't that sexual and, like all identities, this one might change over time. I have found that a growing number of teenagers identify as asexual while figuring out their identity.

Right at the very outset of this discussion, let's not get it twisted.

Here we go:

Now this is really tough, and you'd be forgiven for making mistakes when ‘trans' is so often used as shorthand. When it is, it almost certainly means transgender or transsexual. You may also hear
genderqueer,
which, like queer theory regarding sexuality, is more of a refusal to be pigeonholed than an identity in itself.

There are broader issues regarding gender identity, in that we are still very much stuck in a binary culture which says some things are for boys (slugs and snails and puppy-dogs' tails) and some things are for girls (sugar and spice and all things nice – P.S. who wrote this ANTI-FEMINIST HATE ANTHEM? To think we tell it to children in NURSERY).