![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydionI promised a friend an age ago that I’d write about my personal queer stuff, as they didn’t know me when I was writing more about it, but then I got deluged by the news fire hose and a series of exhausting RL emergencies amoung myself and my local friends. I meant to write maybe a small essay a week this Pride month, but I didn’t get there because *gestures out the window at everything physically and metaphorically on fire*
Still, I do want to write something, especially as, if you are reading this on tumblr, about half of you have started following me in the last year and a half. so here is the answer to the first question, at least, with a promise of more to follow at some point.
Remember, we are all different and people with wildly different experiences are absolutely valid. sometimes these things can be difficult and complicated to untangle. A shout out in particular to late in lifers and all the folks who are still on the journey to self discovery. You are loved and real. Don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise, because those people are what we call assholes.
I am aware that in a lot of ways I am incredibly lucky, both because my family was my family and because I happened to have a really strong sense of my gender and orientation very young, and because my particular brain design leads to a particular type of stubborn. (For example: Because my sensory wiring is as it is, peppermint felt like burning in my mouth, so matter how many times people told me it was candy and delicious I knew it was not for me. It was like a sensory five alarm fire in my nervous system). A thing might be true for other people that was false for me. I learned early to trust what my senses and my body told me me was true over whatever nonsense the adults happened to be peddling that week.
Gender was like that. They assigned me a gender. There was nothing objectively wrong with that gender; it just didn't happen to mine. My sense that I was bowling straight down the middle of the gender lane was obvious to me as early as the Summer I was three and half. (I have memories previous to this, but they are vignettes. Around late May or early June that year, memories become a continuous story instead of glimpses. I didn't know what months were yet. I didn't even solve the riddle of how age could be a number until late august or so, but there are events I can hang these on as before or after and enough sense memory to pin things down fairly well later). I had male friends and female friends and had seen enough diaper changes and changed in enough miked age locker rooms to have a basic grasp of anatomy. I didn't have a word for me yet, but I simply knew I was both genders, even though my sex was clear.
Being the weirdly analytical an self reflective kid I was, my response to this was to set up a series of little experiments starting around early August to see what I could get away with gender expression wise. My parents were pretty relaxed about gender and gender roles and sincere about their feminism and belief in equal rights for all. (My dad was a mostly self educated working class ex greaser/ex-beatnik. He was able to separate irrational ingrained prejudices from a rational ideological commitment to equality. One of the more interesting conversations I watched my dad and his best friend growing up have was right after Death Trap came out when they were working through their feelings about watching Superman kiss Micheal Caine). My experiments and rather flamboyant ambiguity didn't bother them. I was allowed to do whatever in that direction as long as I wore my gendered outfits for things like Church and intelligence assessment for the scholarship program to the school I ended up going to. At some point, possibly around now, my parents began to suspect I was queer, but incorrectly guessed the flavour and extent.
The real test was what happened when I went out into the neighborhood. How much could I get away with where strangers and neighborhood kids can see me? Quite a lot, as it turned out, if I did it the right way and confidently. There were limits, however. There were certain things that did NOT go over well with the bullies of one gender or another. On one memorable occasion I was out front in an outfit I'd made from repurposed articles from my own wardrobe and the costume trunk and a grown ass man screeched to a halt in front of our placed and yelled at me for dressing like that until I went inside with a sigh and changed. so I worked out the limits and stayed inside of them, but just barely.
When I was five, the Rocky Horror Movie came out. my dad was not diagnosed, as he died in the mid-90's but he was definitely autistic. The movie and the whole rapidly developing culture around the movie with the live cast on stage and the audience dressing up and the props and the audience chanted responses utterly fascinated him, and both Rocky Horror and drag became a special interest. ( I remember when La Cage came out later, him translating for me as I couldn't read fast enough yet to follow the subtitles and the French i'd picked up at home wasn't remotely enough.)
Anyway, picture kindergarten age me playing on the floor of his home office while he graded papers, so I could listen to his music on the stereo, and flipping through the stack of LPs he had out and discovering the rocky horror record. It had a big window in the cardboard and Frank'n'furter was pressed into the record posed in his outfit from his entrance.
Tiny non-binary me, took one look at that and thought, "Yes. This. This is Right. This is exactly it." Over the next few years, I'd stare and stare at that album, which my parents wouldn't play for me. Later, when I was old enough to drive, we snuck into the city to watch it on south street and it was everything. The promise of a future and a community with space for me.
I worked out which side my bread was buttered on orientation wise around this time, at some pint not long after I turned five when I developed a crush on two boys in my class (but had the sense not to show it) and on Aragorn son of Arathorn (book version as even the weird half animation lord of the rings movie wasn't out yet), who I became obsessed with the next Autumn.
When I was five I learned to read, and was up to the easier middle grade stuff by the summer I was six. I took pretty quickly to mythology books. I knew a bunch of stories anyway from my mom, but it was in mythology books I, like many non-binary people of my generation, found a word for me: Androgyne. I use it still, amoung other terms mostly coined later. I am angry the TERFs have apparently stolen androphilic because it was our word first and I want it back. Apparently there are some new words floating around. Let me know if you know them because I can't find a consensus.
It was annoying to me in my teens that I was so strongly uni-directional. I felt bisexuality would have widened my options considerably and likely would have been a great deal of effort, but no amount of thinking or group sex in my teens and twenties would make it so. I'm not repulsed or anything. I'm not distressed by touching and being touched in group situations, but I really only enough women as people and/or aesthetically, not sexually. The closest I come to attraction is things like a woman who I often did laps at the same time as with a butch lesbian haircut, some lovely potatoes and who looked rather like a man with a swimmer athletic build from behind, which.... yeah. I'd see her out of the corner of my eye and think, "If she were a man and I were her age, she'd be hot." So no attraction, by a vague sense that if I were attracted to women, I'd likely like two very particular flavours of butch with two different body types. Alas, no dice on the bisexuality. I have been attracted to other non-binary people of a certain flavour and temperament and have been with some in the '90's.
Before you ask, trans men are men and trans women are women and enbies are enbies. Trust me, a transwoman friend of mine and I once tested to see if it could work with her very masculine at the time body because we were both bored and horny and were curious. It could not. Not even a little. She was a woman. Her looking like that at the time mattered not a whit. For the record, it didn't work even a little for her because she was extremely unidirectional in her desire too, and though my parts were correct my androgyne gender was not. People ask would I be with a trans man. I never met a transitioned trans man until I was off the market. I have a strong age taboo, and most of the ones I know and have known were out of range one direction or another. Most of the new people I meet these days socially are far too young to ping me that way. Even the oldest millennials are too young for me. Boomers are right out for a host of reasons. Have of xers are assholes, statistically. Most of my xer trans friends are an incomparable flavour of non-binary or trans women or in a few cases off the menu for other reasons, like distance or monogamy or pseudo-sibling relationships so it would just be weird. Again, not a judgement, but how my particular orientation works. It's been a long time since I met someone new who meets my other criteria regardless of trans or cis status, but we'll get to that. Mostly, I think if I met the right transitioned trans man I would be interested, but at this point it's all hypothetical.
So the whole sex thing turned out to be complicated in a bunch of ways. My sensory stuff by rights should have stopped me, but I have a really strong sex drive and my parts didn't match up so I learned a work around, translating overload into extreme ecstasy as long as I had a reasonable amount of control over what was going on and I wasn't being hurt, which basically closes off the doorway to things like submissiveness or being bitten, spanked, etc.. I honestly think it's a lot of the same mental process, that translate pain to pleasure, just differently applied. I can do the complex alchemy that makes sex work for me with the right partner or partners, but some things are off the menu for sensory reasons or reasons of concentration. Distract me too much and it won't work, basically.
I'm not kink adverse by the way. The older I get the more things we thought were just sex turn out to be kink. I will happily do all kinds of things as long as I can do them while having fun too, or at least if they don't set of my sensory stuff and we can do something for me later. I just have a no list with hard limits, most of which are things we tried at some point or are things I know my sensory system won't handle well. It's not a judgement about anyone who likes those things, it's just me knowing myself really, really well after a whole Kinsey report's worth of experimentation.
Which brings us to poly and demisexuality, words I did not have in the '80's.
Our only model for poly/open relationships in the media were things like swinging and NSA sex, which weren't the sorts of things my lovers and I were doing. We had no nomenclature or categories. We just negotiated individual verbal contracts with one or more people that fit us at the time and then renegotiated or broke up when things changed. we were still doing this in the '90's and oughts. I know things are more codified now, but I got too sick to hunt a long time ago.
I was asked once long ago if I thought poly was an orientation, and I almost rejected it out of hand, but stopped and thought about it awhile and decided it was. I was always poly. I had no best friend as a child, not in a sad way, but in a I had a bunch of different friends I had different relationships with and with whom I did different though often overlapping things. I lacked a need for shoving them into some artificial hierarchy or any sort of exclusivity. There is nothing wrong with people who do, but my brain doesn't work that way. There are some people who are closer than others, but I can't say here is my most important friend, here is my most important lover. I can give you a list of my closest friends at a given period of my life. I can give you a list of my most important sexual and romantic relationships over my lifespan, but odds are it'll be chronological or reverse chronological and important can mean a lot of things both good and bad and generally mixed. I can contract for monogamy and stick to it and have for long stretches of times, but my natural inclination is otherwise.
Demisexual drove me up a wall in High school and at my first college, because you try starting from scratch without a lexicon or the internet and no knowledge of asexuality let alone as a spectrum. Now do it with a sex drive that once led my oldest continuous friend to describe me as "Sexzilla" hen describing me at my second college, which was where we met, by which time I'd figured everything out though a bunch of the labels I use now didn't exist yet. I was a dancer and a distance runner. I could go eight hours with the right partner(s) and occasional water and bathroom breaks and a good snack. I could wear out a couple of guys and want more.
I had zero clue why it worked with some people and not others. It was frustrating and baffling as the first four out of seven partners (if you include the woman in my second three person poly situation back when I was seventeen, who I wasn't into, but who was in threesomes with me) didn't work out for me. Like, I was fine touching and being touched, but I couldn't come. It was four-five years of trial and error to work out what worked for me. The best label I have for it is demi-sexuality. I do need to like someone and have some sort of connection to come, which has been annoying and frustrating at times, but that's how I work. i can be in a group of three with one person I'm into that way, though both is far better. I need two out of five for five. Generally with five, I can just situate myself so I'm mostly focused on my two and I just use a hand or a foot or feet to caress the other people.
The problem is, it's not just that classic demi-connection required. There are other complicated factors that make it work or not work for me, and they aren't what you likely think. While I have an aesthetic bias while I admit to a bias for dark hair, other shades never once turned me off someone. I have a mild preference for wiry or nerdy or softer heavier builds over say body builders which sometimes ping my uncanny valley response at the extreme end, but I once tumbled someone who was the human equivalent of a Clydesdale, so... not a big factor. It's not butch or femme, because I've enjoyed the whole spectrum there. it's not one or two or three personality types.
It's more subtle than than that. I need someone who fits. Fits can mean a whole lot of different things when I was picking friends out of kids in a four block radius growing up. some people are friend shaped personality wise and some aren't. Some people are both friend and lover shaped personality wise. People occasionally jump categories in one direction or the other, hence my long, long history of plucking lovers from my friend group or bringing lovers into the friend group and us staying friends long after we stopped working as sexual and romantic partners. (I used to run big Goth events in my '20's and after a certain point my friends would joke it was like they were my ex-lover reunions. I have a picture in one of my albums of a bunch of guys sitting on a long sofa at an event and I'd been with all of them). By about '90 or'91 I had a really good idea if someone fit or didn't with my weird SPD androgyny dime-sexual poly wiring. I ran an occasional experiment after to test something not covered in previous testing, but after that, I knew where my boundaries were mostly and had a lot of fun with it until I couldn't any more.
Still, I do want to write something, especially as, if you are reading this on tumblr, about half of you have started following me in the last year and a half. so here is the answer to the first question, at least, with a promise of more to follow at some point.
Remember, we are all different and people with wildly different experiences are absolutely valid. sometimes these things can be difficult and complicated to untangle. A shout out in particular to late in lifers and all the folks who are still on the journey to self discovery. You are loved and real. Don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise, because those people are what we call assholes.
I am aware that in a lot of ways I am incredibly lucky, both because my family was my family and because I happened to have a really strong sense of my gender and orientation very young, and because my particular brain design leads to a particular type of stubborn. (For example: Because my sensory wiring is as it is, peppermint felt like burning in my mouth, so matter how many times people told me it was candy and delicious I knew it was not for me. It was like a sensory five alarm fire in my nervous system). A thing might be true for other people that was false for me. I learned early to trust what my senses and my body told me me was true over whatever nonsense the adults happened to be peddling that week.
Gender was like that. They assigned me a gender. There was nothing objectively wrong with that gender; it just didn't happen to mine. My sense that I was bowling straight down the middle of the gender lane was obvious to me as early as the Summer I was three and half. (I have memories previous to this, but they are vignettes. Around late May or early June that year, memories become a continuous story instead of glimpses. I didn't know what months were yet. I didn't even solve the riddle of how age could be a number until late august or so, but there are events I can hang these on as before or after and enough sense memory to pin things down fairly well later). I had male friends and female friends and had seen enough diaper changes and changed in enough miked age locker rooms to have a basic grasp of anatomy. I didn't have a word for me yet, but I simply knew I was both genders, even though my sex was clear.
Being the weirdly analytical an self reflective kid I was, my response to this was to set up a series of little experiments starting around early August to see what I could get away with gender expression wise. My parents were pretty relaxed about gender and gender roles and sincere about their feminism and belief in equal rights for all. (My dad was a mostly self educated working class ex greaser/ex-beatnik. He was able to separate irrational ingrained prejudices from a rational ideological commitment to equality. One of the more interesting conversations I watched my dad and his best friend growing up have was right after Death Trap came out when they were working through their feelings about watching Superman kiss Micheal Caine). My experiments and rather flamboyant ambiguity didn't bother them. I was allowed to do whatever in that direction as long as I wore my gendered outfits for things like Church and intelligence assessment for the scholarship program to the school I ended up going to. At some point, possibly around now, my parents began to suspect I was queer, but incorrectly guessed the flavour and extent.
The real test was what happened when I went out into the neighborhood. How much could I get away with where strangers and neighborhood kids can see me? Quite a lot, as it turned out, if I did it the right way and confidently. There were limits, however. There were certain things that did NOT go over well with the bullies of one gender or another. On one memorable occasion I was out front in an outfit I'd made from repurposed articles from my own wardrobe and the costume trunk and a grown ass man screeched to a halt in front of our placed and yelled at me for dressing like that until I went inside with a sigh and changed. so I worked out the limits and stayed inside of them, but just barely.
When I was five, the Rocky Horror Movie came out. my dad was not diagnosed, as he died in the mid-90's but he was definitely autistic. The movie and the whole rapidly developing culture around the movie with the live cast on stage and the audience dressing up and the props and the audience chanted responses utterly fascinated him, and both Rocky Horror and drag became a special interest. ( I remember when La Cage came out later, him translating for me as I couldn't read fast enough yet to follow the subtitles and the French i'd picked up at home wasn't remotely enough.)
Anyway, picture kindergarten age me playing on the floor of his home office while he graded papers, so I could listen to his music on the stereo, and flipping through the stack of LPs he had out and discovering the rocky horror record. It had a big window in the cardboard and Frank'n'furter was pressed into the record posed in his outfit from his entrance.
Tiny non-binary me, took one look at that and thought, "Yes. This. This is Right. This is exactly it." Over the next few years, I'd stare and stare at that album, which my parents wouldn't play for me. Later, when I was old enough to drive, we snuck into the city to watch it on south street and it was everything. The promise of a future and a community with space for me.
I worked out which side my bread was buttered on orientation wise around this time, at some pint not long after I turned five when I developed a crush on two boys in my class (but had the sense not to show it) and on Aragorn son of Arathorn (book version as even the weird half animation lord of the rings movie wasn't out yet), who I became obsessed with the next Autumn.
When I was five I learned to read, and was up to the easier middle grade stuff by the summer I was six. I took pretty quickly to mythology books. I knew a bunch of stories anyway from my mom, but it was in mythology books I, like many non-binary people of my generation, found a word for me: Androgyne. I use it still, amoung other terms mostly coined later. I am angry the TERFs have apparently stolen androphilic because it was our word first and I want it back. Apparently there are some new words floating around. Let me know if you know them because I can't find a consensus.
It was annoying to me in my teens that I was so strongly uni-directional. I felt bisexuality would have widened my options considerably and likely would have been a great deal of effort, but no amount of thinking or group sex in my teens and twenties would make it so. I'm not repulsed or anything. I'm not distressed by touching and being touched in group situations, but I really only enough women as people and/or aesthetically, not sexually. The closest I come to attraction is things like a woman who I often did laps at the same time as with a butch lesbian haircut, some lovely potatoes and who looked rather like a man with a swimmer athletic build from behind, which.... yeah. I'd see her out of the corner of my eye and think, "If she were a man and I were her age, she'd be hot." So no attraction, by a vague sense that if I were attracted to women, I'd likely like two very particular flavours of butch with two different body types. Alas, no dice on the bisexuality. I have been attracted to other non-binary people of a certain flavour and temperament and have been with some in the '90's.
Before you ask, trans men are men and trans women are women and enbies are enbies. Trust me, a transwoman friend of mine and I once tested to see if it could work with her very masculine at the time body because we were both bored and horny and were curious. It could not. Not even a little. She was a woman. Her looking like that at the time mattered not a whit. For the record, it didn't work even a little for her because she was extremely unidirectional in her desire too, and though my parts were correct my androgyne gender was not. People ask would I be with a trans man. I never met a transitioned trans man until I was off the market. I have a strong age taboo, and most of the ones I know and have known were out of range one direction or another. Most of the new people I meet these days socially are far too young to ping me that way. Even the oldest millennials are too young for me. Boomers are right out for a host of reasons. Have of xers are assholes, statistically. Most of my xer trans friends are an incomparable flavour of non-binary or trans women or in a few cases off the menu for other reasons, like distance or monogamy or pseudo-sibling relationships so it would just be weird. Again, not a judgement, but how my particular orientation works. It's been a long time since I met someone new who meets my other criteria regardless of trans or cis status, but we'll get to that. Mostly, I think if I met the right transitioned trans man I would be interested, but at this point it's all hypothetical.
So the whole sex thing turned out to be complicated in a bunch of ways. My sensory stuff by rights should have stopped me, but I have a really strong sex drive and my parts didn't match up so I learned a work around, translating overload into extreme ecstasy as long as I had a reasonable amount of control over what was going on and I wasn't being hurt, which basically closes off the doorway to things like submissiveness or being bitten, spanked, etc.. I honestly think it's a lot of the same mental process, that translate pain to pleasure, just differently applied. I can do the complex alchemy that makes sex work for me with the right partner or partners, but some things are off the menu for sensory reasons or reasons of concentration. Distract me too much and it won't work, basically.
I'm not kink adverse by the way. The older I get the more things we thought were just sex turn out to be kink. I will happily do all kinds of things as long as I can do them while having fun too, or at least if they don't set of my sensory stuff and we can do something for me later. I just have a no list with hard limits, most of which are things we tried at some point or are things I know my sensory system won't handle well. It's not a judgement about anyone who likes those things, it's just me knowing myself really, really well after a whole Kinsey report's worth of experimentation.
Which brings us to poly and demisexuality, words I did not have in the '80's.
Our only model for poly/open relationships in the media were things like swinging and NSA sex, which weren't the sorts of things my lovers and I were doing. We had no nomenclature or categories. We just negotiated individual verbal contracts with one or more people that fit us at the time and then renegotiated or broke up when things changed. we were still doing this in the '90's and oughts. I know things are more codified now, but I got too sick to hunt a long time ago.
I was asked once long ago if I thought poly was an orientation, and I almost rejected it out of hand, but stopped and thought about it awhile and decided it was. I was always poly. I had no best friend as a child, not in a sad way, but in a I had a bunch of different friends I had different relationships with and with whom I did different though often overlapping things. I lacked a need for shoving them into some artificial hierarchy or any sort of exclusivity. There is nothing wrong with people who do, but my brain doesn't work that way. There are some people who are closer than others, but I can't say here is my most important friend, here is my most important lover. I can give you a list of my closest friends at a given period of my life. I can give you a list of my most important sexual and romantic relationships over my lifespan, but odds are it'll be chronological or reverse chronological and important can mean a lot of things both good and bad and generally mixed. I can contract for monogamy and stick to it and have for long stretches of times, but my natural inclination is otherwise.
Demisexual drove me up a wall in High school and at my first college, because you try starting from scratch without a lexicon or the internet and no knowledge of asexuality let alone as a spectrum. Now do it with a sex drive that once led my oldest continuous friend to describe me as "Sexzilla" hen describing me at my second college, which was where we met, by which time I'd figured everything out though a bunch of the labels I use now didn't exist yet. I was a dancer and a distance runner. I could go eight hours with the right partner(s) and occasional water and bathroom breaks and a good snack. I could wear out a couple of guys and want more.
I had zero clue why it worked with some people and not others. It was frustrating and baffling as the first four out of seven partners (if you include the woman in my second three person poly situation back when I was seventeen, who I wasn't into, but who was in threesomes with me) didn't work out for me. Like, I was fine touching and being touched, but I couldn't come. It was four-five years of trial and error to work out what worked for me. The best label I have for it is demi-sexuality. I do need to like someone and have some sort of connection to come, which has been annoying and frustrating at times, but that's how I work. i can be in a group of three with one person I'm into that way, though both is far better. I need two out of five for five. Generally with five, I can just situate myself so I'm mostly focused on my two and I just use a hand or a foot or feet to caress the other people.
The problem is, it's not just that classic demi-connection required. There are other complicated factors that make it work or not work for me, and they aren't what you likely think. While I have an aesthetic bias while I admit to a bias for dark hair, other shades never once turned me off someone. I have a mild preference for wiry or nerdy or softer heavier builds over say body builders which sometimes ping my uncanny valley response at the extreme end, but I once tumbled someone who was the human equivalent of a Clydesdale, so... not a big factor. It's not butch or femme, because I've enjoyed the whole spectrum there. it's not one or two or three personality types.
It's more subtle than than that. I need someone who fits. Fits can mean a whole lot of different things when I was picking friends out of kids in a four block radius growing up. some people are friend shaped personality wise and some aren't. Some people are both friend and lover shaped personality wise. People occasionally jump categories in one direction or the other, hence my long, long history of plucking lovers from my friend group or bringing lovers into the friend group and us staying friends long after we stopped working as sexual and romantic partners. (I used to run big Goth events in my '20's and after a certain point my friends would joke it was like they were my ex-lover reunions. I have a picture in one of my albums of a bunch of guys sitting on a long sofa at an event and I'd been with all of them). By about '90 or'91 I had a really good idea if someone fit or didn't with my weird SPD androgyny dime-sexual poly wiring. I ran an occasional experiment after to test something not covered in previous testing, but after that, I knew where my boundaries were mostly and had a lot of fun with it until I couldn't any more.