Je peux prendre ta douleur

feel free to ignore this shit

but here we go

so basically this big abstract social structural thing we all talk about with reference to gender and sex and sexuality presumes some stuff:

1. your sex = your genitalia
2. your sex predetermines your gender identity
3. your gender identity is couched in an identification with people with the same genitalia and an attraction to those with the “opposite” genitalia
4. therefore your sexuality and your gender and your sex all go in a straight line from beginning to end with no bumps or kinks or curves

Maybe that’s why they call you straight. Sex ==> Gender ==> Sexuality

So obviously this has a lot of issues for a lot of people and I’m one of them (though I am by no means attempting to posit that I’ve “got it the worst” or anything like that, merely speaking from my experiences).

Anyways.

So when I still liked the term gay for myself (or better yet when I still used, I didn’t really think critically about that part of my identity, I just sort of used it because it was there and I thought that I was supposed to fit the definition not find a word to express my own definition), I always noticed the way that people weren’t just gay, they were tops or bottoms or versatile. Forgive me for the unparallel structure, I just can’t think of how to turn versatile into a noun…

It’s something you declare, or confess if you prefer Foucaultian terms, about yourself. In social networking sites, dating sites, hook-up sites, gay communities, all that shit, the presumption is different. The presumption is that you’re gay and that the sex you want to have with people of the same gender identity as you (or it’s probably better to say the same “sex” but we’ll come back to this) is going to be penetrative. To spell it out…a dick will go in an orifice. Yes, in case you didn’t pick up on it yet, I am only talking about cis gay males. That’s what I was experiencing and the phenomenon I’m referencing pretty much only applies to this that I’m aware of.

So we’ve got our framework, now let’s dive into the analysis part.

Here’s why I dislike this model of a second kind of confession. You don’t just come out, you then confess your preference. And it isn’t in verb form as in “I prefer to top” but rather it is a state of being that you confess that implies a kind of fixity and stability. I am a top/bottom as opposed to just I top/bottom. Okay, with me? You’ve probably noticed this.

So the reason I dislike this is because to me it comes off as assimilationist. Yes, I’m using that word. Yes that is my ~*~*claim*~*~ and I’m bout to back it up with my personal logic/thoughts on it.

We’re still trying to make the lines straight when we use these words. We’re still trying to say that we have this sex that we’re not even going to bother thinking about, and we have this gender and we do identify with other men (I feel weird using we here, but for argument’s sake and since we’re talking about my past self-conception) but our sexuality doesn’t look right. Okay, I know what we’ll do, we just come up with words that define the way we have sex on the same phallocentric terms that straight folks use. One’s gotta be the girl, one’s gotta be the boy. But let’s not be blatant about it because we are gay but we’re still cis dudes so we gotta fight to keep that privilege when it’s convenient to use but act like we’re the oppressed among the oppressed when it helps us win arguments. So instead of “the boy” and “the girl” we’ll say top (coming from the idea that the way EVERYONE has sex is in something at least reminiscent of the missionary position in which the person being penetrated is underneath the person doing the penetrating), and bottom and it’ll basically mean the same thing.

So we are literally, kinisthetically describing a way in which our sex could look like straight sex. Why we do this, okay it could be for any number of reasons, ranging from wanting to be ~*~*accepted*~*~ to wanting to feel closer to our sex/gender (yes i’m conflating the two because deviation from that makes the lines crooked and we need those fuckers straight), or anything else you could think of. I don’t really know why and this isn’t about hypothesizing.

What this is about is pointing out that to me this language and this model for gay male sex and sexuality isn’t really all that imaginative. It’s taking what’s already there and calling it something different. Yes there are people who would say that they personally aren’t that different from straight folks and those same people may even tend to make blanket statements about gay folks in general being the same way. But there are a shit ton of us who talk about differences between queer folks (HA first time i’ve gotten to say queer) and straight folks and we don’t naturalize those differences but rather recognize those differences as socially constructed as well.

So to recap. Straight folks are straight because their sex and gender and sexuality go in a straight line based on some big abstract structured social model that says it has to be that way like this sex (male/female) ==> gender (man/woman) ==> sexuality (attraction to opposite). Cis gay males have this dominant model too, hereafter to be called “hegemonic homosexuality,” that basically tries to straighten out the kinks in wherever this goes wrong like this sex (male) ==> gender (top/bottom) ==> sexuality (attraction to opposite).

Okay kiddos that’s all the time we have for today in John’s corner of the world. Stay tuned and be ready for some more overly analytical thinking about sex in a world where I seem to fail my predestined journey from point A to insert rod b into slot c.