Identity: What Is It Good For? Something, Maybe?

I guess it's fitting that I start this blog off with a navel-gazing look at identity - both my own, and the concept.  I'm not trying to write a thesis here (besides, others have done a far better job examining what, exactly, sexual orientation and gender identity entails than I ever could) but rather to provide a general introduction to who we are, why we decided to start this blog, and other useless nonsense.

In my previous life, when I played for the little leagues (i.e. LiveJournal, home primarily to angsty 17 year-olds and bored stay-at-home-moms taking a break from playing WoW) I frequently got into arguments about things that interested and mattered to me, regarding GLTBQ rights, feminism, polyamory, and identity.  The problem was that while doing so I identified myself as being a straight, cisgendered woman in a monogamous relationship with a guy.  What's the problem with that?  In a LiveJournal identity politics debate, plenty, but the main problem for me was that it wasn't entirely true.  But, lacking the vocabulary (or perhaps, the courage) to speak honestly about the very excruciatingly personal issues that lead me to self-identify as the tripple-whammy of straight, cisgendered, and monogamous in the rough-and-tumble world of a semi-notorious LiveJournal D-lister in which statements of sincerity are the fastest way to lose the game, that identity served its function for a time.

Let's break it down, then, with a serious commitment to honesty and pretending that anybody cares about my narcissism.  Straight?  In terms of who I've actually had sex with so far, absolutely.  If we're going to define orientation based on behavior.  Fact is, I used to identify as bisexual (and for a brief moment, pansexual, before I developed a distaste for the term) but gave it up, because I'd never gone past second base with a girl, and felt like I was one of the legion of young women appropriating a queer identity without ever having faced any sort of oppression as a result of my queerness.  I felt like I was claiming a label without having "done the time" as it were.  So despite my confused and complicated sexual yearnings, I made the decision about five years ago or so to just identify myself as straight.  After all, I was in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship that I intended to be in for the rest of my life, so since I didn't see any future opportunities to prove my queerness to myself or anyone else, I decided to take the political high road: I'd identify myself as a breeder, and take one for the team. None of that trendy bisexuality stuff for me, thanks!  I'd have to be satisfied with my attempts to be a queer uber-ally, because if I present as straight and normative, that's what I am, right?

What I didn't realize at the time was that I'd just basically put myself in some sort of weird, mixed-up identity-politics/radical theory closet out of guilt regarding my own privilege.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I suffered for my own mislabeling,far from it.  But I wasn't being entirely honest with others and in the long run, with myself, either.

This would be the point at which it would be appropriate, perhaps, to have my co-author and fiancé weigh in with his own clumsy paragraph about his identity.  Which he would, except he's out having what I can only imagine is incredibly amazing sex with some cute twink while I'm stuck at home with a terrible head cold, getting a nice buzz on from this mimosa.  Hey, vitamin C is very necessary when overcoming illness!  Anyway, I suspect that answers at least a couple basic questions regarding his identity and our current monogamous status.

Anyway, the point of this isn't to be all, "Blah blah I'm confused about what makes me hot despite being 30 and how pathetic is that, but validate me regardess," but just to give a context for how I personally relate to the identity issue, which overall I think is the most misunderstood and radically changing aspect of sexual politics today.

Outside of the magical Internet anti-kriyarchy blogowhatsnot most people automatically identify themselves as straight or heterosexual, when they bother to think of it, and the majority of everyone else identifies as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.  What we fail to realize is that the very notion of an identity based on sexual orientation is entirely a modern one, and how we identify ourselves and others with regards to orientation and gender has been in a constant state of flux ever since.  Pandora's box is wide open, as evidenced by a lot of the lesser-known orientations flying around as well: not just asexual, but say, panromantic asexual.  Sapiosexual. (Look that one up.  Please.) And so forth. 

Fine, so there's a lot of wacky terms to describe something complex like orientational identity, no need to stop the presses, right?  But the thing with identity is that once you start to think about it, you can't have a conversation about sexual politics without dozens of unsaid assumptions about what identity is and what it means coming into play.

In the conversation that lead to the start of this blog, my co-author and I were talking over tasty burgers and beer at Barney's on Piedmont.  He was raging on about the relatively new concept gaining significant pop culture momentum of women having inherently fluid sexual orientation, with the mostly unspoken corollary that men have inherently static sexual orientation, as exemplified in Lisa M. Diamond's "Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Desires."  In laymen's terms, women are inherently bisexual, and we shift throughout our lives through periods of being, whereas men are born straight, or gay, with little inbetween, save for those annoying bisexual men who persistently refuse to have their identity invalidated. 

Of course, one can't even start to have a basic conversation about whether or not womens' sexual orientation is fluid and mens' static without engaging with the very concept of what identity is and how it is defined.  Diamond seems to be, despite some claims to the contrary, an essentialist - a loaded term if there ever was one.  Essentalism refers to different things in different contexts, but with regards to sexual orientation, it does refer to the belief in some sort of inborn, inherent preference with regards to sex partners.  This is, essentially the mainstream view: people are "born" gay or straight.  We like to pretend this view is rooted in science, but it's far more political, borne out of anti-gay movements that claimed that gay identity was a chosen behavior, and thus could be stopped, usually through a liberal dash of Jesus and prayer.  The early LGTBQ (back then, just "gay") rights movement was based in a purely reactionary stance: if they say we can choose to be gay, we will say you can't! Sexual orientation is inherent.  We're born this way, so you have to accept us.  The problem is, in the real world, we all have anecdotal and perhaps even personal evidence that sexual identity, if not orientation, can be fluid.  Hence Diamond and her thesis.  Part of the problem, for Diamond, myself, and many people out there, I suspect, is conflating "orientation" with "identity" to begin with.

In his brilliant post "Respecting Sexual Identities" (linked twice now, it's that awesome), Pepomint writes:
"Identity functions as a kind of personal strategy. This is most obvious in the social arena, where a person considers their position and weighs how to describe themselves. Identities tend not to match perfectly, so expressing a sexual identity often is an exercise in compromises. For example, say a man only falls in love with men, but has good sex with women on occasion. Should he identify as gay, bisexual, or queer? If he identifies as queer, will everyone just assume he is gay? If he identifies as gay, will women assume he does not want to have sex with them? If he identifies as bisexual, will everyone assume that he is mostly straight but does men on the side occasionally?"

He goes on to talk about how identity is personal, political, and full of strategery.  So is it really surprising that something this complex could be ever-shifting?  At this point, I see identity politics primarily valuable as an organizational tool, and a way to frame a conversation.  In terms of describing what burns in a person's hearts, or loins for that matter, it tends to be woefully insufficient, regardless of how many new terms we make up.

Between mouthfuls of sweet potato fries and gulps of Sierra Nevada Ale, I suggested that because we have frustratingly common conversations like this on a daily basis that we do what any good egotistic Americans should and commit said thoughts and discussions to the public realm vis-a-vis this much-touted blogosphere.  Plus, I really just wanted to get away from LiveJournal.  So here we are.