two links about heteronormativity

[kate_nepveu]

First: You're Always Coming Out, by thefourthvine.

Coming out is supposed to happen in One Big Moment. Usually your One Big Moment involves coming out to your parents; sometimes, especially in fiction, it's coming out at a press conference or in front of an audience or something. But wherever it happens, the concept is the same: in that moment, your whole life changes. Before, you were closeted and ashamed, and after, you become open and honest. You have chewed your way out of the cocoon of secrecy to emerge as a beautiful gay butterfly!

[ . . . ]

So my One Big Moment was -- not. It was not big. It was not dramatic. It was, to be honest, pretty comical. [ . . . ] It didn't even manage to be a single moment, since I spread it over most of a day.

This was probably much better preparation for the rest of my life than I thought at the time.

Second: untitled post at imreallybad, which is very short, so in full:

bisexual people passing as straight when they’re in a straight relationship is not “passing privilege.” it’s erasure. it’s assimilation.

that’s like saying that femme lesbians have privilege over butch lesbians. invisibility might keep people safer on a micro-level which is fucked up, but it’s all based on people thinking they can tell who’s queer & who’s straight just by looking at them, which is infinitely problematic and painful.

don’t alienate queer people who are assumed to be straight. invisibility is a symptom of hetero-normativity, not a privilege.

With regard to this one: I agree with the first sentence of the last paragraph, but I'm not entirely convinced by the last. Or maybe I'm not thinking of "privilege" in a sufficiently narrow/term-of-art sense. But the day-in, day-out that thefourthvine describes? I'm in a heterosexual relationship, and as a result I don't have to do that.

Don't get me wrong—invisibility sucks! It's why I bothered to come out in the first place! But, seeing those posts in that order . . . I don't know, it just felt like a post I should make.

(And now, having failed to come to a better conclusion, I must take my dull self off to do some dishes and make the kids' lunches. Talk among yourselves, if you like.)

Comments

[mmcirvin]

Yeah... When it comes to sexual attraction I'm maybe like a Kinsey 1; I'm overwhelmingly attracted to women, but I'd be lying if I said I never felt any attraction to men at all. Also, in my life I've had this series of nonsexual male-male friendships that sometimes have had near-romantic levels of emotional intensity. But at the same time I think that if I adopted the "bi" label I'd be a bit of a poser.

But I also grew up as a pro-gay-rights liberal feminist in a very homophobic age, and it made me wary of making a big deal of my straightness and doing the sort of performative "who would I bang" thing with other guys, which combined with general shyness led to people being really puzzled about me. Often I was effectively passing as asexual, and a lot of people undoubtedly assumed I was just a deeply closeted gay dude.

But my being married to a woman now leads to people making a different set of assumptions. Maybe more accurate ones on the whole, but nothing simple is 100% accurate.

[mmcirvin]

...And that is sounding a lot like the stuff I wrote in a discussion on racial passing and white privilege on this blog a while ago.

Only there have been new developments: as I partially suspected, DNA testing of my sister indicates that the supposed Native American ancestry in my family is probably bogus. Those "Cherokees"? Probably actually Jews.

[kate_nepveu]

Oh goodness. That's depressing yet unsurprising in many ways.

[mmcirvin]

There's all different kinds of passing, evidently.

[kate_nepveu]

And erasure.