Thoughts on Queer Heterosexuality

Someone recently posted this link in a friend group of mine's page on Facebook. (I would encourage you to read it, because it's great, but what I'll write about isn't contingent upon its content.) I commented as follows:

I love this article. I have very slowly been developing ways that I might concretely and concisely communicate to friends/family back home the depth of the significance of integrating LGBT experience into conversation and community understanding. Speaking of it as a way to foster greater liberation in the lives of straight people is becoming more and more appealing to me - I love the idea of including "opposite-sex" attraction in queer spectra. The conversation about the natures of marriage and relationships that has resulted from this political/rights movement could mean so much for totally average straight people on an everyday basis.

Honestly, part of the reason I think it's been more and more difficult for me to see myself in future straight relationships is that there are still so many areas of straight culture/custom that are lacking in the freedom I've found in the lesbian equivalent. Obviously, I'm mostly attracted to women, and obviously, it's not that those things are inescapable, by any means. I love that straight couples are breaking out of archaic molds, too. But the nature of the beast is that culture profoundly shapes how we understand relationships (even being straight now is not at all what it was 50 or 100 or 2000 years ago)... It would be (and was) very difficult for me, personally, to distance myself from restrictive cultural expectations (that often run counter to big pieces of my personality) as a heterosexual person, and as a woman, at that. Maybe this idea could contribute some fuel for conversation?

I often speak in terms of the broader LGBT culture and community, but I think my corner of the LGBT experience and other particular pieces I've become invested in are particularly exemplary of what I'm about to say. One of the most incredible things about coming to discover in more depth what it means to be queer - perhaps lesbian - has been that it's freed me from so many subconscious feelings of expectation, obligation, and cookie-cutter life plans for the achievement of happiness. Unlike a lot of people, I'm discovering, I spent most of my teenage years relatively unconcerned with coupledom. Although I did long for intimacy at times and had a noticeable sex drive (that, strangely, was uncoupled to attraction), these things had a very limited impact on my conscious understanding of society, relationships, and my future. At times, I had a relatively equal physical relationship to male and female friends, and I understood that no degree of emotional closeness necessarily corresponded to romantic potential. Romance was never on my radar, so it was never a worry of mine.

But let's face it, no matter how free my teenage years seemed to be of explicit messages that I was supposed to get married young to a specific type of man and have babies and stay home and cook and clean, it's been programmed into my head that it was supposed to be a certain way since day one. It seems to have been programmed into everyone's heads to some extent. So when I did develop my first post-pubescent crush on a guy, it pretty quickly became a relationship (and a pretty good, happy relationship, I might add. I loved him very much and have very few regrets - I still really like him. None of this is meant as a negative statement about him). He had pale skin and dark brown hair; he was taller than I was; he had an engineer's mind; he was intelligent; he loved music. Those are certainly all boxes I'd made for the person I wanted to be with to fit in, growing up, and in early puberty. It didn't help that the explicit message from our immediate culture was that no teenage couple should be in a relationship unless they could see it feasibly ending in marriage, because that implied that only the failure of a relationship could end up causing them NOT to end in marriage. That was always in the back of my mind, so it was always kind of assumed that if things were going in the right direction, marriage is where it would end up.

These things are what I recognized and focused on during the relationship. There are other things, though, that I may have known but didn't pay much attention, that are overwhelmingly relevant to the way that relationship happened:

Firstly, and in a slightly creepy, Freudian kind of way, I can't help but recognize explicitly now that all those boxes I made are boxes my father fits into. And what's more, I fit into all my mother's boxes that corresponded to his. I had lighter hair and bigger eyes; I was shorter, less intelligent (in bookish, traditional ways), and (even if only slightly, in my case - it made a difference psychologically) younger; I understood people more intuitively than he did; I was the soft, right-brained counterpart to his linear, systematic way of thinking; I became absorbed in his musical tastes and his interests. Come to think of it, as much as my grandmother is a matriarch and a firecracker, my paternal grandparents (whose culture we inherited) ended up fitting into a few of the same boxes, as well as what I know of the generation before that. This is not a new thing.

To add to that, his parents fit into all these same boxes. Even though both our mothers are very smart and did very well for themselves both studying and working, and this is pretty unspoken truth, we kids always regarded our fathers as brainier - they are older, they make most of the money, come from more families with deeper roots or that are more well-off, they're more rational, they're more scientific and mathematical. I'm bothered by the fact that I thought that way, though I doubt there was a way to circumvent it. Our mothers are both nearly a decade younger than our fathers. Our mothers both handled conflict with more emotion, or at least what is marketed as "more emotion" by society: instead of anger, it would be hurt; instead of retreating into isolation, they would yell and try to get us to listen to them. Our mothers' appearances as well as their temperaments suggest more affection - sometimes smothering affection - and they were more involved in our lives (though both our sets of parents tried hard to minimize the extent to which this was true, and I appreciate that). Honestly, the similarities between our families are striking. My relationship with him did not just click as well and as quickly as it did because he fit into my predetermined, societally-engrained box; his entire family did. And the family he and I would've had if we'd kept following that mold would have been in that same box, as well.

The two families got pretty close pretty quickly, just like we got pretty close pretty quickly. It felt to me like our families were becoming a family, and we related to each other that way. Over and over again, I wrote in my journal that it all seemed "so good, so beautiful, so peaceful, so right." And it was. It was the perfect fulfillment of everything that was ever expected of me.

Secondly - and unsurprisingly, since I've already established that the mold exists and has been manifested to such a degree in our families - the same mold exists in the media. Especially in Disney movies, growing up, it's the same thing: tall, dark, worldly-wise guy with the small, sweet, bright, caring, beautiful bride. This is what we're taught to expect. Even in couples where the woman's hair isn't lighter (Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin), they make up for it in skin tone and eye size. Often, the way cartoons translate gender expectations into visual image makes no freakin' sense. For example:

How the hell. Even Nala and Simba are subject to this strange gendering. Zoom in on the left picture... Last I checked, eye/fur color are not sex-linked traits.

I could go through just about every single Disney princess movie:

Small, delicate woman that's been protected her whole life and just wants to escape finds a funny, darker, street-smart, ambitious guy just when she's most helpless. He then proceeds to pursue her throughout the rest of the movie, while her only attempt to pursue him left her helpless, since they had her think he was dead. He can "show her the world" - she can't even "describe her feelings."


A child whose hair has healing powers (who happens to be female) is stolen away as a helpless babe. She grows up locked in a tower, unable to do anything but cook and clean and paint, always dreaming of what could be. He, like Aladdin, is older and has done his adventuring; he well knows the world when he finds her, and the precious princess becomes dependent on the rough-and-tumble man to help her actualize her dreams.

Girl's father dies, leaving her in helpless captivity. Again, all she can do is dream, although her (male) rat friends one day come up with an idea to help her. They nearly succeed when everything fails, but at the last minute, the Fairy Godmother grants her her dream: the necessary beauty and opportunity to escape and show herself off to the older Price Charming, who elects her despite his boredom with beautiful women for her unparalleled smallness and perfection. He goes on a mighty quest through all the kingdom to find her after she is taken from him back into captivity, and when he finds her, they live happily ever after.

At first glance, this story almost seems a bit different. Despite being sheltered and pale-skinned and big-eyed, the woman is smart and capable, while the man is clueless/stupid/attracted to her world. But he isn't pitied, and doesn't "follow his dreams:" after she (who's depicted on many occasions as bewildered and out of her comfort zone) is eventually overwhelmed by the awesomeness of life with him, she decides to leave her father to live with him. Happily ever after.

The archetype of archetypes, sequestered in the woods in order that she might have enough protection, she dreams of her prince charming when one day, he finds her. Older, more adventurous, and confident, he eventually persuades her that he's trustworthy and they fall in love. When she's taken away before he can get to her, he goes on a quest to rescue her and finally succeeds, after battling thorns and dragons and fire and all kinds of imminent death. Then he takes her as his bride and they live happily ever after.

Girl is the youngest of all her sisters and just wants to be different. Miss-16 has everything a girl could dream for, but yearns for more: to be freed from her bondage, because "flippin' your fins, you don't get too far." If she can just leave her world, she will be free to walk and run and stand on her own two feet. She rescues him, but the only praise she gets for it is desirability: her beauty and voice, not her strength or capability or trustworthiness or superior ability, like a prince might. Despite the fact that he's a member of the royalty, who likely wouldn't've seen much of the outdoors, she's still paler and fairer. She's still the one with the pressure to use "her looks, her pretty face, and body language" to appeal to him enough that he wants her by the third day. Finally, she does it, and - with the help of a bunch of awesome male secondary characters - her father concedes and gives her away. Finally, she is part of his world. Happily ever after.

Don't get me wrong, I love these movies. I adore Disney. But as has been pointed out a gazillion times, these movies are disturbing reflections of society's subconscious expectations of what a girl should want out of life. It's not just that she always wants the prince and the prince always comes to rescue her from her despair. Women should want more than men in life, and I always knew that on a conscious level. But that women are expected to be inexperienced/helpless in a relationship, to be curious and creative but never able (without the man), to have the power to say yes or no to the man's advances (making her emotional, picky, and subject to whim) but never the power to make her own... those are ideas that have deeply and negatively permeated real relationships. I have seen them affect my parents' (generally very healthy) marriage, and I have felt them affect my relationship to my mother. Whatever extent to which these things are true in relationships are magnified tenfold and then mocked either as pathetic or stereotypical. It's completely unfair - mostly to women, but to both genders. Having these kinds of expectations on any relationship puts a filter on the way you understand any interactions you have with your significant other and friends with significant others. Suddenly, there are all these ways you become parallel to other women in relationships with men: you're also the clueless one, you're also the emotional one, you're also the creative one, you're also the picky one, you're also the one that no one listens to, you're...

This isn't just me, or just my mother, or just my father, and I sincerely do not believe that any of these things are owed simply to my parents' personalities. I adore my parents and could not possibly put any of this on their shoulders if it's so clearly a product of our entire society. So many of my friends' parents and so many relationships in the media fell into these same molds. But I heard my mother talking to her girlfriends growing up. I understood what the culture was like. It was about school and church and children and husbands: things other people are doing. You're always trying to get people to do things: go on picknicks, get together, clean their rooms, go to church, come to dinner, put down the toilet seat. And men talk about everything no one else understands: technology, politics, games, articles, more technology. They're reluctant to do things, but have to concede the power they rightfully have to keep their wives happy. They arbitrate between mother and child when the child accuses the mother of lacking objectivity. Always stronger, bigger, smarter, more objective, more comprehendible, more free.

For the price of living in this mold, you get to feel that something fits more than anything else fits: when it's going well, everything is in accord with all you have always been communicated should be. As the relationship grows and you understand more beautiful and nuanced things about your significant other's personality, you have a system to place it in, a model for how to interpret them. And this helps you to cope with the differences between you, creating a comfortable intimacy or camaraderie between you and other people in the same station of life.

I felt the presence of all these ideas very strongly when I was in a straight relationship. I began to associate more closely than ever on the basis of gender with mothers and the female half of other couples in our friend group. I felt myself get naggy and emotional and more responsible about having necessary conversations and all that kind of thing. I felt myself becoming the mold - becoming my mother, becoming his mother, becoming the media, becoming a woman. Over the course of a year, I slowly felt my world divide into two genders in a way that had never been much of a reality to me: there were the men, that were generally this way, and the women, that were generally that way. This duality was enforced by the nature of my most important relationship, over and over and over again, every day, every moment I interacted with him. And that message had the reinforcement of generations behind it.

I have spent the seven months between the end of that relationship and the present with a social group that's probably about half queer, in some way or another: trans people and gay people and people you just never really label. There are no tidy, convenient categories. There are no rigid expectations, because all of us have broken the mold. And even for those of us that haven't broken certain molds, we're still constantly in the presence of those who have. Largely because I'm around a bunch of people who weren't socialized to be the same gender they live, gender no longer serves as a way to label and either affirm or dismiss certain personality traits of mine. I no longer have to risk inheriting all the negative bagage of traditional femininity when I admit that I don't like videogames. I no longer have to risk feeling pretentious or out of place when I talk about my political, philosophical, or theological opinions. I am not a woman; I am Marié, completely and fully. My personality is a personality, and not the byproduct of my gender.

As I said in the Facebook quote above, I'll insert that I'm also gay because I have never been sexually attracted to a male person I was not very in love with. That's not really the topic of this post, but I should make it clear that while I've been clearly and (fairly) consistently sexually attracted to women since I came out, I've only been vaguely, sporadically attracted to certain pieces of maleness and masculinity in the past - I never really understood other girls' attractions. I was physically attracted to my boyfriend (even if often to his more feminine traits), and the attraction had certain sexual overtones, so I'm pretty willing to assume that sex itself would have been satisfying, if it had eventually gone that far. Perhaps I could've functioned as a demi-heterosexual. But in dating a man, I would not only have been signing up for a relationship; I would have been signing up for an institution, a tradition, and a way of life that I am utterly incompatible with. I find it ironic that complimentarianism is so frequently used as an argument for heterosexual exclusivity, because I believe it would've been a particularly harsh contributor to whatever unhappiness and depression came from any straight relationship I were in.

Again, as I said above, I would never equate heterosexuality to these things. This year, I have gotten to know awesome straight people that have broken molds the same way all the rest of my queer friends have, and I have gotten to know people that don't seem to be bothered by the restrictions of traditional straightness. But maybe this makes it clear why I think it would be difficult for me to ever be in a straight relationship. Because of both my biological sexual orientation and how psychologically straining it would be to separate myself from the mold of straightness society gave me, it would be unhealthy and unwise for me to consider myself, for practical intents and purposes, any straighter than gay.

I will admit that I don't understand very well those that are straight and have no desire to leave stereotypical molds. The best I can do is to liken it to my feeling of belonging and acceptance as part of the queer community - it makes sense that if a certain label actually suits you, that you would find freedom and belonging and rightness in filling the role laid out for you. But it is my understanding that there are bagillions of straight people that are just as queer as all us LGBT folk, and I cannot wait until they find some better way than "Ally" to be included in our community. I also really believe that even for normal straight people, being granted the same freedom I've found in choosing to identify only with the pieces of gender and orientation cultures that I feel actually describe me would be liberating. It puts power back in the right places: in personal authenticity and the work of God.

One friend of mine grew up in a culture that has been overwhelmed with feminism for a couple generations. The boys were expected to be stupider than the girls in class; gay people were completely accepted, and even elevated socially; he was the youngest in his family, and never looked up to for his particular strengths, which are pretty right-brained in nature. He is completely, beautifully, and authentically straight, and he would benefit from inclusion in the box-breaking, liberating nature of LGBT culture.

A bunch of acquaintances of mine from choir and some people on my floor are stereotypical straight girls. They like girly things; they wear girly clothes; they talk girly talk; they're obviously attracted to men (you know what I mean if you've ever heard them gossip). But maybe, just maybe, if they understood themselves as straight queer people, they could reclaim all these things with intentionality. Maybe they could shake off the sense of obligation to be skinny; maybe they could reconceive of their obsessions with cuteness and beauty; maybe they could fully embrace and reintegrate the portions of their personality (physical smallness, creativity, submissiveness) our culture sometimes mocks as part of stereotype; maybe they could learn something about themselves and find an even greater freedom.

And for anyone, whether straight or gay or trans* or cis or asexual or unlabeled or bi or anything in between, I can see the benefit of not feeling limited to what you've been told you must be. Even for the straightest of straight, I pray that they may realize things about who they know (or know they don't know?) they are, and that they'd chose the labels they identify with based on all the beautiful things they've discovered about their personalities. Knowing that you relate to society and do relationships the way you do not because you're operating on ancient, societally-engrained patterns of fear and obligation, but because you feel that they are right and they work... That sounds like liberation to me.

I cannot wait for the day that all people - white and black and religious and secular and trans* and cis and rich and poor and gay and straight - can come together and learn from each other. We have so many lessons to share. Why do we keep excluding each other?