I had the opportunity to visit a few of my favorite intentional communities in the week leading up to New Years Day: Compersia in Washington DC, and Twin Oaks and Cambia (with visits from Acorn residents) in Virginia. I enjoyed museum visits, miles and miles of tandem bike riding, I helped set up a hillbilly hot tub in the mud, rain, and cold New Year’s Eve day, enjoyed a fabulous New Years Eve Party, saw old friends and made new ones, drank at a literal “speakeasy mini bar” (think puppet sized craft cocktails down a cellar crawl-hole accessible only by password), and I had the opportunity to teach a couple of my favorite workshops to top it all off. I joyfully led “Gender Exploration” and “Play Piercing/Needle Play” classes. It was a perfect week to top off 2018 and move into 2019!

I enjoy bringing my workshops to intentional community groups. There’s a level of engagement I find in these spaces that’s different elsewhere. I like the often multi-generational representation within my audience and a wider set of opinions populating these spaces. This leads to layered conversations which are less common when I teach groups outside of community.

Engaging in these experiences offers me questioning. I question my own perspective and it gives me the opportunity to examine my curriculum from new vantage points. This time around was no different. Both workshops were different and wonderful in their own ways. The class I taught about sex and gender brought up conversations which helped me tie together some of the ideas within my own curriculum that I had yet to articulate as clearly as I was able to that day.

When I was young there hung a bumper sticker in my house: Question Authority. Not only is it good form to practice being the questioner, it helps one’s authorities better examine their own functionality.

When I teach about sex, gender, and identity I start by distinguishing between and defining sex characteristics (phenotypic, chromosomal, gonad development, hormone levels, and sexed brain development) versus gender identities (cis, trans, nonbinary, a-gender, etc…). We talk about identity as an emerging process, a changeable journey, and get into the differences between how we’re identified by others and how we identify ourselves. We also explore the differences between identity, orientation, behavior, and coping mechanisms. During this workshop I was able to speak to two concepts I’ve been speaking around-about for a while but had been unable to articulate to my satisfaction. What I came away with were the concepts that “sexual orientation is a privilege” and that “our obsession with other people’s genitals is absolutely a socially accepted (and generally non-consensually approached) fetish”. Today I’m writing about the first of these statements, you can read this blog about the second.

Sexual orientation is a privilege: I found myself making this claim during workshop discussion, and realized I absolutely believe it in numerous ways. Socially we’ve moved past the point of arguing that one has no control over who they are attracted to. That argument was helpful in the past to legitimize the minority status of those in LGBT communities. Now there’s pretty broad acceptance and scientific data supporting the notion that we’re not 100% “in control” of who we find attractive. Sexual chemistry is absolutely a condition of nature in combination with nurture.

It’s generally accepted that it’s as natural for a person to play with genitals that look like “a” as it is to play with ones that look like “b”, or “c”, and so on. When we speak of sexual orientation we’re talking about a complex list of factors influenced by public and private definitions, enacted behaviors, and a desire to control our own personal branding. For instance, a woman who is in a “monogamous” relationship with another woman may consider it not to be a breach of their monogamy to have occasional sexual interactions with men. This person’s behavior is that of a bisexual/pansexual person, though they retain their public identity as homosexual/lesbian based on their definitions of “which sexual behaviors count”. It’s that person’s privilege to identify outside of behavioral definitions in order to maintain the lifestyle or relationships she wishes to preserve.

Peering at identity on a larger scale, it’s dangerous for many people to publicly identify within sexual minority terms. Only those people who have the support, safety, or fortitude to voice their sexual desires, intrigues, and behaviors are entitled to an accurate and public sexual orientation. This privilege may be placed even further from reach when someone is part of multiple marginalized cultures or communities. That person may be less apt to claim their sexual behaviors and desires as an inherent part of their identity—one worth fighting for and claiming publicly—in order to remain safe or sufficiently supported within their communal circles.

On the other side of that coin, outside of marginalized communities, let’s look at the privileged people in this patriarchal culture. The sheer number of men who engage in brojobs, who are on the down low, or who lie about their history of same sex experiences is phenomenal. If a man identifies as straight and is on Grindr looking for hook-ups regularly, there’s something going on there that’s not simply about orientation. It could be about conformity and fear, but perhaps it’s also about maintenance of social privilege and the desire not to lose such. To hold onto one’s orientation as “straight” (privileged) regardless of the practice of taking on multi-sexed partners points to, in my mind, a maintenance of privilege over positively addressing the normalcy of variation within human sexuality for all.

If you are nonbinary identified, what does it even mean to be heterosexual or homosexual? As we move further into social acceptance and visibility of trans and intersex people, we must start asking ourselves how attached we are to our own identities in the face of partners who don’t fit sex or gender definitions we’ve used in the past.

It seems to me that the sexual orientation definitions we use frequently serve to maintain privilege and/or marginalize others. We have further to go in order to disengage the black and white binary thinking which bullies a person to be “in” or “out”. My hope is that as the lines which equate male with masculinity and female with femininity blur, that we will all become more free to explore, embrace, play, and fear less the urges and negotiations which bring us pleasure and joy.

I hope your year is going well thus far. I’m excited to engage in more writing, more teaching, more art, and more collaboration in 2019. Please consider supporting my writing and other artistic projects through my Patreon campaign.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

This writing takes time, research, and consideration. It is my art.
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