Who sez I never do anything risqué?
So it was World AIDS Day a few days ago—a very admirable cause—and in order to celebrate, the EMU hosted a benefit show that consisted, as I’ve mentioned, of drag queens, drag kings, and burlesque dancers.
I’ll repeat that for those of you who live in Utah. I’ll type slowly, so you can digest it. My … COLLEGE’S … STUDENT … CENTER … had … a … drag … and … burlesque … show.
Yeah, this place is goddam GREAT.
I went with the usual crowd: Liz, Emily, and Josh. Liz and I tried our darndest to get hold of Ally to go along, but she was apparently elsewhere. And Molly had an essay due the next morning, which is just screwed up priorities, if you ask me. If I had a choice between writing my final paper and whooping and hollering for babes in pasties and dudes in wigs, my GPA would suffer. It was magnificent: glamorous, sexy, adorable. I enjoyed everybody, from the bearded young king to the sassy queens to the besparkled girls in tassels. I loved every minute of it, unabashedly and completely.
Liz said that the next day in her philosophy class’ discussion section, a guy tried insisting that gender was not a cultural construct. He never stood a chance. The anthropology students and biology students shot him down. “Obviously, he wasn’t where we were on Thursday,” she noted.
And as I get bombarded with the political nonsense about gender relations and Good Old Fashioned Values and all that garbage, I’m beginning to realize something about my own concept of sexuality, and that is that as far as sexual orientation goes, I haven’t got one. As far as I’m concerned, there are two kinds of sex: consensual and non-consensual. The first is good. The second isn’t. And that’s about as far as I get with the categories.
All the ones describing orientation—homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, asexual*—always struck me more as tendencies than as hard definitions. I guess it’s like Kinsey’s scale, but my analogy is always that sex is like flavors. You can prefer one flavor over others, but that doesn’t mean you don’t like both—just, well, you choose the one more often than the others. (And it’s not like you say to yourself, “I have decided to prefer this flavor.” You just do.)
At least, with me that’s how it goes. I am, as far as I can tell, mostly heterosexual.** But I do have what I call my gay third,*** which is the bit of me that prefers the gals—as in “the gay third of me really goes for Sigourney Weaver.” I’ve read that true bisexuals are rare, but I don’t know if there’s such a thing as true bisexuals so much as there are people who are in the middle of the scale of preference. And if that’s true, then it would mean that very few people are not bisexual. Just, most have very strong preferences one way or the other.
And that’s as far as I’ve gotten. But even if this is all just a musing moment, one thing remains certain: I’m gonna give Liz no end of hell about having a drag king park himself in her lap.
Gods and demons, what a great night.
(For the record, I also think the idea polygamy is fine, except that the way it’s done around where I live is usually coercive, subversive, and incestuous. That sort falls into Category #2 in Amuddya’s Sex Classification Chart. If it was a bunch of happy consenting adults, that’s their business.
Okay, really, I’m done now.)
*Yes, there’s such a thing. You never hear about them from the religious right, do you?
**I have yet to perform any experiments on the subject—something I expect will be met with much relief by my mom, who reads this blog.
***Probably not an accurate fraction. I imagine it’s more like a tenth. Or a twelfth. But ‘third’ is easier to say.
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