Among Us

This is post 3 in my Coming Out series.

When I first started realizing that I was pan/bi/queer I wanted to write about it immediately.  I process feelings best by putting them down in text, particularly when I am shipping them out to the world.  However, I decided that I shouldn't make a big coming out post until I had actually, you know, had sex with a man.

I should make sure I actually know what I am talking about before I go and make a big scene about it, or so went the thinking at the time.

Trouble is, I started thinking about how I would go about having a first time, and that was stressful and felt bad.  It didn't seem like the right thing to do for some reason.

While I was wrestling with the right way to approach this situation I ended up watching the queer musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch.  When the movie ended I was awash in tears, struggling to contain the emotions swirling within me.  The base emotion was all about the queer men in the show, feeling connected to their story and struggle, feeling their fear and joy.

That base emotion led to a further emotion of tremendous vulnerability.  Now I have a trait that can reduce me to tears effortlessly, and make me weak to attack.  Now I can be more easily hurt, but honestly I am not worried about people coming after me for being queer.  What hit me hardest was that people could use that as a lever against those I protect.  A cornerstone of my identity is myself as guardian of those I love, and the feeling that now I am worse at that because of my vulnerability was a tough thing to cope with.  My loved ones deserve an invincible juggernaut holding the line, not a weepy mess.

I knew this vulnerability existed before, for other people.  I could have described it clearly.  There is a big difference between *knowing* a thing and *feeling* a thing though, no doubt about that.  I have spent my life having so much privilege, and having some of it suddenly vanish was quite a thing to adjust to.

The next feeling in the cascade was a terrible case of impostor syndrome.  Why do I deserve to claim this identity at all?  I haven't actually gone out and had sex with a man, I haven't been discriminated against because of queerness, how can I be having all these feelings when I don't really belong?  I felt like a ridiculous fraud, trying to be in a space I had no business occupying.

This feeling makes no sense logically.  When I was 19 I had never touched a woman in a sexual fashion, but I sure as hell knew I wanted to have sex with Gillian Anderson.  (Scully from the XFiles).  I didn't need to have sex with her to be sure!  I have friends who are bi/pan/queer who have only had sex with one sex/gender and I certainly accept their identity, because you don't have to have sex to have the attraction.  If someone tells me their orientation I accept it, I don't ask for pics as proof.

So why do I have such a harsh standard for myself, when I would never apply it to anyone else?  I know what I want and who I am, and that is all that is required.

Of course I can determine logically that my feelings are irrational, but that isn't exactly a ticket to not having feelings anymore.

What I can do though is decide that I should write a coming out post regardless of what I have or have not touched.  I can proclaim an identity that I couldn't prove in a court of law, but which I know to be valid and true.  I can also just accept that there is no need to rush, no benchmark that must be met.  I can run out and get it on if I want, or I can wait five years for just the right man to show up and rock my world.

I don't know where the path leads, but I am on it, 'qualified' or not.  Here I go. 

Words are hard

This is part 2 of my series of posts where I came out as bi/pan/queer.  Describing what happened to me is weird and complicated and language does not do a great job of letting me say what I mean.  Note here that when I say attracted in this post I mean sexually, not platonically / aesthetically or otherwise.

The most obvious example is that I now describe myself as bisexual because I started being attracted to men.  Seems fairly obvious, but men refers to a gender, and gender has never been a thing that affected my attractions.  For a while I have used Christina Hendricks (a curvy, conventionally attractive actress) as my model of the physical ideal, in terms of my attraction.  If she asked me for sex I would sure say yes, and if she followed up with 'also, I am a man' I would say 'sure thing sir, shall we smash genitals then?'  Pronouns, clothes, roles, performance, all that stuff that is part of gender simply doesn't register.  Bodies, on the other hand, do.

Okay, so I could say instead that I wasn't attracted to males, and now I am.  Still, then we run into the problem that I don't mean XY chromosomes, because I don't know anybody's chromosomes, and I don't mean what gender someone was assigned at birth, because that doesn't matter to me.  How a person appears now matters, but how they appeared in the past isn't a factor.  Sex and gender are complicated, and while they have a bimodal distribution, they sure aren't binary.

To be actually precise I would have said in the past that my attraction was strongly oriented towards people that have the set of physical secondary sex characteristics common in female humans.  That doesn't exactly roll off the tongue though, and I am sure some people would find it offensive that I reduce my attractions to simple body parts.  Clearly there is a lot more to it than that, as the brain is always the sexiest thing.

So this helps some in describing what changes have occurred in me.  Nowadays I could say that there are still bodies I am attracted to and others I am not so much, but the ones I am into don't conveniently correlate with biological sex or gender.

All this mess and struggle is why I aesthetically like queer as a descriptor.  It says I don't roll the way the standard man does, which is true, but it doesn't make any attempt to narrow it down.

On the other hand, the word bisexual gives the average person a pretty accurate picture of what I am like.  It just has all this stupid baggage that irritates me.

I am attracted to some humans and not others.  There are patterns in who I am attracted to, but those patterns are complicated and finicky and I don't even know what they are, not really.  English (and every other language, I think) simply doesn't handle that stuff well at all.  Each attraction is different, and so maybe I need a word for each one, which obviously is stupid and impossible.

The key takeaway here is that every time I use a word for an orientation, gender, or set of characteristics you can be sure there is a whole blog post of backstory and clarification behind it, and I just can't possibly fit all that stuff in.  I want to communicate, and English is the tool I have, so I am going to try to do communication with it, even when it is messy and wrong.  I really want a society where gender and sex and orientation just aren't a big deal so if our words are slightly inaccurate that doesn't matter much.  I want them to be like colours - sure, 'dark blue' isn't super accurate, but mostly we get what it means, so whatever, no problem.

That isn't the society we live in now though, so for the moment I am stuck obsessing over terminology surrounding attraction and knowing that no matter which thing I choose it is going to be wrong somehow.  There is no right answer, no matter how hard I look.  I know what I like, I just don't know how to tell people what that is!

Crooked

In August 2023 something new happened to my brain.  I felt it clearly, and described it as 'A key turning in a lock, and a door opening'.  I felt a clear image of a door slowly rumbling open, looking like a tomb door in an Indiana Jones movie.  I could feel the dust shaking down, and just barely begin to see through the crack... and what I saw behind the door was pretty gay.  Not gay as a perjorative, but gay as in 'Damn, men are *cute* now!'

I have always been straight.  I tried a few experiments with men over the years, admittedly fairly modest experiments, and the result was simply 'meh'.  It wasn't objectionable, it just didn't have the magic.  I have liked the idea of being bisexual / pansexual / queer for a long time, but my instinctive reactions just didn't do the thing.  I figured that is just how I am, the way I got built.  You can be as comfortable with skydiving as you want, but if you feel bored when you jump, find a new hobby.

Over August and September I consciously felt my brain rewriting itself, smashing old pathways down and opening up new ones.  Every week I felt more comfort with attractions to men, more desire to try that out, and identified more with queer men in media.

I haven't even acted on this yet in any physical way, and yet I am organizing queer musical nights, watching Elton John biopics, and then deciding I *have* to get myself some of those clothes.

I have also felt my emotions changing.  For many months now I have been more overtly emotional, more easily brought to tears from shows or speeches, and regularly overwhelmed just by thinking about things in my life that used to be no big deal.  It isn't that I am unhappy, far from it, just that the highs are higher and the lows are lower.  I suppose that might not be linked to the sudden change in orientation, but the timing certainly looks suspicious.

What I haven't done is stopped being interested in women.  I haven't suddenly gone full gay, I just flipped over the menu and saw some great new stuff on the back I never knew about before.

The thing I really want to know is why this happened now.  I have been thinking hard about the various things that happened to me over the past year, and there are a few candidates for causes, but the evidence is circumstantial at best.  I got a rainbow tattoo, at the time as a show of solidarity to the queer people in my life.  I painted the fence of my house rainbow for the same reasons.

That painting job was neat in that the children seeing it loved it, and most of the adults thought it was cute... but a couple adults saw the rainbow and absolutely lit up with joy.  You sure could tell the adults who were queer and got hit right in the feelings.

But none of that is a cause for a brain rewrite.  I just don't know why this happened, and I don't know why it happened now.  I was raised in a homophobic era, with the AIDS epidemic combining with regular old bigotry to make 'that's gay' the standard default insult.  My family was comfortable with touch and accepting of differences, but the kids at school and media at large told me the rule is:  You don't touch another man except with a closed fist, you don't talk about feelings, and you don't ever admit you might be attracted to a man.  Even if you get good messaging at home, that sort of thing leaves marks, and maybe it just took me 30 years to tear those walls down.

Again though, that is an explanation, but there is no proof.

One thing I think about is how my story feels different than most I have heard.  Mostly the story I have heard is 'I knew I liked women, but I couldn't really admit it to myself, and definitely couldn't admit it to others'.  My story doesn't sound like that.  I was straight until I wasn't.  That doesn't make it wrong or anything, just different.

I also didn't hesitate to write a coming out post, even though I haven't actually done anything measureable yet.  Several people who are close to me couldn't quite puzzle through why I would do this.  They don't think I should lie or anything, they just didn't understand why it was anyone else's business.  Nobody should care, and I don't owe the public anything, basically.

I have two reasons for writing this.  The first is my desire to set an example.  Every person who comes out makes it incrementally easier for the next people to do so.  Every example of living loud and proud removes a small burden from those who wish to follow that path.  I don't claim that everyone is obligated to be out - it is a personal choice for each of us.  I, however, have partners who love me, family and friends who accept me either way, and security from the rest of the world.  If anyone should be out, I should be first in line.

The second is that I only want people in my life who know me.  I want to spend my time with those who know all of me and love what they see.  If someone doesn't want to be with a queer man, then I absolutely want them to go away.  I think many people are afraid that is they come out, their friends will go away.  I, on the other hand, am afraid that if I don't come out I will spend time around people who don't like the person I am.  I want to live openly and truthfully, and I know there are people that will want to be with me as I am.

Words can be tricky.  Bisexual is the most accurate, clear term.  Pansexual is pretty similar, but less well known.  Queer has a lot of aesthetic appeal, but lacks precision.  I figure I will use them all depending on the circumstance.

I intend to write more posts about this.  There have been some powerful emotional moments over the past few months and I want to talk about them.  Also this transition has given me new insight that I want to share.  I do hope that the renovations in my brain slow down a bit though - it has been a lot these last couple months.

I want to feel rich

When Wendy and I sold our condo and bought a house we got to see a lot of staging.  In Toronto over the past 20 years staging has gone from a thing a few people do to being the standard.  I have complaints about how staging works and what things it promotes (classism!  rabble rabble) but the tricky thing about staging is that it isn't easily defined and it gradually slides from completely reasonable to icky without a clear dividing line.

I will admit at the outset that we staged our condo to sell it, so while I will complain about staging and its effects, I couldn't turn it down personally.  I know that the staging process made me money, so despite how destructive it is, I wasn't willing to toss away tens of thousands of dollars on principle... especially when our real estate agent included staging for free.

At the beginning you just have cleanup.  You want to sell your house?  Clear that old junk off the porch, mop the floor, pick up the laundry.  I can't see any reason to complain about that.  You want someone looking through the place to be able to see what they are getting and feel comfortable.  The trouble is you keep on doing things that seem reasonable and eventually your place has been repainted neutral white, is filled with expensive furniture, decorated with fancy art, and completely unusable because all of your tools and gear have vanished.  It is sterile, boring... and looks like the place a rich person might live.  The kind of person who has taste in fine art, pays other people to do the work for them, and thinks garish colours are SO last year.

That is the part of the process that grinds my gears.  The stagers tried to tell us that we had to repaint everything so that the prospective buyers could see themselves living in our space, but I think that is nonsense.  We weren't trying to let them see themselves... we were trying to trick their brains into thinking of our condo as a rich person's residence.

The buyer wants to be rich, and they love the vision of themselves as a rich person, so we designed our place to facilitate that dream.  We put up ugly, shapeless modern art because that is how people in our economic bracket think a rich person's home looks.  I am sure that if you are selling a higher end home the staging process changes; you want to make the house look like a person that has twice that much money lives there.  The ideal staging makes the person who is looking to buy that place feel like it is better than the price would suggest, but not too much better, or it triggers cognitive dissonance.

Wastefulness bothers me.  I hate that we had beautiful colourful walls and we had to paint them all white.  I hate that we had to install laminate flooring because that is what is expected at this price point, even if plenty of buyers aren't particularly interested in laminate floors.  So much of staging is doing work that will immediately be undone just to shove money one direction or another.  I like doing things to improve a building - I hate doing them solely as a trick.

The trouble is we are all trapped in a destructive cycle of game theory.  We are playing prisoner's dilemma, except that we only play it with any given opponent once, so everybody defects all of the time.  Nobody has an incentive to cooperate, and the real estate people have every incentive to get people to spend more to raise the selling price because they are paid a percentage.

Even though I can see how this ends up screwing everybody over (except the real estate agents....) I don't see a good way out of it.  People are emotional and foolish and as long as they desperately want to increase their social status and houses are expensive then staging and other trickery will take place.  People want to be rich and powerful and a person's home displays that status clearly.  While these things hold, we are going to continue to try to make our homes look like an Important Person lives there, and we are going to continue to waste our collective resources to achieve that.

Fancy house

Shopping for a house was an enlightening experience.  My internal voice definitely yelled 

CLASSISM!!!

many, many times.  The most obvious culprit, I think, was the letter that we were asked to come up with the first time we put in a bid on a house.  We had only been actively looking for a week when an amazing house came on the market, priced way under its realistic value.  It had a ton of room, a basement I could stand up in with room to spare, and was right next to a subway.  We ended up in a bidding war with another potential buyer, and our agent asked us if we wanted to submit a letter to the owner to try to increase our chance of being accepted.

I have to give my agent credit here.  She made it clear that these letters have problems, and in some areas they are illegal, but she had an obligation to tell us our options.  She sent us some samples, and those samples made me angry and sad at the same time.

All the samples were staged photos with staged stories, all saying the same thing:  We are a conventional, attractive young couple, doing a conventional life, and we are so grateful for the opportunity to bid on your home.  The grovelling was the worst.

If I was being honest my letter would say "My spouse, child, and my girlfriend are moving in together.  We are making an unconventional sort of family that makes us really happy, and I think this house will give us a great place to do that."

Sending exactly the right letter can add significantly to the effective value of your bid.  Sending my honest letter could easily erase my bid entirely.  This is why these letters are not allowed some places, of course, because they often end up enabling bigotry.  White people who own houses preferentially sell to other white people.  Other privilege ends up working the same way, naturally, and since straight, conventional, etc. people own a disproportionate share of the houses, this puts another barrier in the way of people who aren't that.

In the end it didn't matter.  The seller and the buyer discovered that their mothers had the same name,  and that was enough to convince them it was fate, and we didn't get the house.  In the end, that was a good thing, as the house we did get was not as good (mostly because the basement is short), but the location is better and the price was far more manageable.  There was no second bidding war as we were the only bidders the second time around, so we didn't have to do face down the letter thing again.

I can see the angles.  I could have just made up the perfect letter, bought into the classist bullshit, and sold my ass off.  I know how to sell!  I know exactly what lies to tell, should I want to.  Instead, all I wanted to do was to write down "I am offering you a ton of money, take it or leave it, but don't expect me to grovel for your damnable charity, or pretend that your house is going to continue on being a bastion of your values."

When we sold the condo our agent told us that the bidder was a mathie of some sort or other.  My response was "I don't care in the slightest.  Show me the money."  It turns out that I am the sort of person that I want to deal with in real estate.  Who knew?

I am prettier now

Over the last 8 months I got two new tattoos.  They are a lot more obvious than the previous ones as they are located on my forearms, and like my previous arm tattoos they are a set.  This time the set theme is roots and wings.  Here is the first:

The blueberries are on my left arm and they represent my origins.  I have memories of picking blueberries with my family, especially when I climbed up to the rapids on the Kam river above Kakabeka Beach.  Walking across giant exposed hunks of Canadian Shield to find blueberries growing in little dips where the dirt accumulated is a powerful memory of mine, and I did this many times growing up.

We even had special machines my family built to clean and process the blueberries.  After a big berry picking session there would be coolers full of the berries to deal with, and we had specially built berry cleaning tools.  They were basically a ramp to pour the berries down with a bucket at the bottom to catch them.  Halfway down the ramp was a grate the berries would roll over, and a fan blowing through the grate would send all the sticks and leaves flying away, cleaning the berry haul.

The blueberries remind me of where I came from, the people that helped raise me, and the connection to the land and knowledge of nature that I still retain small pieces of.  It is where I came from - the family I was born into.

The other tattoo is where I chose to go.  It is an icosahedron, unfolded from a 3d shape into a 2d map on my arm.  The numbers come from a d20, a standard die used in roleplaying games like Dungeons and Dragons.  The d20 represents the games I love to play, the unfolding reflects my mathematical training.  I have told people that when I die I want it cut off my arm, folded into a die, stuffed, and put on a mantle somewhere.  Perhaps it can be rolled when a particular important skill check needs to be made, or when ogres attack.

The colours on this tattoo are a representation of the people who now surround me.  I am quite straight, unfortunately (I recognize that being queer is a struggle, but I have had a few exciting offers, and if I was bi I could have taken full advantage!) but there is a lot of queer in my house, and I wanted to have something on my body showing my support and solidarity.  In particular I wanted to send a message to Pinkie Pie that cannot be mistaken - I will put my effort and attention (and fury, should it ever come to that) into taking care of them no matter where on the rainbow they end up.

The rainbow d20 reminds me of what I have decided to do, the skills I have honed, and the family I have chosen.

A few things to say

I haven't blogged in quite a while.  I have mostly felt like there isn't much to say that isn't already being said better somewhere else - unless I spend a tremendous amount of time on a thing I might as well just post a link to someone who already wrote something similar but better.

However, my life recently underwent a huge change and during the change I found a lot of things that made me want to rant about classism, so to the internet I go!  I have a couple of posts I want to make, firstly just talking about what is up with me right now, and then the rants will follow.  I have no idea if this will mean I generally continue to blog or not.

I bought a house!  I am now living on the Danforth in Toronto, right near Pape subway station, on a quiet side street.  It is hard to take a good picture of it because of the cars and trees in front, but here it is:

There are many complicated feelings about the house.  I love what it is, and I think it will be a grand place for my family.  However, I have feelings about sustainability and good urban planning that put a damper on the celebrations.  In big cities having people all live in single family dwellings is a problem.  I would have preferred a large condo instead of a house.  Unfortunately there was simply no condo available that would work for us because people don't build big condos for families - they are built for couples/singles.  I needed 4 bedrooms, and that is a tall order for a condo.

The second big change, definitely related to the first, is that my family changed.  The Flautist moved in to the house with me, Wendy, and Pinkie Pie.  I have been polyamorous for ten years now, but my living situation always looked conventional, and now it doesn't.  That makes things complicated, because now when I meet the neighbours or Rogers installers they assume that The Flautist is my daughter.  This has led to some awkward (and sometimes hilarious) moments.

We were all happy to be building a new family, but it is complicated.  Other people have questions, and we have to thread the needle between being open and informative, and stonewalling questions that are invasive.  It isn't always easy to determine which category a given question belongs in.

I like my new life.  Houses are SO MUCH WORK though.  I don't know how I will ever get through my jobs.