On labels & what they refer to

greywash posted a couple of articulately rage-filled bisexual rants earlier today (here are the before brunch and after brunch installments, which take The Magicians as their jumping-off point but are very much applicable more generally), and I wanted to both signal-boost the conversation, and also archive a comment I left, for future finding-and-referring-back-to-later purposes:

The discrepancy between "labels as descriptors of observable behavior" and "labels as signifiers of internal lived reality"—and ESPECIALLY the trend toward the latter to the exclusion of the former—really gets me because I feel like a lot of the time it invites exactly this kind of is-he-or-isn't-he debate even when the evidence is not at all unclear. Or worse yet, competitive vying for a person to put their stakes down in one's particular camp via a self-disclosure that that person, as you say, really doesn't owe. And then there's all the intra-queer rhetoric around "It's only your internalized [bi-, lesbo-, x-] phobia that's preventing you from identifying this way," when actually... there are any number of reasons one might choose not to discuss the murkiest facets of one's lived reality at any given time, and shouldn't be pressured to do so.

When a real person does self-disclose a certain way, obviously that should be listened to and not argued with. But in the absence of that, and particularly when discussing fictional characters, if we're going to the extreme of "observable behavior means nothing, and ONLY someone's own words can be taken as evidence of their orientation," then not only do you run up against a whole host of issues with characters who are lacking in self-awareness or actively lying (to themselves or others; for whatever reason), but you create a double-standard about what words... are for... which is in large part to describe the world's reality as we observe it.

And of course there are infinite shades of experience. Of course many gay men have been married to, and fathered children with, women. Of course there are many bisexual people who only ever acted on their opposite-sex attractions (or, especially more recently, who felt pressure from the gay community to only act on their same-sex attractions). Of course there are sex-repulsed asexual people who have a lot of sex because they're using it to fulfill other needs or wants. Of course there's this whole culture of men who self-ID as straight but who frequent truck stops for same-sex hookups. And on and on. And a lot of this is stuff I'm interested in exploring in fiction, because (AS YOU KNOW, DOCTOR) I personally embody a disconnect between my observable behavior (lived long-term first with a man, then a woman) and my internal lived reality (have always been almost, but not quite, totally uninterested in men both sexually and romantically). So, you know, I feel that tension: I don't really feel like "bisexual" is a very accurate descriptor of my inner lived reality, and even though I also feel "lesbian" is inaccurate, I would still be more likely to bridle at a potential biographer using my 12-year relationship with Ex as a way to inaccurately over-represent my investment in men, than I would if they cast that relationship as a nod to compulsive heterosexuality or something. (Again... not super accurate, I don't think, but possibly less inaccurate.) So that liminal space where labels are really messy, is somewhere I feel drawn to & where I feel at home, and I certainly don't want to erase it entirely from the discourse.

But to get to a point where we're divorcing orientation labels from behavior so radically that no amount of observed behavior can be taken as establishing or even strongly indicating someone's orientation, is just bizarre. And goes from "bizarre" to "oppressive" because of course no person, fictional or real, is ever required to self-identify as straight in order to be taken as such.

And, in response to a comment from achray:

Yes, a lot of my thoughts about it are coming from a historical perspective as well, and there are so many other issues that I left out of that comment for the sake of relative brevity, such as shifting cultural constructions of queerness over time and space such that the application of modern labels can be reductive and inaccurate; gaps in the archive; families and literary executors who destroyed evidence; the impossibility of fully comprehending the nature of any specific relationship if you're not inside that relationship and sometimes not even then (see, as example A of many of these, the surviving Hawthorne/Melville correspondence).

But it does still seem quite silly to be able to, say, look at a Byron or a Colette, folks who clearly had and enjoyed sexual/romantic liaisons with people of multiple genders, and say: these people were hetero because they never explicitly offered up a label they preferred. I mean. Really.

Sunday (more than) Six

Sneaking in under the wire (at least where I am). I'm really not feeling this story this weekend & just want to keep doing research and backstory-creation for my WWI Canadians, but I did write about 1500 words on it, between one thing and another:

"Anyway," said Eleanor, "you've got this really annoying coworker who keeps, like, bothering you to be friends."

She glanced pointedly at Tahani, who swallowed.

"I don't want friends," she said, in her best American accent. "I prefer to be alone."

"Correct. Which is why you've been dodging this woman for months. But now you find out, she has two tickets to see Beyoncé at the stadium in the next town over, for her and her boyfriend."

"Oh I adore Beyoncé!" Tahani said. "Lovely woman. At my gala to benefit education for girls in developing regions of—"

"Yes," Eleanor said, sternly. "You do 'adore' her. Everyone 'adores' her. Which is why you want that ticket. Also, and I know this one'll be a stretch for you, but: debt collection doesn't pay great. You're broke. What do you do?"