Queer Labels


© Li Sam Writing. All rights reserved.

Furthermore, the LGBT movement has come up with the label “queer,” and what its meaning is beats me. There are definitions, lots of them, but I can’t find any logic behind any of them. I, of course, could be missing some understanding here, but if I’m going to sort this label with the others as a stand-alone “Q” (LGBTQ as some say) I just can’t figure it out, even though I have tried really hard.

I do realize that being queer is about lifestyle, but what about sexual orientation and body identification? My understanding is that queer people can have any sexual orientation or none. There is something they call “asexuality,” which means no sexual attraction at all in any direction. It’s also true that some people perceive themselves as non-gender, like neither boy nor girl. Are those people, too, queer, I wonder? I know that some women-liberation activists have brought up this non-gender issue in the sense of equity, that men and women are equal, and they want to live equally and bring up their children as non-gendered (they say that gender shouldn’t influence how we treat people). Is that queer, I wonder?

There’s also talk about a third gender that’s in-between, or whatever other gender you want to create. Is that queer or trans-, I wonder? One comment I noted during a Pride week in Stockholm is, “I want to improve my sexuality.” I don’t know what that is or where to sort that comment, especially because the person who said it was dressed female and had a beard. I do know that men and women for whatever reason make themselves more or less attractive as men and women, cross dressing and with mixed appearances, too, but I don’t know how to sort this sexuality as all being in one group; I just can’t see how queer can be distinctive as a group with all those variations. Nonetheless, I have to face the facts; mixed gender, non-gender, a third gender, and even more genders exist. These people, whatever label they choose, are part of society too.

I attended a workshop at a Southern Comfort conference [www.sccatl.org] attended by a lot of “trans-” people, and I must add that I very much enjoyed that venue, and it brought both my wife and myself a lot of new perspectives on people and things, and oh yes, labels too. And please, don’t misunderstand me: I do highly value that event and the people attending it.

However, there was this workshop that interested me about being queer and the relatives and relationships of queer people, so I attended it, with mixed results. One of the attendees, a woman with her husband on his way to changing gender, was quite upset that she had lost contact with him and felt no sexual attraction at all with him dressed as a woman, but still she loved him and didn’t know how to deal with the situation. Was she a lesbian or what? She said she didn’t feel like she had changed sexual orientation. Her testimony became quite emotional, but the lecturer, a young woman (as she appeared to be), tried to assure her with, “In that case, you are queer.” To me this asserted that her love for her transsexual husband proved that she was queer. I could see in that woman’s face that she wasn’t prepared for that answer and didn’t appreciate it.

I must say that all these queer theories I have come across don’t make my sorting labels easier, and the more queer sub-labels that constantly are added, like in a never-ending stream, just make it worse. To me the main issue is: What has queer to do with LGBT? Where is the connection?

To consider:

Are there other sexual orientations involving “attraction” besides hetero- and homosexuality?

A non-gendered or third-gender person: who is that, and how does it show?

Is sexual orientation, “attraction,” the same as love?