Was having this conversation with some new friends earlier and was curious. When did you guys figure out your sexuality/identity or whatever? Was there a person that helped you or a particular moment or event?

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[–] Evkob@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh definitely split attraction further complicates things.

For myself, I quite like queer as a general label. It feels like a rejection of sexuality, gender, and relationships as they're presented in cisheteronormative society. And then if need be, we can use the more specific terms like "panromantic heterosexual" to further explain stuff to those cool people in the know.

And I know you already know this on an intellectual level, but it never hurts to have a reminder: one's queerness is not dependent on who they're currently in a relationship/having sex with!

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

And I know you already know this on an intellectual level, but it never hurts to have a reminder: one’s queerness is not dependent on who they’re currently in a relationship/having sex with!

What I'm looking for isn't so much an internal sense of my own queerness, but more of the "queer as in fuck you" queerness, where my visible existence challenges the norms around me.

To misquote Tales From the City, "If two queers walk down a street and no one notices, are they even queer?"

That's what I need my queerness to be. Not an internal feeling, but an active and explicit middle finger to the heteronormative bullshit that society puts on us that makes so many of us repress and hide from ourselves. And when I was just seen as another unqueer face in a crowd with an unqueer partner, I didn't feel like I was challenging heteronormative bullshit. I felt like I was involuntarily assimilating in to it, and losing myself all over.

When I'm with my girlfriend, I get all of that. I love her, and I love that our happiness is a middle finger to the people who have told us we shouldn't be who we are. Our little polycule is very much "queer as in fuck you". But, I'm navigating my relationship with her around split attraction, and in some ways, trying to capture all of that with the single word "queer" feels like it loses something :)