Welcome back to another Getting In Bed With Kristin, now with 100% more Sam in a basket! This week, Kristin got personal about grief, loss, and depression — and opened up a conversation about how other people get real with their hard feelings. You can ask your questions for the next episode, which airs on March 14th and posts right here on Autostraddle dot com on March 15th, in the Facebook livestream, on Twitter with the hashtag #GIBWK, or anonymously in this little box!
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Kristin is the co-director of A-Camp, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Everyone Is Gay & My Kid Is Gay, author of This is a Book for Parents of Gay Kids, and co-host of Buffering the Vampire Slayer, a podcast about (you guessed it!) Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Whilst I do understand what Kristin and the commenter mean wrt ‘dyke’ having a certain energy which may be unrelated to lesbian identity, personally I’m still uncomfortable with bi women using the word to describe themselves – dyke feels like a word very specifically aimed at women for having no attraction to men as well for having attraction to women, and for that reason feels like a lesbian-specific term, and I think it’s valuable to have words that are specific to different identities within our community!
Thank you so much for the advice about breaking up with someone who makes you happy. I broke up with someone two and a half months due to ‘these things feel good, these other things are not good, and you want full circle good’ and I’ve been having an incredibly hard time accepting my decision. ‘At the risk of losing something, even if it’s something we should be walking away from, once we’re at risk of losing it, and it doesn’t feel in our control anymore, it’s really scary, and so we’re like ‘oh, just kidding, I don’t know!” rings SO true for me right now. And similarly the section on loss and grief helps, too.
Also…this is the first time I’ve watched one of these videos and I love Kristin’s voice and was trying to figure out whose voice it reminds me of, and it’s Drew Barrymore’s!
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And yet somehow the men who’ve harassed me—a queer who also identifies as bi who also identifies as a dyke—still called me a dyke. Still shouted the word to me along with incoherent threats as they zoomed away in their pickup truck. Still mumbled “fucking dykes” to me and my friends as they passed us in the grocery store. Straight cis dudes accidentally affirming my identity as someone who is not-for-them is a trip.
I guess I’m just wondering where this imaginary line is drawn and why it keeps moving and why we’re never gay enough for 100% Kinsey 6 gay lady homosexual lesbians, regardless of who we are and how we live lives and who we have sex with and who we have romantic relationships with, which desires we act on and which we don’t. Somehow in the year of our Lourde 2019 we still haven’t moved on from the idea that bisexual women are fence-sitting traitors.
I dunno, I don’t even mean this against you, C, personally, but I’m just so tired after being out for more than two decades and being made to feel like I constantly have to prove myself or live up to some ever-evolving litmus test just because I sometimes partner (romantically or sexually) with dudes of various genders/gender histories. Now I’m rambling. Because: So tired.
Sam in a basket!!
Whilst I do understand what Kristin and the commenter mean wrt ‘dyke’ having a certain energy which may be unrelated to lesbian identity, personally I’m still uncomfortable with bi women using the word to describe themselves – dyke feels like a word very specifically aimed at women for having no attraction to men as well for having attraction to women, and for that reason feels like a lesbian-specific term, and I think it’s valuable to have words that are specific to different identities within our community!
Thank you so much for the advice about breaking up with someone who makes you happy. I broke up with someone two and a half months due to ‘these things feel good, these other things are not good, and you want full circle good’ and I’ve been having an incredibly hard time accepting my decision. ‘At the risk of losing something, even if it’s something we should be walking away from, once we’re at risk of losing it, and it doesn’t feel in our control anymore, it’s really scary, and so we’re like ‘oh, just kidding, I don’t know!” rings SO true for me right now. And similarly the section on loss and grief helps, too.
Also…this is the first time I’ve watched one of these videos and I love Kristin’s voice and was trying to figure out whose voice it reminds me of, and it’s Drew Barrymore’s!
And yet somehow the men who’ve harassed me—a queer who also identifies as bi who also identifies as a dyke—still called me a dyke. Still shouted the word to me along with incoherent threats as they zoomed away in their pickup truck. Still mumbled “fucking dykes” to me and my friends as they passed us in the grocery store. Straight cis dudes accidentally affirming my identity as someone who is not-for-them is a trip.
I guess I’m just wondering where this imaginary line is drawn and why it keeps moving and why we’re never gay enough for 100% Kinsey 6 gay lady homosexual lesbians, regardless of who we are and how we live lives and who we have sex with and who we have romantic relationships with, which desires we act on and which we don’t. Somehow in the year of our Lourde 2019 we still haven’t moved on from the idea that bisexual women are fence-sitting traitors.
I dunno, I don’t even mean this against you, C, personally, but I’m just so tired after being out for more than two decades and being made to feel like I constantly have to prove myself or live up to some ever-evolving litmus test just because I sometimes partner (romantically or sexually) with dudes of various genders/gender histories. Now I’m rambling. Because: So tired.
Agree, Erin
<3