Queer Crip Love Fest: Parenting at the Intersections
The conversation around parenting and disability often follows the same tired path: nondisabled parents, disabled child, and a whole lot of “life-changing lessons.” But what about disabled people who decide to have kids? We’re not hearing their stories often enough — to the point that some able people might not realize they’re out there. Fortunately Lala, a 22-year-old nonbinary mother living in Florida, has plenty to say about that.
“I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Type 3. I’m a mother to a two-year-old boy, and I have an amazing and supportive cis male partner. Right now, however, we are fighting to reunify with our son due to a domestic incident. Being disabled is making the battle to get my son back even more difficult.
After I had my son, I got back into reading. Reading helps me cope with the fact that I have limited exposure to the world around me because of my physical disability and mental illnesses. Reading helps me to escape the dark mindset I have, and even helps me to dream peacefully.”
Read on for their insights on parenting while disabled, being out at work, and the importance of a good book.
Let’s start with your fiancé. Where did you meet?
We were part of a mingle group on Facebook — so I guess you could say it was kind of an unconventional way of meeting. But for a lot of disabled people like me, it’s not. It’s more than conventional; it’s perfect. I was actually with my ex at the time, so we were just Facebook friends. And after I went through a bad breakup with that person, he and I started talking seriously.
I was supposed to go to an Orlando meetup, and he was going to come from Miami. But then I got my first job, and thought I was going to be too busy working to make it. And so one day this big group of people, including him, made a surprise visit to my job. This is going to sound so cheesy — I’m not gonna say it was love at first sight — but when we actually met in person, something definitely clicked. It was a pretty fast move, but I felt it was right. We have a son now, our two-year-old.
That’s so great. Do you think it’s more common for disabled people to meet their partners online?
I don’t think it’s specifically about that; there’s a multitude of reasons why someone will befriend someone or meet a partner, and one of them is being disabled. For queer people, too, it’s a lot easier to find like-minded people online. There’s always the chance that we could get bullied, killed, whatever — any of those fears people have about outing themselves.
Even then, I’m afraid to tell some people that I’m disabled, because I don’t know what their reaction will be. Usually, the reaction I get is “Oh, but you don’t look disabled!”
I get that all the time.
Yes. So it made sense for me to find my friends and my fiancé online. It’s been a lot easier for me to be taken seriously online. When people find out how old I am, for example, they’re like “I wouldn’t have guessed! You’re so wise and mature for your age!” But offline, it’s much harder for me to be taken seriously. It’s a lot harder for me to find friends, it’s a lot harder for people who are older to take me seriously unless I’m with him.
I get teased for having a “chipmunk voice.” When I do disclose my disability, some people will really patronize me and treat me like I don’t know what I’m talking about or whatever.
Yes! I’ve always found getting people to take you seriously as an adult is one of the most difficult things. There’s a temptation to treat disabled people as perpetual children.
Once, a woman thought I was my own fiancé’s daughter because I was walking with a limp.
Whoa, what?
Yes. That was kind of embarrassing. I mean, there’s an age difference between us, but we look nothing alike. So… yeah.
You’re actually the first person I’ve talked to for this series who’s a parent. It can be such an emotionally charged thing for disabled people to have children. Talk about not getting taken seriously — parenthood is something people assume we’ll never want or be able to do successfully. What’s your experience been with that?
Before becoming a parent, I looked at parenting through rose-colored glasses — with an able-bodied person’s perspective. It was drilled into my head by other people, well-meaning as they were, that I probably shouldn’t have children. Because “Oh, what if you pass it on to them?” or “Oh, what if it’s too hard on your body to carry the fetus?” “What if you can’t pick up your child?”
Honestly, when I got with my fiancé, I was just like, “fuck it.” My symptoms are debilitating and they’re going to get worse as I age. I’d rather be a mom now than later. And plus, I’m fortunate that I got my diagnosis when I was nine; many, many people who have uteri don’t discover that they have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome until they’re either pregnant, going into pre-term labor, or the baby is older and they’re also having issues.
Parenting while disabled is very interesting. We actually purchased our first baby carrier at Target when our son was about five months old. I only got to wear it one time; we take public transit everywhere, so usually it was Dad always wearing it, or we had the stroller. The one time I got to wear him was in a supermarket. He was so heavy! And I knew I couldn’t walk with him in it, so I sat down in the grocery scooter and strolled around the store carrying him. The looks I got were mixed; there were some, like, “Should she be doing that?” or “Aw, that’s so cute!” but in a very patronizing way. Or “… is that her baby?”
Do you find you have to justify yourself as a parent?
When I take him to doctor’s appointments, for example, I almost always have my fiancé with me. Again, we take public transit, or when we were on Medicaid, we got free transport to and from the appointments. So I didn’t really feel the need to justify myself in that situation. But when I was pregnant, my first OB didn’t take me seriously. I said that due to the nature of my disability, I should be labeled high risk. He didn’t really pay attention to me at all. I kind of felt like I was in a drive-thru: “Lemme see how you’re doing, baby’s good, okay great, get out. Next!”
It’s really hard for me to advocate for myself, and at that point my fiancé didn’t know much about EDS. Now he does; I even have him carrying around a little EDS information thing in his wallet.
If you talk about disability as a family issue, people assume that means the kid has the disability — and also that it’ll be a burden on the family. But it’s so much more complex than that.
That makes me think of something else I’m really hoping to see: more changing tables in gender neutral or men’s restrooms. They’re pretty common here, but this is a major city; if you go further out into smaller towns, they get a lot harder to find. Obviously as my son gets bigger, it’s harder for me to change him. So it’s almost always been my fiancé that has to change him, and some public restrooms just do not have changing tables. It’s unfair and absurd. There are so many reasons why every public restroom should have a changing table!
“We don’t have our own bathroom, we don’t have a kitchen, we don’t have a sink, we don’t have a toilet. Everyone in the building shares one microwave. I’ve noticed that a lot of us in this building have chronic illnesses, disabilities, or mental illnesses. There’s a lot to say about that.”
Do people ever say that it’s “so inspiring” that you have a kid?
To be honest, my fiancé kind of did at first. But he’s really been open to learning and listening to what I have to say. He says I’m inspiring for other reasons. But beyond that, no, I haven’t really been praised for being a parent and being disabled.
That’s surprising in a good way, actually. I would think people would get weird about that.
I’m sure they do. But I have to disclose my disability because I “don’t look like it,” so I’m able to kind of blend in. I’m sure if I used a wheelchair or my scooter full-time and had my son walking around beside me, people would say it’s “such an inspiration.” I wouldn’t be surprised.
Right now my son is in foster care. We’re supposed to be living somewhere that accepts children later this month, so that’s kind of a tight deadline to find a place. And we’re in a hard situation; I just started working my second job ever, and it’s only minimum wage. My fiancé works in IT, and people in that field typically make good money, but it’s been hard to save up for a place. Where we live is pretty much a shit motel. The landlord is overcharging everyone here. We don’t have our own bathroom, we don’t have a kitchen, we don’t have a sink, we don’t have a toilet. Everyone in the building shares one microwave. I’ve noticed that a lot of us in this building have chronic illnesses, disabilities, or mental illnesses. There’s a lot to say about that.
I’ve been having to unpack my own ableist thinking, and nothing’s been more eye-opening than living in this building and talking to the people here. Some people I talk to on a regular basis are the very same people I would have judged, or thought they were weird or odd or peculiar, and just not wanted to associate with whatsoever. But upon knowing who they are and why they’re struggling — often because they’re disabled and can’t find work, since no one wants to hire us — it’s made me reevaluate the way I looked at ableism.
Disability has such a harsh impact on employment and housing. Even though it’s technically illegal not to hire someone because of their disability, there are so many loopholes in the way that law gets applied.
I honestly go into work thinking “Could this be my last day?” Because even though my employer seems very understanding, when I finally disclose my disability, I’m afraid I’m just gonna go in and they’re gonna say “Sorry, we have to let you go.” And I’m not gonna know why, and I can’t prove that they fired me because of it. They can also fire you for being gay here.
So are you out as queer at work?
Several of my coworkers know that I’m bi, but not nonbinary. I still go with she/her pronouns. They already know that I’m disabled, and at least I can kind of present as cishet, but there are things I have to think about. Which would I rather disclose, and which would I rather keep hidden?
How long have you been out as nonbinary?
I’d say a little over a year now. I kind of kept it hidden until the Pulse tragedy, given how close it was to home. I went to an arts school that a lot of queer people tend to flock to, and I was worried, checking on Facebook to see if any of my friends were there. Hearing that it was on a Latinx night, being Latinx, it just made it even worse. I drank a lot the night after it happened, and I was freaking out.
I was staying at my friend’s house at the time, and I came out to my fiancé over Messenger. He told me that he would love me no matter what, and he said he was gonna be there for me until the end and meant it. I don’t mind that he still presents me as his wife, but he definitely recognizes that I’m genderqueer, and he’s been very understanding. I’m kind of hoping that he’ll help me get my first binder, because I really want one.
That would be awesome! It’s great that he’s been understanding. That’s by no means a given.
He was a lot worse when we first started dating; he was definitely more on the privileged side, to the point of not recognizing it. But I’m getting through to him. He’s started to help me pick out my haircuts — like now, I have an undercut, and he helped me pick that out. He gives me tips on how to style it and make it look better. It’s awesome.
There’s been some moments when we’ve really clashed, or he’s made transphobic statements about somebody else. But typically, we’ll have a quick argument, and later on or the next day have a heart-to-heart. And he’s been very understanding and perceptive to what I’m saying. It’s kind of hard for people who have intersecting, marginalized identities to find someone who can be wholly enlightened or totally aware. There’s always going to be those internal biases they don’t know that they have. So I try to think about it as “How can I frame this to help him see that wasn’t okay?”
“I love being able to read something that is fabricated from the author’s imagination. It’s amazing, it’s really a special craft.”
I also want to talk to you about reading. You mentioned that you hadn’t been reading in a while because of school, which is something I definitely relate to, and then you got back into reading after your son was born. Was it because you were reading to him, or just because you realized it was time?
Both. We got word books for him, and I was reading those almost every day. And I was like, “As much as I think these are really cute, I’m getting kind of bored reading the same thing over and over. I should really get back into reading.” So I checked out chapter books for children at the library. The first one I read to him was The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles. I love that book. I hadn’t read it since I was in third grade, and it was such a treat reading it to my son. It was also a fantastic choice to get back into reading.
I’ve set reading goals for myself ever since my son was born, and I’m trying to reach those goals by New Year’s Eve. I’m trying to read 52 books, one every week. I’m on track so far.
Media representation of disability, especially disabled queer people and people of color, is sorely lacking. Have you ever read a book that you felt represented you in all of those identities?
I’ve felt I had to pick one identity and sacrifice the others. There are books with disabled protagonists that I might want to read, but they’re not really available in the library. I can’t remember the last time I looked up a book about a disabled character. I’ve kind of given up; it’s disheartening. I don’t tend to see books about characters who use wheelchairs or canes or have hearing aids or anything.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie is about a kid who, as he describes it, has water on his brain, and he’s intellectually disabled. Alexie is Native American, and so is the character. So it was very interesting to see those identities intersecting. The character describes how he didn’t feel at home on his own reservation because he was going to a white school, and he didn’t feel like he fit in at school because they were being racist toward him. The kids at home would call him retarded and everything, and it really tore me up, because I know what that’s like.
Ursula Le Guin said that stories are lies that tell the truth, and I think that’s very true. That’s exactly why I read. I love being able to read something that is fabricated from the author’s imagination. It’s amazing, it’s really a special craft. I love being able to see things from different perspectives, which I really think has helped me be more mindful of other people and understand where they’re coming from. Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I think that applies.
Reading has been an amazing way for me to just step outside my world for a second and be able to refresh my perspective. Especially since the election, it’s been helpful.
“I think love, for the marginalized person of intersecting identities, is being able to see past your own biases you’ve internalized to love that person and recognize difference. For a privileged person, it’s to be able to love unconditionally — because they should be loving unconditionally.”
What’s it been like, at the intersection of all of your identities, to live in this political environment so far?
It’s a complicated question, obviously. Because I can’t lie and say I’ve been harassed or discriminated against; I am light-skinned, and that affects things. I haven’t really experienced harassment, and I hope I don’t. I live in Miami, which is a diverse city, but a lot of people still voted for Trump. And even though I haven’t experienced harassment or racism personally, I can’t say that it doesn’t happen. A lot of white people, and even light-skinned people of color, tend to get that wrong about Miami. They think that because Miami has many different cultures and is very diverse, racism is not a thing here. That’s absolutely false.
I’m definitely not oblivious to the things going on in this state. I live right outside what used to be a predominantly black neighborhood, and now all you see are white people. It’s horrible how gentrification took over. They’re trying to convince people that this is the place to be, when there are homeless people sleeping at the foot of all these new paintings and murals and whatever. I experience more direct racism online than I do in my day to day life, but it’s very much alive here.
How can America be great when it was never great for people of color, for disabled people, for the sick, for the poor, for people with uteri? It just never was.
And finally, the big question I ask everyone in this series: what does love mean to you?
That’s honestly a tough question. Because if I say love is unconditional, and then one of the ways I cope is by saying “I hate my oppressors,” people will be like “You need to rise above and be better than that; otherwise, you’re just as bad as they are.” Okay, but there’s a power imbalance, so that’s not really true.
I think love, for the marginalized person of intersecting identities, is being able to see past your own biases you’ve internalized to love that person and recognize difference. For a privileged person, it’s to be able to love unconditionally — because they should be loving unconditionally.
Poly Pocket: Balancing Comfort and Desire
When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own. Or be one.
Jasmine is a 23-year-old bisexual polyamorous nonbinary femme xicanx living in Los Angeles. They are currently in two very loving and growing relationships, and work as a video game designer and producer. You can find her on twitter as @jazzy_femme.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Carolyn: When did you start to explore polyamory?
Jasmine: Ever since I started dating when I was a teenager, I leaned towards polyamory but never knew it could be a reality for me. I’ve always been the type of person who gets crushes pretty easily, and as a Sagittarius I never want to feel “stuck” with anything or anyone. I was monogamous with my high-school relationships, but once I was going to move away to another state for college, my then boyfriend and I started talking about opening our relationship and me dating other folx. We broke up before I moved so it never actually happened.
When I started seeing my partner, we had agreed from the beginning that we had no interest in being monogamous and that we were also free to date other people as long as we always communicated. We developed our boundaries and rules along the way and actually continue to do so because people change and grow and so do their needs and wants.
“We developed our boundaries and rules along the way and actually continue to do so because people change and grow and so do their needs and wants.”
Before meeting my girlfriend, I was more interested in casually dating. I would go on dates and meet other people and it usually didn’t work out, either because they were really weirded out by the open relationship or because we just didn’t vibe. Since being with my girlfriend, my needs have changed and I’m not really interested in casually dating. I really want to invest my time into my new and growing relationship, my established and still growing partnership, and my career, along with my own personal well-being and self-care.
Carolyn: That sounds like a really thoughtful relationship approach! You mention developing rules and boundaries with your partner; how did that come about, and what were the results?
Jasmine: It’s always been a “cross that bridge when we get to it” sort of thing. There’s a general rule of if we’re unsure, let’s talk about it to make sure. So it ends up being a really in-depth conversation with a lot of processing together about why we need this boundary or rule and if it works for the way we each individually want to live our lives. We definitely started with baby steps, trying to think about absolute boundaries we want with the idea that they could change later down the line.
Some things that have come up include hooking up and “heat of the moment” sort of things. If I’m going to hook up with someone or my partner is, how do we go about telling each other and communicating that happened/is happening? Do I ask permission beforehand? Is that always a realistic option? From that, we decided that if we were to hook up, just let each other know when we have a moment because we know letting each other know beforehand really isn’t always realistic. Same goes with dating. Letting each other know as early as possible that we’re dating someone new is always preferred as a general rule.
We’ve also talked about boundaries in how we want to fit other partners/loves into our future and what that could look like. Like I said before, my partner and I are very much in it for the long haul. They also have another partner currently living in another state and they’re also in it for long haul as things are right now, so we’ve definitely talked about the idea of living together, who would stay where, and how we would be sharing time/resources with each other.
Carolyn: In those discussions, what do you try to prioritize? And what communication strategies are in play?
Jasmine: We generally prioritize that everyone is comfortable over everyone getting what they want. It’s always a give and take, especially when there are more than two people involved.
When communicating, we definitely have a conversation together as those who would be effected by whatever decision. When we first started talking about a future living situation, it started out as multiple conversations happening at different times with different information, which led to a lot of miscommunication. We all learned from that and not ever wanting anyone to be hurt or left out of important decisions or feelings, we always try to keep everyone in the loop as a group.
“We generally prioritize that everyone is comfortable over everyone getting what they want. It’s always a give and take, especially when there are more than two people involved.”
Carolyn: Above, you mentioned boundaries and discussions with your partner; what kinds of boundaries and discussions have you had with your girlfriend?
Jasmine: While it’s a pretty new relationship, we’ve actually had a lot of discussions, especially because my girlfriend never thought she would be in a poly relationship. With my partner, we’ve been on the same page about a lot of things (hanging out with each other’s partners/people we’re dating, showing affection in front of each other, etc.), but I’ve had to have more in depth conversations with my girlfriend because she’s so new to it all.
Carolyn: What excites you about your current way of doing relationships?
Jasmine: I get so many kisses from so many cuties! When it does work out and there are no conversations to have for the time being, I get support and love and time with two really incredible human beings. I’m working through a lot of intergenerational trauma and healing from things like depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder, so it’s always comforting to know that I have a team of support and love that I can rely on. I also get to love them and shower them with kisses, affection, and support, and it’s really fulfilling for me as someone who has a ton of love to give to others.
Carolyn: What about it is a struggle?
Jasmine: Making sure that everyone is comfortable. I’m a little ball of anxiety, so sometimes I have to be reassured that everyone actually wants to be doing this and that everyone is getting their needs met. If I don’t, then I start second guessing myself and my ability to have multiple relationships.
Carolyn: What do you do to make sure your own needs are met?
Jasmine: To be honest, I’ve struggled with that in the past and I’m getting a lot better at it. I definitely take some alone time where I’m not with anyone and I focus on my own hobbies and self care-ish things. My partner and my girlfriend are also really good about reminding me to do self care like taking baths or going for walks alone. They remind me that I can’t be giving to others when I’m not giving to myself. They’re both always my biggest cheerleaders when I tell them I went to yoga in the morning or when I go take my beach walks.
Carolyn: How have your partners (however serious or casual) gotten along?
Jasmine: It’s been interesting! The last person I dated before my girlfriend was a cishet man and he was always a little awkward hanging around my super queer friends or my partner. My girlfriend and my partner have thankfully been getting along and they’re learning more about each other and developing their own friendship outside of me, which is always my ideal. I’ve also been lucky in that I get along with my partner’s partner and she’s one of my best friends.
“I used to be really jealous, but then I learned that it came from my own insecurities.”
I only have the one metamour but our relationship has evolved a lot. It was a rocky start because my partner had some history with her prior to my entry, but it all ended up working out when we started hanging out in group settings, especially finding out we had a lot of things in common. My metamour and I will text, send each other cute animal vidoes, and skype from time to time. I think I said this before, but she’s currently living in a different state so we don’t get to hang out. If she were in the same state, there would be no doubt we would also hang out and see each other pretty regularly as close friends.
Carolyn: Do you experience jealousy? If so, how do you handle it? If no, how do you prevent it?
Jasmine: I used to be really jealous, but then I learned that it came from my own insecurities of someone leaving me for someone else because the other person was “better.” With therapy, I’ve gotten WAY less jealous but there are times that jealously does come up. I’ve been able to do a lot of introspection about where that comes from and why and address it that was rather than expressing it in a way that is unnecessarily harmful.
I try to be honest and have conversation about what the jealously is directed towards once I figure that out. Like, if I feel jealous about my partner’s relationship, I’ll try to be as honest as I can with my partner and let them know I’m feeling jealous/insecure so they can give me a little more reassurance.
I say “try” because sometimes it’s really hard to admit when you’re jealous and insecure of someone else so it’s sometimes harder than other times to be open and honest about what you’re feeling.
Carolyn: That’s accurate. How do your relationships shift when you date/meet/sleep with someone new?
Jasmine: When I start seeing someone new, I’ll usually become a little more focused on the new person because you know, they’re exciting and new. It does mellow out and balance is restored once a little more time passes. My partner is thankfully always very understanding and patient and roots for me in my new romantic endeavors.
Carolyn: How out are you about being poly to friends and family?
Jasmine: I’m out to almost everyone except my family. I’m not ashamed of being poly so I try to be as open as I can, but my family is always a different story. They’re still working through the whole me being bisexual thing, so it might be a while ’till I drop something else for them to process through.
“I get different things, emotionality and physically, from different folx, and being poly has allowed me to explore that.”
Carolyn: Where does poly intersect with other elements of your identity? How does it function within your understanding of yourself?
Jasmine: It tends to intersect with my queerness and how I deal/date different gendered folx. Perfect example, I have dated so many cishet men that I have honestly become so emotionally detached so I could never see myself long-term dating another cishet man in my life. I’ve realized I get different things, emotionality and physically, from different folx, and being poly has allowed me to explore that.
Carolyn: What do you want for your future? Is there anything you’re working towards or hoping for?
Jasmine: My ideal future would be a true chosen family. Like most queer kids, I had/continue to have a less than ideal relationship with my family. Wanting to carry and have kids of my own one day, I want them to grow up being surrounded by different loving people and different relationships that are all rooted in love and support. With all of the co-parents and uncles and aunts!
Drawn to Comics: Chicana Bisexual Maddi Gonzalez Makes Beautiful Comics About Mental Illness and Life
by rory midhani
When I talk about my best friends, I talk about Cecelia Kyoko, I talk about Heather Hogan and if you follow me on twitter, you know I talk about Maddi Gonzalez. All three of these people mean more than the world to me, more than the galaxy, more than the universe. I met the first two through Autostraddle, but I met Maddi because I saw some of her comics on tumblr. I was reading a comic of hers called Phases, that’s about all the different, well, phases, that she went through growing up (including Green Day fan, message board nerd and a bunch of others) and I checked out her blog and I feel in love with her art style immediately. Ever since then, I’ve been a huge fan and now a close friend. She recently came out publicly on twitter (congratulations! I love you!!!) and so I’m writing about her here. She’s been deserving of a highlight for a long time, and now she’s getting it.
Maddi is doing some really brilliant art right now. She was already doing brilliant art — my last three twitter icons have all been drawn by her and I’m guessing that she’s going to draw all my future ones. Recently, though, it seems she’s had a breakthrough, and she’s having a ton of fun and loosening up her style at the same time as she’s refining it and finding her real voice in her art. It’s really wonderful and cool to see this happening. I love the brightness, fullness and fun in her art. She has such a strong sense of lines and colors and curves, and it makes all of her art just seem so vivid and full of life. And boy oh boy is she great at drawing people of color. So many artists just give up when it comes to drawing poc hair, noses and lips, but Maddi nails it. I love the way her lines curve around and come to life and create these unique characters that stick in your memory. She’s my favorite Chicana and my favorite Latinx artist ever.
from Buggy Brains #1
She also recently published two new comics that are, in my opinion, some of the best she’s ever produced. Both are dealing with her mental health, and both are extremely personal in a way that does a great job at showing off her unique voice. She also does a brilliant job of balancing her humor and personality with showing how serious and real the situation was for her. The first, Buggy Brains #1, is the shorter of the two, and it deals with her experiences taking antidepressants and how her life is different now that she’s doing that. It’s also a more recent comic, so you can really see some of her great new art. Maddi is making great comics that have a great message about how getting help for your mental illness is a good thing that you shouldn’t feel ashamed or afraid of doing.
from Panic at the Psych Ward
Her longer comic, Panic at the Psych Ward, is a masterpiece of journal comics. It’s made up of comics that she did while she was hospitalized last year for mental issues. I love this comic; as someone who’s had similar mental problems for most of my life, I love Maddi’s straightforward and often humorous look at her time in the hospital, and it’s has made me accept myself and my mental health problems a whole lot more than I ever thought I would. She makes me feel like it’s okay that I have depression and that I’m getting help for it. When you have depression and anxiety, it can seem like you have to take everything so seriously all the time; Maddi definitely takes it all seriously in this comic, but she also takes it lightly. That’s a thing that Maddi’s really great at doing in her comics: being wise and serious, but also weird and funny, she strikes a really freaking great balance.
Look at this great Heathers the Musical fanart
Maddi Gonzalez has easily one of the best twitters in existence, everyone should follow her there. She posts a ton of super great fanart and is just hilarious but also really smart and wise. You can also check out her website and follow her on tumblr and instagram, and email her at maddigonzalez.art@gmail.com if you want to commission her to do work for you (she does really brilliant work). If you want to buy comics from her, you can go to her online stores and if you want to throw some support her way, you can donate to her ko-fi account. She’s also currently the artist on the funny and fun high school graphic novel Uncanny Valley High, the first two chapters of which are available to purchase online. Maddi is one of the best people on the planet, please support her.
New Releases (April 5)
Batgirl & The Birds of Prey Vol 1: Who is Oracle TP
Welcome to Drawn to Comics! From diary comics to superheroes, from webcomics to graphic novels – this is where we’ll be taking a look at comics by, featuring and for queer ladies. So whether you love to look at detailed personal accounts of other people’s lives, explore new and creative worlds, or you just love to see hot ladies in spandex, we’ve got something for you.
If you have a comic that you’d like to see me review, you can email me at mey [at] autostraddle [dot] com.
Poly Pocket: Wholeness Doesn’t Mean One Thing
When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own. Or be one.
Cecelia is a 23-year-old mixed race Asian genderqueer polyamorous bisexual femme living in Brooklyn. They are single, and work as a freelance writer and professional astrologer.
This interview has been lightly edited.
Carolyn: When did you start to explore polyamory?
Cecelia: I got really lucky that basically when I decided to explore polyamory, I ended up dating someone who had been polyamorous for a while. This was in 2015 when I was studying abroad in London, which was great, because I had never been in a situation before where I looked at everyone around me like, “Woah, I’m into what so many of you are doing, wow, you’re all so date-able.” So it was a combination of sort of falling in love with everyone I met and actually having someone to guide me through polyamory from their own experience working through it.
Carolyn: What does polyamory look like in your life right now?
Cecelia: I just moved to Brooklyn like a week ago, so I’m very very single at the moment. I’m in a place again where I see myself wanting to form relationships with the people around me based on like-mindedness. But I’m the kind of poly team player who prefers to be the side chick of many, and the main chick of none. I don’t really want the pressure of being a primary partner of someone right now, but I love being a long-term non-primary partner of someone who has a primary relationship.
Carolyn: Is there a story to how you figured that out?
Cecelia: Yeah, for sure. It happened during that first experience I had with polyamory in London. On the third date, the guy I was seeing sat me down and was like, “Hey, just so you know, I’m poly and I have a long-term primary partner, and you can ask whatever you want or take however long you need to decide if this is something you want to continue, knowing that I have a primary relationship.” And surprisingly, I was super excited when he told me that. Because if I’m being totally honest, my bisexuality is such that I’m really choosy when I date hetero men, and when I do date them, I prefer for it to be fairly fun and casual for a while. Not to say that being a secondary partner implies a “casual” relationship in any way. But in this specific situation it was at the point when guys are usually like, “I’ve never met anyone like you please marry me,” and I have to sadly and gently let them go to free myself as someone that they consider a possession. So when this guy sat me down and was like, “Hey, so our situation will basically be one date a week, and maybe getting coffee or lunch here and there throughout the week, but my primary focus is on the person I actually live with,” I was so excited. I was like, “A regularly scheduled fun and chill relationship? hell yeah, sign me up.”
“I try my best not to be preachy about polyamory or make anyone feel like they’re ‘less queer’ or ‘less radical’ or less anything if they choose monogamy. But for me personally, polyamory is the only style of dating I could ever participate in.”
Carolyn: When you meet people, how do you position conversations about poly or what kind of relationships you’re interested in?
Cecelia: I always try to sneak into the first date that I’m poly. I know some people switch from being poly to being monogamous depending on the preference of the person they’re dating, but I’m not like that. For example, the guy I dated in London is going to visit New York soon but his primary partner is someone new now, so I had to re-establish what his relationship to polyamory is now. Basically I asked if we could have sex when he visits, and he said no, because that’s the agreement he’s made in the relationship with his current partner. And I have to respect that.
I really do respect monogamy when other people choose it for themselves. I try my best not to be preachy about polyamory or make anyone feel like they’re “less queer” or “less radical” or less anything if they choose monogamy. But for me personally, polyamory is the only style of dating I could ever participate in, so I bring it up as early as possible. I want to be really transparent that I’m not willing to change my decision to be polyamorous for anyone, because I know I would be fundamentally unhappy and unfulfilled in a monogamous relationship.
Carolyn: How would you characterize your attitude toward relationships generally?
Cecelia: It’s taken so much introspection and self-awareness to figure this out, and I’m really excited to live in a time where we can really ask this question and invent whatever brave new rules for being in relationships that make us feel whole and valuable.
First of all, the main reason why I can never be monogamous is because I don’t feel good in any situation where I’m considered someone’s possession. I’m really private and independent and need to have freedom first and foremost. Often in monogamous relationships I end up feeling like someone’s “thing,” even if that’s not what they intend. And that feeling makes my skin crawl so much that I’ll go into human disaster mode and end the relationship in a really messy way that wrecks everyone. So that’s one thing I’ve learned about myself.
But another thing entirely that matters to me is that I resist the idea that “wholeness” means “one thing.” I think we’re taught that being whole means being one easily recognizable thing, and that’s a notion I resist in both my work with astrology and in my relationships. I believe that each person contains a bunch of conflicting, intersecting parts, and that different people can make someone feel really vibrant in many beautiful different ways. So if I really like someone, it makes me excited when they have multiple partners who can light up different parts of their mind/body/soul etc. I actually don’t really get jealous, so that helps. I feel confident that I can bring a really specific and positive energy to a relationship, but I also know that I can never provide one person with everything that they need in a relationship. For example, I’m insecure about how funny I am sometimes. So it makes me happy if my partner has someone who makes them laugh for days, because they deserve to have that energy too. And it relieves the pressure on me to be super funny or whatever. Because I know that if they need a good deep and healing convo, they’ll come to me.
“I believe that each person contains a bunch of conflicting, intersecting parts, and that different people can make someone feel really vibrant in many beautiful different ways.”
Carolyn: Where does poly intersect with other elements of your identity? How does it function within your understanding of yourself?
Cecelia: I like polyamory because it really fulfills all of the conflicting, at-odds parts of myself that I’ve always been told that I had to somehow reconcile. I’m mixed-race so I’ve always felt like “not quite this thing, but not quite this other thing.” And then being bisexual is like “you don’t belong here, but also not really here.” So polyamory is a way I can say Fuck You to all of that.
I’m actively not ashamed of how different relationships allow me to perform gender differently, or give me a way to build love and acceptance with someone based on our similar life experience with race or any other mutual point of interest, really. When I realized that other people had always partially defined what categories I did or didn’t have access to, I decided to actively resist that. So yeah, I’ll go on a date with a hetero guy and dress up to look cis-passing because it’s fun and simple and easy, and then I’ll go on a date with a radical queer person and dress in a way that feels more authentic to me, and take the relationship more seriously. And that’s just how my bisexuality personally works. I know a lot of bisexual people whose primary partners are men in a very serious way. And that’s great! But I know myself, and what I want, and I don’t hide what I need from anyone I have a relationship with. Once I had a queer femme partner of color and I went on a date with a hetero guy (who didn’t have atrocious politics, I won’t date anyone whose politics suck). My femme partner was like: “Why? Don’t you know that he fundamentally sucks?” And I was like, “Listen, some people watch television for easy entertainment. I go on dates with hetero guys.” But even with those guys, I’m really clear. I’ll say something like, “This has to be fun and simple or I’m out.” And other people think it makes me fake as hell, but I’m always really clear about what part of myself I hope to bring to a relationship. I’m very clear early on that the other person knows what they’re signing up for, and that they feel like we can build something that’s mutually beneficial based on what we both value in a relationship. And I wholeheartedly say Fuck You to other people who want to define for me what kind of relationships I’m allowed to feel good in. And to other people who want to dismiss me for being “greedy.”
Carolyn: Tell me more about that!
Cecelia: A common accusation put on bisexual folks (that makes me yawn) is that we’re “greedy.” There’s an obviously negative moral connotation to that word, so bisexual people are taught to feel bad for experiencing attraction to cis folks and trans folks and genderqueer folks and everyone in between. And if you see me living as a vibrantly bisexual, polyamorous person and you want to call me greedy, I can’t let it affect me. Because in a way, we actually totally agree on the definition of the thing that I’m doing, which is dating different people. Because yes, I do enjoy feeling differently in relationships with different people. But what we disagree on, and what I actively reject, is the idea that what I’m doing is somehow inherently unethical or bad. Which is why I’m clear, transparent, and communicative from the very beginning with people I want to build a relationship with.
“Instead of arguing over what’s wrong or right or morally sound or factual, it’s far more interesting and urgent to me right now to ask: How are we doing everything that we possibly can to find a sense of wholeness in this world? And how can we help each other find that through relationships?”
For example, when I meet a queer femme, sometimes my heart gets stolen pretty quick. So early on I’ll say, “I want to do a metric fuck-ton of emotional labor with you and commit to both of us healing and feeling witnessed and growing in this relationship. And I want you to know that the intensity I feel with you is one of my favorite things about being alive on this earth, but also sometimes I need to feel the absolute opposite of that intensity by going on a tinder date with a random hetero guy. And I promise that those dates will make me come back to our relationship feeling grateful and refreshed.” And if the queer femmes who steal my heart aren’t into that or don’t get it, which happens sometimes, that’s okay. Because if you don’t agree with what I can offer you in a relationship or you need more than I can offer you (or if you straight up think that what I’m doing is immoral), then that’s fine and you’re not wrong and I’m not wrong, we just have different needs and opinions. And it’s very simple really because if we have different needs, then we don’t have to date. That sucks, but it’s easier to know that earlier rather than later. But actually I’ve found that a lot of bisexual queer femmes secretly feel similarly to me when I bring it up, so we’ll plan hetero tinder dates for the same night and then compare notes afterwards to see if we’ll go on a second date with that person or whatever. That’s always really fun in a sort of secret way. You could look at us and call us evil for ghosting dudes or whatever. But in the grand ethical scale, that’s a small moral debt that hetero cis dudes have to pay for benefiting from the patriarchy.
So yeah, from any angle, it’s really easy to look at bisexuality or polyamory in its various forms and call it greedy or unethical. But the only form of validation that matters to me is the one that comes from the person (or people) I’m in a relationship with. And if I’ve done something wrong or bad I’ll know because they’ll tell me, or I’ll sense that I’ve hurt them and ask them about their feelings. Then I’ll listen and try to understand how my intentions didn’t align with what they experienced as my actions. And I’ll try to be better. So if you want to say that what I’m doing is wrong or bad, that’s cool, because you don’t have to date me. You can date someone else who agrees that what I’m doing is wrong or bad. And that’s the whole point of re-defining relationship structures!
I think so many of us are deciding to stop caring about “morality” as we’ve been told that we either fit into it or deviate from it. Because you know what morality as it’s been historically defined for centuries got us? This shitshow of a world that we live in, with this bozo nightmare of a president. And so instead of arguing over what’s wrong or right or morally sound or factual, it’s far more interesting and urgent to me right now to ask: How are we doing everything that we possibly can to find a sense of wholeness in this world? And how can we help each other find that through relationships?
Carolyn: How do you seek or build poly community?
Cecelia: I definitely try and have conversations with my friends who are poly about what exactly they’re doing so we can compare notes. Because I don’t think anyone is 100% sure that they’re “doing poly right,” and if they are, they’re lying. So talking to friends and non-partners about what polyamory looks like is just as important as defining what polyamory looks like with your partners. We have to build a collective language around this stuff! And I’m really excited to meet more people who are poly in New York, because it’s nice when you already have a working understanding with someone of how you both relate to romance or sex or long-term relationships generally.
“I want everyone to be able to take on their own definition of what it means to be in a relationship, without feeling the guilt that comes from articulating needs that are often inaccurately labeled as selfish or inauthentic.”
Carolyn: What do you want your future to look like? What vision are you working towards or hoping for?
Cecelia: I want a future where, regardless of if people are poly or not, everyone is really seriously taking on the project of figuring out how to get what they need in relationships while also genuinely being present for the needs of others. I want to live in a world where everyone comes to the realization that we can just put everything we’ve learned about relationships on the table and edit that notion or create our own definitions until we arrive at something that makes us feel truly valuable. I want everyone to be able to take on their own definition of what it means to be in a relationship, without feeling the guilt that comes from articulating needs that are often inaccurately labeled as selfish or inauthentic. If I don’t want to be someone’s possession, that can make me independent, not selfish. If I recognize that different parts of my identity need different kinds of people to feel seen, that can make me responsible for my own definition of wholeness, not inauthentic. I want to live in a world where I can explain this concept and people can understand it. And I think arriving at these different definitions will make everyone more introspective and self-aware and ultimately, more invested in the project of taking care of ourselves and each other better.
VIDEO! Getting In Bed with Kristin #8: Bisexuality with Mey Rude
My lovely wonderful A+ers, I am so sorry that this is getting to your inboxes a day late! You see, my parents are in town and also YouTube decided to be horrible horrific monsters and block important LGBTQ content so I have been a little *SPINS IN CIRCLES, FALLS TO FLOOR*
That all said, holy shit, Mey Rude joined me last week to talk about bisexuality and it was the very best. We got into gender, dating apps, stigma, erasure, and oh-so-much more.
Also THIS THURSDAY! Mara Wilson is going to be joining me in bed whaaaaaat! Tune in (can you still say “tune in”??) at 3pm PT to get answers to all your Mara-related and/or gay-related queries from both of us. Huzzah!
Getting In Bed with Kristin: Bisexuality with Mey Rude | March 14, 2017 from autostraddle on Vimeo.
Queer Crip Love Fest: The Two Great Loves of My Life
By all accounts, I am one of those people who just needs to get a dog already. I will — will — lavish affection on every dog I encounter, whether or not I’ve met their owner before. I let a stranger’s Pit Bull/Corgi mix sit in my lap and lick my face for a good ten minutes on International Women’s Day. I’m still wondering about whether the stray I saw in my neighborhood months ago found a forever home. Current logistics and finances make pet ownership a no-go, and I refuse to adopt any dog until I know I can give it a life full of cuddling, constant attention, and great snacks. But I’m still a firm believer that there are few loves purer than that between a Dog Person and their canine pal.
So when Kaety, a 20-year-old nonbinary actor, artist, and activist, reached out to me about “the two great loves of [their] life”:
“First is my almost-four-year-old dog, Denim. I’ve had him since he was a puppy, and he had become my therapy dog. Not only does he regularly get me out of panic attacks, he helped me survive during some of my darkest hours. His rambunctious personality keeps me on my toes often, but he wouldn’t be himself without a bit of trouble.
Then there’s my fiancé, Matt. His patience and acceptance of even the most difficult parts of my life had always been absolutely natural. I lived with him through the worst parts of my illness so far, and he has always kept me grounded.”
… I knew we had to talk.
What does love mean to you?
That’s a really interesting question for me right now because I’ve had some tough family stuff go on. I’ve always had a complicated family; I don’t have many blood relatives I am close to whatsoever. So family love has come from friends as much as relatives. I’ve found that love is someone who is going to be there and understand you, even if they can’t follow everything that’s going on. Even if they don’t get every intricate part of what you’re going through, they’re still there, and they’re still gonna respect you.
A quiet, understated, but always there love makes me feel best. For me, love is positive attention with respect of my boundaries and moods. I love very deeply, and invest a lot in those I love, and sometimes that can hurt, but that’s how my heart is.
Especially since I have a chronic illness, sometimes I can’t be as affectionate with people as I want to be. Often, my skin will just be hypersensitive, and if I even just touch a hard corner of something, it hurts like a burn, almost. That’s hard for a lot of people who care about me. Sometimes I have to place really strict boundaries and be like “I can’t even hug people today, because it hurts.” That has been a problem for some people who have known me for a long time. They’re like “But this isn’t how you used to be.” And I’m like “Well, I have to preserve myself, to some extent.” It does get in the way.
So if you’re having a day where hugging is not an option, what are some other ways that you show affection?
I like being able to touch someone briefly, even if it’s just their arm or their hand. Or just sitting next to someone and actually being there with them — that means so much more to me than any of the physical stuff does, in the long run. If you’re gonna be there and spend time with me, help me distract myself from all the maintenance I have to do on my body, that’s what means the most. Sometimes it does mean just sitting on the couch talking. I can’t always go out to lunches and stuff. I can’t always drive. And so people understanding and still taking the time to be with me during that means a lot.
“Love, for me, is positive attention with respect of my boundaries and moods.”
It sounds like your fiancé does a good job with that.
He was raised by a parent who’s disabled, so his outlook on that is very unique. She home schooled him for a brief amount of time too. He is able-bodied, pretty strong, pretty able to work long hours, which is very helpful for me since I’m not able to stand on a concrete floor for nine hours a day anymore. He, fortunately, also enjoys that, so he’s been able to help us progress. We started out literally living in his parents’ home; that’s where we moved in together. And we gradually got to an apartment, and now we’re in a house, and that’s huge.
Having a safe, stable place to live where I don’t have to go up a flight of stairs or deal with noises from other people that keep me from sleeping has improved my life significantly.
It’s interesting that you bring up the division of labor, because I think a lot of people have questions and/or are skeptical when it comes to a disabled and an able-bodied person together. “What could you possibly be contributing to this relationship?” And not even just from outside — there’s the whole internal “Don’t burden this person who’s already doing all this for you!” thing. This idea that even being with you is a favor.
We haven’t had an issue with that — again, I think that’s largely because he grew up with a disabled person in his household. But he also does understand that having a disability takes work. It is sometimes a full-time job. And he understands that on days when I have energy, I get a lot done! I have pushed through and done things I definitely wasn’t able to do years ago.
How did you meet?
We actually met at community college, in our Community Chorus class.
Oh, yay! That’s so cute!
He was a music major; I was just there because I enjoy music and was like “I should probably try and make friends sometimes.” I got to know him because he was a very popular music student, so the conductor would call him out and have him do example stuff for us. So I knew his voice before I ever knew him. Which, I mean, it’s just so sappy.
Apparently he had tried to talk to me at some event, but it was somewhere that had been hard to drive to and I was a new driver, so I blew him off because I was distracted. But we ended up at an end-of-year party for the chorus and talked then. Our first date was the most recent Godzilla movie, and it was only a few months after that that we moved in together. We got along immediately.
“I was already identifying as nonbinary when we started dating. And on our second date, I came out to him… And he took it fine, which none of my previous partners had. He was just like, ‘Okay.’ And that was huge for me.”
Were you already identifying as disabled when you met him?
No. I was aware that something wasn’t right in my body, but I thought it was due to depression. I’ve always had depressive issues in some form or another. So I definitely wasn’t identifying as disabled, but I was having a large number of the issues I deal with now. It’s obviously super complicated. It was really once I started feeling real physical effects and was unable to do certain things — I ended up dropping out of college, even though I started early, because I was too sick to go to class. It was around then when I was like “This is definitely not normal anymore,” y’know? “This is not a reasonable, expected amount of pain in a lifetime.”
I know that line is so blurry; I also know that my physical and mental health issues interact a lot. Most of the time, I don’t really know where the lines are between those. Which is complicated! It’s hard when an anxiety attack will bring on a fibro flare up. Personally, I think a disability is when it starts keeping you from doing something you want to do. But that’s only based on experiences I’ve had, and it’s obviously super individual.
Especially since I was diagnosed pretty young — a lot of fibromyalgia isn’t caught until you’re closer to your forties — I couldn’t relate to the experiences of other people, who were like “Oh, this was brought on by menopause” or something. I’m like, “I’m 18 and I have this.” There are people who, when I say I have a chronic illness and try to talk about it will be like “Well, you’re just an adult now.” I mean, yes, but also, this is real. It does keep me at home a lot. I do have a weakened immune system. I’m not making this up. So it was so important that he believed me and understood.
I was already identifying as nonbinary when we started dating, though. And on our second date, I came out to him — which was a little scary, because I wasn’t as publicly presenting as I am now. I still looked pretty cis and I was vastly underweight. And he took it fine, which none of my previous partners had. He was just like, “Okay.” And that was huge for me.
“There are people who, when I say I have a chronic illness and try to talk about it, will be like ‘Well, you’re just an adult now.’ I mean, yes, but also, this is real. I’m not making this up.”
That’s so validating. So with the progression of your disability, both physically and in your understanding of it, did he take that well also?
Yes. Right after I moved in with him was when I started hitting my sickest, because I was experiencing a lot of stress and not receiving any real treatment. And I ended up dropping out of school and almost not leaving the house for three or four months. Nothing beyond going to the grocery store, if that. And that was really tough. I had just turned 18, so I was really young. And he took that so well.
He saw every day how sick I was, and how much, every day, I would want to get stuff done. He ended up getting a degree and working full-time, just working on improving skills outside of the college environment. Neither of us is a very traditional learner. But I think his parents being who they are really benefited him, and ultimately ended up working in my favor with him understanding a lot of things right off the bat.
He wants to be a bigger activist in the community. He appears very cishet, and he is cis — but he’s always been attracted to nonbinary people and just not known the term for it. Most of the people he gets along best with are trans or gay. So he’s looking to do a lot more activism. And he’s started wearing nail polish at work. Y’know, he works at Home Depot — he has a lot of conservative coworkers who think it’s okay to say shitty stuff. So he does that just to remind them.
What kind of activism do you do?
Well, I grew up right outside of D.C. — so, that is to say, with too much politics. It’s part of the reason I left. But for years I’ve done activism as just a part of my life. I started helping at polling centers as a child. I’ve been to, I think, all the inaugurations I’ve been alive for except for this most recent one. I’ve been to counter-protests for Westboro Baptist Church, and I was on the steps of the Supreme Court the day before the marriage equality vote. Activism has been a part of my life since I was born, and I can’t just ignore that as an adult.
Recently I’ve been involved with the Degenderettes, which is a queer femme activism group. A lot of activism, art, and community outreach and safety. It’s founded by trans femme people. They definitely deal with a lot of disability conversations as well. I’m the leader of the group up here, and they’ve been great.
Okay, I’ve been saving this: tell me about your dog!
He’s actually here with me right now, being a big sleepy baby. His name’s Denim. I rescued him at around four months, and they told me he was some sort of retriever, but they were very wrong. He’s actually a Catahoula Leopard Dog. It’s the Louisiana state dog, actually. And they’re known for being extremely loyal.
He got attached to me very quickly, so as a puppy anytime he was away from me he’d just destroy stuff. And he wouldn’t sleep at night. But now he’s about four years old and has been one of the best companions for me. He’s not as energetic as he used to be, but he’s such a troublemaker and the most loyal dog I’ve ever met. He’s next to me at all times he can be. He knows when I have panic attacks or when other people have panic attacks, and usually he’ll either try and crawl in your lap or start acting out and causing trouble. I know that as a cue now: if I’m showing anxiety that I might not even notice and he’s acting out, I need to evaluate how I’m feeling. He’s never been trained for it or anything; he just does it.
Right now he’s certified as a psychiatric comfort dog. I’m going to work on getting him certified as a higher-level care dog, so I can bring him to events and stuff. Because he’s amazing with people. I can take him on planes, but it’s not as easy as if I had the other certificate. Plus I want to take him to Pride and stuff like that.
“My dog knows when I have panic attacks or when other people have panic attacks, and usually he’ll either try and crawl in your lap or start acting out and causing trouble. I know that as a cue now. He’s never been trained for it or anything; he just does it.”
How has Denim helped you navigate your disability better?
He definitely knows when I’m having anxiety and over-obsessive tendencies. He can tell when I’m starting to mentally lock up, and has gotten very good at telling me that I’m doing that. He’s basically a nurse dog: he lays next to me when I’m sick and is very calm. He doesn’t get into as much trouble then. He gets me out and about, gets me to talk to people. I’ve met people who don’t like dogs who like him.
In general, it’s just the companionship. When I got him, I was alone a lot and lived in an area where I couldn’t walk to restaurants or anything. So he has been a live-in companion. And he’s got such a big personality.
You mentioned earlier not being able to show physical affection all the time, and sometimes dogs can want to jump on you just because. Has that ever become an issue?
Once in a while. He does have long nails, and since I bruise easily, I’ll just get a lot of bruises that are lines up and down. Now that we’re in a house, we spent some extra money and fenced in the yard, so that’s been good in terms of running around. We open the door and he just sprints. He’s learned to be a dog without other dogs.
He’s been such a companion, and a real lap dog since the day I met him. I sat on the ground, he came over and sat in my lap, and I was like “I guess this is my dog now.” Also, I got him right after I was diagnosed as bipolar. And so he was there all through that.
Did you face similar issues of being believed and taken seriously — which it sounds like was an issue with your fibro — with your bipolar diagnosis?
To an extreme extent, yes. I was pretty lucky to get diagnosed early at 16. But I faced some pushback from my therapist at the time. And I would have friends’ parents tell me they didn’t believe in me taking meds. I would tell them “I probably would be dead without these,” and they’re still like “You’re too young for that.”
I get that we don’t want to start “too early,” but sometimes it is necessary. And that needs to be understood. It was bizarre — and because I was still considered a child, people would feel comfortable saying things like that to my face. But even at that age, I wasn’t having it. And because my mom started taking medication for depression when I was young, she understood that they have life-saving properties. That was lucky.
I was very fortunate to hear about fibromyalgia and get my diagnosis as early as I did. Both of my parents believed me, which was convenient, and I already knew what to do. So I was really well prepared, and I’ve helped a lot of other friends with chronic pain start to address and understand that, as a young person, you shouldn’t have constant pain. That’s not addressed enough! And it’s definitely a thing. So I do that in the community a bunch and I want to do more.
It’s such a complicated thing because there isn’t really one answer — as with many chronic illnesses. There’s never just one answer.
Charlize Theron Fucks Women, Fucks With Men In “Atomic Blonde” Trailer
Sometime in 2012, at a wrap party to celebrate the end of filming Mad Max: Fury Road, Charlize Theron found a brief moment to herself amid the festivities to indulge in a small, secret smile. Deep inside herself, she knew that this was only the beginning. Did she know that she would, a few years later, go on to star in this movie about a bisexual superspy who kills, just in the space of the trailer, about a dozen men with her hands before making out with a hot French lady spy? Maybe not for sure, but I think she knew she could, and was just waiting for the right opportunity. Now, seven million shares of that one screenshot from Fury Road later, we have this trailer for Atomic Blonde. Here it is! I think we can all take credit for it, in a way.
You, like me, may have questions! Does the comparatively low billing of Sofia Boutella, the hot French lady spy, mean that James McAvoy as spy contact David Percival will be the ultimate love interest instead? Do the filmmakers realize that by casting James McAvoy instead of Tom Hardy, they’ve ruined the opportunity to create infinite intersecting Mad Max spinoff universes, like Tarantino’s without the racism and foot fetish preoccupation? Will the film be able to avoid the minefield of the duplicitous bisexual trope in a spy movie with two queer women in it? How many spy coats does Charlize Theron wear? I look forward to a spirited and rewarding discussion of these issues and others up to and through summer of 2017, when most of us will see this movie come hell or high water.
Poly Pocket: Polyamory and Recovery
When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own.
Aden Carver is a 28-year-old white genderfluid bisexual polyamorous person living in Telluride, CO. She is solo and dating, in recovery from an eating disorder/anxiety/depression, volunteering as a ski instructor for an inclusive adaptive program, making money as a server and making joy as a songwriter and performer.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Carolyn: When did you start to explore polyamory?
Aden: Looking back at my childhood and adolescence, my polyamorous tendencies are very evident. But the extremely conservative religious environment I was raised in suppressed this and my queerness deeply. I experienced many intense female friendships that were very relationship-like, which I think is a common queer experience, and I was certainly crushing on multiple people at the same time. In college I dated a man I had been in love with for years. We were very close, we wrote music and performed together. When we finally entered a relationship, I sabotaged it and cheated with a queer person. At the time, I thought it was because I must be a lesbian, but in reality it was that the only choice of a future with him was marriage and children. I didn’t have the language to understand how I could both deeply love him, and also not want that future. I first came across the language of polyamory at some anarchist gatherings and festivals when I was 21. After a few discussions and failed attempts in different relationships, at 26 I found myself single and decided to pursue polyamory on my own. At the same time I was finally accepting my bisexuality after being out as a lesbian for several years. From that point forward, monogamy was a deal breaker for me. I told everyone I hooked up with or dated up front what I was looking for. If they weren’t down with it, we didn’t date. I’ve been firmly practicing this now for two years, and my current partner is the first one who stuck.
Carolyn: So what’s your relationship like right now?
Aden: Currently, I have one consistent partner, a bisexual cis man who I have been seeing for about a year. It’s the first polyamorous relationship either of us have been in, so we are definitely learning and making it up as we go along. He is very out and proud of his sexuality, as am I, and I think the fact that we are both queer makes us much more compatible. We are also very out and open about our polyamorous status in our community, which is important to me. I’ve had many casual encounters outside of that, but none have blossomed into more intimate relationships. I’m definitely trying to date and find additional partners, but it’s proven difficult to find like-minded folks in this tiny mountain town. I consider myself to be more solo polyamorous, I don’t wish to live with a partner or be involved financially. My autonomy and freedom are important to me, and my mental health has improved greatly since I’ve focused on maintaining those areas.
“Polyamory really helps me to focus on myself, what I really need and want. And also forces me to communicate that, since there are no givens.”
Carolyn: On the topic of mental health, above you mentioned recovering from an eating disorder/anxiety/depression – can you tell me more about how that relates to how you do poly?
Aden: When I’ve been in monogamous relationships in the past, it’s been very easy for me to be swallowed whole by them. To lose myself completely in trying to make that person happy and ignore whatever is going on in my own body and mind. Also relying on one person to meet my emotional and physical needs was very ineffective, causing me to feel I was too much and too demanding.
Polyamory really helps me to focus on myself, what I really need and want. And also forces me to communicate that, since there are no givens. It also has helped me seek emotional support across a wide variety of relationships, some romantic and some not, and to put more value in my friendships. The focus of communication and boundaries really helps with my anxiety as well, and I like that I get to decide with each partner what our communication and boundaries look like.
Carolyn: When did you start to discover that focus? Was there a specific moment that made you think oh, this is the way I need to run my life?
Aden: It was a slow realization. There was a time when I first was exploring polyamory that I was really struggling, I was talking to a person long distance and it wasn’t a healthy or secure relationship. All of my monogamous friends said, “Obviously you can’t do this, it’s making you miserable.” But I was determined, I knew I wanted to be polyamorous. After moving to CO and beginning my relationship with this partner, I began to really see how this practice is better for me. I wasn’t as obsessed with making him like me, I allowed things to move more organically. It required less mental energy, and I was able to focus more energy on myself. I wasn’t trying to be functional for him, I was doing it for myself. I also wasn’t as attached to the outcome, I had no idea that a year later we would be saying “I love you” and discussing all of our crushes together. That all happened and grew of its own accord, without me being hyper focused on it. And because I was able to focus more on myself, I feel the most recovered I have been since I began treatment in 2013.
And – something I think about a lot is cheating. I fit the bisexual stereotype of “cheater.” I cheated in most of my monogamous relationships. At the time, I was shamed by my partners and ashamed of myself. I didn’t understand that I was communicating with myself. My actions were telling me that the relationships I was in were not right for me, and when the walls were closing in, I didn’t have the language to understand why, so I acted instead to sabotage them. Polyamory has freed me from that.
“[Polyamory] makes me even more grateful for each brief, passionate experience with people without wishing it was more than it could be.”
Carolyn: What do you find most exciting about your current approach to relationships?
Aden: I love the freedom and spontaneity! I love that I am free to connect with anyone I meet. It makes me even more grateful for each brief, passionate experience with people without wishing it was more than it could be. And I love being able to discuss my crushes and experiences with my partner. That was a level of openness I wasn’t sure I could achieve. The first time he hooked up with someone else and told me about it, I was afraid of how I would feel. I didn’t want it to undo my desire to be polyamorous. When he told me, I had what I can only describe as a huge rush of adrenaline. A ton of energy, but it was neither positive nor negative. It was like “Ok, this happened and I’m still here, he’s still here, the sky hasn’t fallen like everyone said it would.” It was amazing and empowering. It was so affirming of what I already believed, but had yet to experience: that you do not have to have possession of someone else’s body and sexuality in order to have profound intimacy and trust.
Carolyn: What do you find is a struggle?
Aden: Right now outside of my partner I only have some potential connections brewing. I imagine once I have other partners at a similar level of intimacy as I do to him there will be new struggles. At the moment, my main struggles have been just trying to have healthy communication and interaction in our relationship, not even poly stuff, just the stuff between the two of us as humans. I had a really hard time opening up to him and trusting him at first, he has been very patient. I had this false belief: “Well no one wanted to stay with me when I was monogamous, so why would anyone stick around for this?” He was hesitant at first, it was a totally new concept for him. But he has continually surprised me and my trust in our partnership has grown and deepened. So I just want to continue to nurture that as I date and meet new people.
I also struggle living in a place that has very little queer community. I really long for friendships and dating relationships with other queer women and persons. That has been very difficult to find. My tinder is very sad, but I keep it on, just in case!
Carolyn: How do things shift when you do date or meet new people?
Aden: Well so far, all of my crushes outside of this partnership have gone nowhere. So right now, if I have a date or a crush I talk to my partner about it and he’s supportive. He isn’t actively seeking other partners like I am; his connections with others have been pretty spontaneous and casual. He usually tells me about them after the fact. We don’t really keep a regular schedule of seeing each other, so these outside connections have, so far, had little impact. We will see what the future holds. There is one person who we have both connected with separately, who has expressed a desire to interact with us together. I’m not sure what impact that will have, but I am excited to explore it!
“I’ve learned to balance my directness with patience, by allowing things to grow organically but also disclose my intentions and needs when the time is right.”
Carolyn: What have you learned about communicating with your partner (and potential partners in any sense)?
Aden: I have to continually remind myself that not everyone’s communication style matches my own. I am a very direct and immediate processor. My anxious brain runs away on the crazy thought train if I am not able to discuss things right away. My partner takes a little more time to process things. We are both very stubborn and care maybe too much about fairness and “rightness” in a conflict, rather than the other person’s feelings. Our Aquarius and Leo egos butt heads sometimes. So I’ve learned that we are often unable to resolve an argument right away, the next day is better. Thanks to my eating disorder, I’ve had more than my fair share of therapy, so I understand the use of “I” vs. “You” statements more than others sometimes. I try to stick to that script when explaining how I feel. With crushes and potential partners, I’ve learned to balance my directness with patience, by allowing things to grow organically but also disclose my intentions and needs when the time is right.
Carolyn: What do you want your future to look like? What vision are you working towards or hoping for?
Aden: In the future I want to be as free and self-sufficient as possible. I want to travel extensively and live in a variety of places. I don’t want children or a partnership that tries to keep me in one place. I am seeking partners that can have that kind of transience and flexibility. Despite the lack of queerness, the place I live is growing on me (astounding natural beauty is hard to pass up) and is an ideal home base for extensive traveling because of the seasonal nature of the tourism. So for the next few years I can see myself traveling and home basing from here, developing myself further as a performer and artist, dedicating more of myself to activism, deepening my relationship with my partner and hopefully adding a couple new ones to the mix. Polyamory has given me so much confidence and really grounded me in myself. I feel more capable than ever and excited for my future.
Queer Crip Love Fest: Radically Vulnerable Feminist Pep Talk
All photos courtesy of Alaina Leary
Happy Aggressively Affectionate Week, everyone! Did you do Valentine’s Day? Galentine’s Day? Gal Palentine’s Day? My girlfriend and I celebrated early with a fancy dinner on Sunday night followed by a few solid hours of video games. I’ll take Dragon Age over crowded restaurants every time. But I’m also a big ol’ squishy romantic at heart — and so I’m excited to introduce this week’s Queer Crip Love Fest guest.
Alaina is a 24-year-old grad student living in Boston and working in book publishing for kids and young adults. She’s not a fan of Donald Trump, Bury Your Gays, Autism Speaks, or the lack of diverse representation in books. But she loves her girlfriend Macey, whom she described like so:
“I love that she’s selfless and the way she cares about people. I can see it in her eyes when she’s thinking up a great present for someone, I can hear it in her voice when she calls someone to make them feel better. We can be stuck together in the most awful situation, like we’ll be in an airport waiting hours for a delayed flight, but it doesn’t matter because we’re together, we make it fun. She’s the kind of person you want to be stuck in an airport with. She’s the kind of person who, when she comes into the room, it’s a better room than it was before.”
They’re high school sweethearts. They met in Agricultural Mechanics class. On the first day. Keep reading, y’all — this one is a goodie.
Okay, first I want to talk a little about you because I’ve admired your work for so long. Can you tell me about your grad program?
I’m studying for my Master of Arts in Publishing and Writing. I started in September 2015, right after undergrad, and I will graduate in May of this year. Most of my focus has been in online and book publishing. I’ve taken a lot of classes in electronic publishing, editing and writing, business and innovation, book publicity, stuff like that. Right now I’m in a class where we’re writing stories for the Boston Globe Magazine. We’re going to pitch those stories to them and be accepting assignments from them on the local community — so I’m hoping to sneak some marginalized stories in there if I can.
Yes, that’s great! You’ve also worked with Disability in Kidlit in the past, right? I know they’re going on a break, but they’re such an awesome resource that I’d love to hear more about that.
Yes! I have written for them before. I’m not one of the founders — though I wish I were, because what a great idea — but I’ve written some reviews for them and am friends with the people who started it. Disability in Kidlit is an important site because it, to my knowledge, is the only one that focuses on disability representation in children’s, middle grade, and young adult lit. Possibly even in any lit!
I’ve been working with the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books for a while now, and a lot of what I’ve done with them is dependent on Disability in Kidlit, Latinxs in Kidlit, and Gay YA. All these sites are feeding into these groups of marginalized people whose stories aren’t being represented. Book reviewers aren’t necessarily vetting these books for whether or not they’re good representation, and that’s what sites like Disability in Kidlit do.
What have you been doing for We Need Diverse Books?
I’ve mostly done social media for them since last year. I went to BookCon back in June 2016 and livetweeted their young adult panel, which had some great authors like Leigh Bardugo, Gene Luen Yang, Sherman Alexie, Anna-Marie McLemore. It was focused on loss and grief — it wasn’t actually focused on diversity — but they were very careful in vetting diverse authors of diverse books. It had a really good spin on that whole topic.
I’ve also hosted and moderated a lot of We Need Diverse Books’ Twitter chats — picking people and themes for those, asking questions, getting the audience involved. Every once and a while there will be a really disability- or queer-specific question, and they’re like “We have someone who can answer that!”
One for the book nerds. Alaina (left) and Macey at their five-year anniversary photo shoot, January 2014
That’s as good a segue as any to talk about your girlfriend, Macey. You’ve been together for a long time!
Yeah! We just made it to eight years.
That’s fantastic, congratulations. You met in high school?
Yeah, first day.
Oh my god. Okay, can you tell me your origin story?
So our story actually starts with the first class we were in. We went to a vocational high school where, instead of being a technical school where you’d learn hairdressing or graphic design or something, you learn about animal science. So we actually met in an Agricultural Mechanics class — which, like, I still don’t know how to do anything besides turn my car on. But we met on the first day of school, and she asked to eat lunch with me and some girls, and I just kind of liked her immediately, if you can believe that.
“ I was not completely out as being queer — I was semi, half-in-half-out — and she wasn’t out at all. So we started out as friends… I said ‘Why don’t we give it a go?’ And she said ‘I’d love to.'”
I was drawn to her for some reason. She was reading; that might have been it. She had glasses; that could have been it, too.
Speaking from experience, both of those things help!
Right. At the time, I was not completely out as being queer — I was semi, half-in-half-out — and she wasn’t out at all. So we started out as friends, and we were friends for about a year when I realized that our friendship was developing into a pretty serious crush. And then I was like “Oh no, straight girl, friend, me — a typical scenario.”
Eventually, it just kind of came out among our friend group that I liked her, and she said “Y’know what, I’ve been feeling the same kind of thing.” And I said “Why don’t we give it a go?” And she said “I’d love to.”
That’s so nice!
We were kind of shy and nerdy in high school, so I think I asked her out over AIM.
Classic.
Yup! And her response was via handwritten note, so I still have that.
Senior prom, June 2011
Aw, that’s so sweet! What a nice memento.
That’s pretty much our story — and right after we started dating, it then became “How do you date your best friend? What do we do if we break up? Is she bi? Is she gay? Is she just gay for me?” So many questions for both of us. And the whole coming out process to all our friends and to her family and most of mine, we navigated together. Which is just wild to me, looking back on it.
How has that been? Have you generally had good experiences through all that?
Yeah! I mean, there’ve been some rough patches, like every coming out situation. We have had a lot of really good experiences, though. Our friend group in high school was very accepting. And my family was very accepting. We’ve hit a couple of rough patches with people not believing in bisexuality, because a lot of people are like “Oh, you can be gay or you can be straight, but you can’t be bisexual,” which is what we both actually are. But we’ve chosen to not really push that issue with most people, because we’re dating each other — so I guess if they don’t believe us, that’s fine. It doesn’t really affect our situation.
“Right after we started dating, it then became ‘How do you date your best friend? What do we do if we break up? Is she bi? Is she gay? Is she just gay for me?’ So many questions for both of us.”
We pretty much went through the whole experience together. I knew I was queer a lot earlier than she did, so I came out a lot more easily and a lot younger to my family. So I was being a support system for her, which was new to me: learning how to be patient with someone as they identify with themselves and as they chose to tell people, and dealing with the fallout of what it’s like to tell someone. Even someone who ends up being accepting, it can be a shock.
Absolutely. I came out really young also, so I’ve had what I would imagine is a similar experience. Being out in high school is a very specific type of being gay or queer. And even if you ultimately don’t lose any friends or whatever, it can still be kind of a rocky road. It’s nice that you had someone there to go through it with you, but I can see how it’d be kind of strange to experience both sides of that negotiation at the same time.
It was. And I think, for me, what was so weird about it was that I had always been culturally taught that you just know you’re gay the minute you come out of the womb, basically. And I did! I don’t remember not being gay. But my girlfriend had a different experience — she really just didn’t identify as gay or straight, and all of a sudden she was like, “Yeah, I guess I like everyone.” For me that was weird at first, because I had never experienced that before. And I was like “If you don’t know, are you really even gay?” Because I had always heard that you were born that way and you just know that you are.
High school graduation, June 2011
Have you since shifted your views on that, as a result of being together?
I’ve definitely shifted my views. And I had an aunt come out as trans and transition in the last couple of years — so I’ve kind of learned that either people don’t know everything, or they don’t want to deal with it, or they sort of know somewhere inside but they’re not ready to accept it yet. And I think, no matter what part of the LGBTQ spectrum — or even disability, y’know — you’re on, that’s completely valid. I got older and realized that there were parts of myself I hadn’t been honest about. I started to realize more why that was so common for people in the LGBTQ community.
“I just had this feeling inside me that disability wasn’t an identity or something to be proud of or tell people about. It was hush-hush: you don’t want your employers to find out, you don’t want your friends to find out.”
Was disability one of those things you weren’t being a hundred percent honest with yourself about?
Absolutely, yeah. The way I would put it is that my internalized ableism ran deeper than my internalized queerphobia. And I’m not sure why that is, to be honest, because I was actually raised by two disabled parents. But I just had this feeling inside me that disability wasn’t an identity or something to be proud of or tell people about. It was hush-hush: you don’t want your employers to find out, you don’t want your friends to find out. You try to be as well as you can, suck it up as much as you can, and not ask for accommodations until the last possible minute. It took a lot of unlearning and a lot of social justice for me to get to a point where I’m like “Y’know what, no. I’m just gonna say it.”
I think that’s true for a lot of people in our age bracket who’ve come to disability activism as young adults. It’s in spite of ourselves, regardless of how progressive our families were. I was born two years before the ADA passed, so I wasn’t aware of it, because I was two — but you can bet my parents were. They had done their homework. But they didn’t know how to keep internalized ableism from becoming a thing in my life. They were nothing but supportive of me, but it still gets in there. How has unlearning that habit played itself out in your relationship?
I want to back up and bring my good friend Katie into this, actually, because she deserves some credit. Not to always blame your moment of truth on some disabled person — because that’s such a typical story — but it wasn’t really until I was in college and met Katie, who uses a wheelchair, that the process started. I didn’t even know what ableism was, if you can believe it. I kind of came to that unlearning as if I were an ally — which I think is very common for people in the queer community too. At first you’re like “I just really like gay people! I really support them!” And then all of a sudden you’re making out with them. That’s kind of how I came to disability too. I was like “Oh, I’m really just here to support,” and then I’d find myself getting fired up about these topics, and them feeling very personal. Katie would say something about accessibility or the questions people asked her, and I’d be like “Yeah! That does suck! … Why does that feel like it’s happened to me before?”
“I kind of came to that unlearning as if I were an ally — which I think is very common for people in the queer community too. At first you’re like ‘I just really like gay people! I really support them!’ And then all of a sudden you’re making out with them. That’s kind of how I came to disability too.”
Right! So were you not identifying as disabled at that age?
I wasn’t, no! I didn’t really start until undergrad, honestly.
So you met Katie and saw some similarities in your experiences, and then that was it? Or was it sort of on its way to happening anyway?
I would say college and the internet in tandem opened me up to the wider disability community. My parents, like I sad, were/are disabled, but other than that I really didn’t know anyone else. In college I sort of just fell into this really disabled friend group, which was awesome. We had more disabled people in our group than abled people. We just kind of flocked together. In tandem with my social justice activism and learning on the internet, I was meeting all these people in real life who were like “Y’know, I have autism,” or “I have cerebral palsy,” or “I have dyslexia,” and these were things they were cool with talking about. They were fine with asking for accommodations. And I think it just opened my eyes to the fact that it didn’t have to be this hidden part of me — this very special ed, going to the doctor’s office kind of thing.
Sophomore year of college, October 2012
So you and Macey were already together when you started to discover disability politics?
Yes.
And is she disabled also?
No.
So were you her first exposure to those sorts of ideas? When you started to get on board, so did she? Or did she already have experience with it in the past?
She definitely did not have experience. I would say she learned about it at the same time that I did, through Katie as well. And then she started to see me opening up to it, and as our friend group grew and became more vocal about their own disability experiences, so did I, and that was a big moment of change for both of us.
“I think it just opened my eyes to the fact that it didn’t have to be this hidden part of me — this very special ed, going to the doctor’s office kind of thing.”
One of the biggest things we’ve had to talk about as I’ve gotten more into disability politics is, I’ll be honest: like everyone else, disabled or not, I’m lazy sometimes. What we needed to establish in order for that to work was “Do you actually need an accommodation or assistance right now, or are you just being lazy?” Because you never want your partner to be the person who does everything for you or feels burdened by you, or feels like they have to help you with all these things you can’t help with around the house. And she’s just been really respectful in terms of when I can’t do things, and being accommodating.
I have intersecting disabilities, so in addition to physical difficulties I also have attention deficit difficulties. So sometimes it’s just a matter of me explaining “I put the laundry in, but I forgot to put it in the dryer!” “I made a ham sandwich and forgot about it!”
College graduation, May 2015
It’s really important that you bring up the word “respect,” because I think that’s the thing a lot of disabled people want in our lives in general — but especially from our intimate relationships. Can you think of a particular time that really showed she understood your access needs?
I feel like it happens on such a daily basis. We’ll be going to the grocery store, and she’ll ask me if I need my cane or not because it’s already in the passenger seat with her. We live in an apartment and we have dumpsters where we throw our trash out, so if I can’t lift it and throw it in, she’ll lift it and throw it in for me. She’s really good about all the sensory issues that I have — so sometimes I’ll need captions, or I’ll need something repeated, or I will completely forget what someone looks like, or be somewhere that’s just sensory crazy and need to get out. She’s awesome about that stuff. She’ll be like “We’ll get you out of there, we’ll get you somewhere chill, I’ll rub your back.”
Sometimes that’s all you need: just someone to be cool with accommodating whatever’s going on. And I think one of the reasons she’s so good about that is because she knows what it’s like to deal with her own struggles, because she is also a marginalized person. She’s queer, obviously, but she’s also Latinx and she’s plus size.
We talk a lot about our intersecting marginalizations and how our experiences are similar and different. Because we have those purposeful, feminist discussions with each other, we both really get that sometimes we just need different things, and one person just needs to be able to say “No, right now, I need this.”
“You never want your partner to be the person who does everything for you or feels burdened by you, or feels like they have to help you with all these things you can’t help with around the house. And she’s just been really respectful in terms of when I can’t do things, and being accommodating.”
So what does love mean to you?
I think about this question a lot, because I have been in a relationship for so long, and so many of my friends and family members have noticed that it’s noteworthy that I’m still dating my high school sweetheart. Love, to me, really means unconditional love. I think love starts from a place of excitement and passion, and mutual interest in each other that you really get excited about together. And then it grows into something so unconditional. Anyone who’s been in a long relationship can tell you that there are very difficult times and very stressful times, and there are times that you’ll be tired and they’ll be cranky, or you’re both tired and cranky — and it’s the unconditional love and respect for the person, and remembering to always be better, that gets you through those times.
“Sometimes that’s all you need: just someone to be cool with accommodating whatever’s going on. And I think one of the reasons she’s so good about that is because she knows what it’s like to deal with her own struggles, because she is also a marginalized person.”
I think someone that you really love makes you want to be better, but you also want to be better for them. It’s so easy to fall into the old traps of like, whining and complaining, or nagging, or snapping at someone when you’ve had a bad day. And I think if you really, unconditionally love someone, you take a minute and you step back and say “Stop it, self. You’re just being an asshole. This person’s done nothing but love you, and you should treat them with respect.”
Apologies go a long way, and I’ve always been taught to own up to what you do, apologize, and have that discussion — and then actually take some action and be better. A lot of what love means to me is that commitment to grow, and recognizing that someone will change. Because if you meet someone at 15 and you start dating and now you’re 24, that’s a lot of years and a lot of change. You’re changing as a person as you grow older. And I think what sustains love is you recognize the person is going to change, and that you’re going to change, and that you’re committed to making that work.
Seems to have worked, apparently!
I’ve just kind of rolled with it. Macey and I have changed so much. And like you said, I got into disability politics while we were together. I came out to the world as disabled, I started walking with a cane, I started writing public articles about disability and autism and all of these things, and being so public about that. That’s definitely a huge shift of identity for both of us, because she’s a part of my life in this relationship. Those kinds of changes are things people go through together and you just have to be ready to roll with it.
“We talk a lot about our intersecting marginalizations and how our experiences are similar and different. Because we have those purposeful, feminist discussions with each other, we both really get that sometimes we just need different things.”
You also identify as nonbinary, right?
Yes.
Did you come out as nonbinary while in your current relationship?
I did. It’s funny that you ask that, because I have a very long and bizarre relationship with gender identity that’s still in the works. I originally came out as trans to Macey while we were still in high school, and at the time, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with that. Maybe socially transition and medically transition, maybe change my pronouns. I experimented with the pixie cut and kind of gender-neutral, masculine look. That was pretty early in our relationship, now that we’ve been together for eight years. Because we started dating when we were sophomores, and it was senior year that I told her I wasn’t sure how I was feeling about my gender identity.
I thought she wouldn’t want to be with me, even though she was bisexual. That should be a fail safe. But I still imagined that it would be too difficult. I guess that was one of the moments early in our relationship when I was like “She’s in this for the long haul, and she’s okay with change and the unknown.” That’s really the reassurance I think I needed to move forward with our relationship — and to feel completely, radically vulnerable with another person. Ever since then I’ve been able to be so much more honest with her, because that was when I told someone something I’d been thinking about since I was little but never shared with anyone.
Cape Cod, April 2016
I love that, “radically vulnerable.” I think vulnerability is tough for disabled people, because you’re sort of assumed to be perpetually vulnerable but also constantly fighting against that. So it’s great that your relationship is a place you feel like you can go to let down the guard.
Right. It’s one of those things that I’m going to be constantly working on, because I think we all are born radically vulnerable as kids, and we’re all so very open to the idea of just being whoever we are when we’re young. And for many of us, our first experiences with doing that are being shut down — whether it’s by our parents or educators, classmates, other family members. Being shut down for being who you are and living your life.
In my case, I was disabled as a child as well, so living your life in a disabled way, being shut down and being told that the way that you speak or walk is not correct and not good. I think that it turns people away from radical vulnerability, and we have to kind of relearn how to do that when we’re in these relationships. Because it really is the only way to get to know someone and feel safe with them: to know that they know you at your core, and that at your most vulnerable, they’ll still be there. I think if you haven’t reached that point yet, there’s still that part of you that says “Well, when they see this, they won’t wanna.”
“I think what sustains love is you recognize the person is going to change, and that you’re going to change, and that you’re committed to making that work.”
I think that’s a really common fear, but for disabled folks it’s especially acute. Because there’s this narrative that you’ll always be too much, or that there’s gonna come this breaking point just by nature of who you are. Especially if your partner’s not also disabled. But if they are also disabled, everyone simultaneously assumes that’s who you should be with, and also doesn’t understand how you could be in that relationship at all! So it’s sort of a lose-lose.
I also have an able-bodied girlfriend, and it’s interesting the expectations that people have for a mixed-ability relationship. That person being not just your de facto caregiver, but ultimately your savior. And your job is to make them a better person. What would you say to somebody who was implying your relationship should be like that?
This definitely has happened before. People see Macey holding doors open for me while I’m walking with a cane, or holding my coffee for me, or throwing the trash out, and they make these assumptions. What I would say is that I don’t think disability is the only thing in life that makes our experiences different — and no matter whether you’re a mixed-ability couple or you have disabled partners or able partners, there are different things all parties bring to the table. Even in a couple where both people are abled, there are going to be situations where either person acts as more of a caregiver or nurturer. It’s just natural to being human.
Being disabled doesn’t make me the person who needs to be taken care of all the time. In fact, there are plenty of times when my girlfriend really needs a pick-me-up — and I’m the one who snaps her out of it with a good ol’ feminist pep talk. Everybody needs that sometimes.
Alaina and Macey’s first photo together at Alaina’s fifteenth birthday party, and that same photo recreated for their five-year anniversary
Poly Pocket: It’s Not The Structure, It’s The People
When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own.
Mina is a 32-year-old multiracial cis queer kinky lady living and dating in a big blue city in the deep red American South. She is a sexual assault survivor with a handful of mental health diagnoses, an invisible disability, a weakness for terrible puns, and a goddamn master’s degree, thank you very much. She is in a committed relationship with a cis dude and also dating casually, and works in public sector administration. “Mina” is a pseudonym.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Carolyn: When did you start to explore polyamory?
Mina: Well, I had a pretty terrible introduction to the idea. In November of 2010 I had just moved across the country to go to grad school and move in with my long-distance boyfriend, and the day I found out I got accepted to the program he was like, “Oh, btw, I think we should also fuck other people.” It was a complete surprise, and I spent a lot of time in the next couple of weeks being hurt and crying.
We revisited the conversation occasionally, and eventually I got to a place where I would be OK with noticing myself being attracted to other people — both men and, increasingly — women, which was also a surprise to me at the time. And from a feminist/critical perspective, it made sense to me that since I had a non-traditional initiation into sexual activity (i.e., sexual assault at 14 and again at 15) I might need to do some other non-traditional things as a consenting adult to reclaim my agency.
So first I had to interrogate my own assumptions about monogamy. And then I had to decide what I was going to be OK with in theory versus in practice. I don’t know if that specific task ever really ends: I have decided that ethical non-monogamy is possible, and now I am working on what it is going to look like for me specifically. Because like for everything else, there isn’t one right way to do this. And that’s taken me a long time to realize and embrace, and it still isn’t anywhere near ideally implemented! So now I’m asking myself, what do I want, and that’s a hard question to answer even within a committed monogamous relationship. Let alone when you add in additional partners and lovers.
“I have decided that ethical non-monogamy is possible, and now I am working on what it is going to look like for me specifically.”
I broke up with the guy who I moved here for, in large part because he couldn’t demonstrate the kind of commitment I needed to see in order to feel comfortable with opening the relationship. That isn’t what I tell most people, of course, but it was the process of thinking about ethical non-monogamy that led me to decide to DTMFA. That was two years ago, and I’ve never been happier.
Also, the idea that “loving more than one person is possible” finally started to make sense to me when I realized that I describe more than one person as “my best friend.” For me, “best friend” is more like a level than an exclusive, one-person-only category — I love each of these people deeply, and differently, and I wouldn’t try to prioritize which one of them I love “more” because that isn’t the point of how we care for each other. Happiness is not a competition. And so the idea that I could also, in theory, be in love with more than one person at once… that idea started to make more sense.
Carolyn: So what is your relationship situation right now? And how does the way you’re asking yourself what you want fit into it?
Mina: I’m in a committed, serious relationship with a white cis dude. We met last August (2015) and we live together now — I knew it was getting serious when he proposed that we introduce our cats to each other. He’s on my insurance through work, and we had to do some courthouse legal stuff to make that happen, and I wrote basically a pre-nup that we both signed. (I don’t want to let my love life ruin my finances again.) So, he’s my “primary.” We started dating when I wasn’t really interested in monogamy, and he has basically always done polyamory, so I had the experience of being able to define up front what I want from him.
I have a pattern in my relationships in which I take it upon myself to be their #1 support. Which is great, in some ways, but can also easily slide into me being their only emotional support, and that gets codependent AF, fast, and isn’t good for me. “Doing the open relationship thing” means that by default, I am acknowledging that I cannot and will not be all things for this person, which is pretty liberating.
And, well, I wouldn’t have had the space to figure out I also like dating ladies if I had continued to prefer a monogamous setup. This has been a relatively recent thing (maybe the last 18 months?) and since then it’s been a series of “Ways We Should Have Known Earlier.” Without having the chance to date outside this very loving and nourishing relationship I have at home (although damn it’s got its issues), I wouldn’t have given that whole aspect of my life another thought.
Carolyn: Where here does poly intersect with other elements of your identity? How does it function within your understanding of yourself?
Mina: I exist in the between spaces of a lot of social identities. Dad is white and mom is Chicana and her Ancestry DNA profile says she’s 25% Native — to white folks I read as white, and to brown folks I read as “something that isn’t white.” This is the first time I’ve ever lived and worked somewhere that people look like me.
I try to acknowledge that I get the benefit of white privilege even while feeling frustrated that I feel like an outsider to a lot of the Latin@ community. So, navigating the racial identity thing while dating can be a little tricky. I have a super-sensitive radar for gendered racialized bullshit, and I’ve dated white folks (men and women), and other folks, who are insufficiently critical in their race-gender lens — is that just called “woke” now? — and dumped them fast even though the sex was good. If I can’t trust you in the voting booth, why tf would I trust you in bed? But at the same time, I’ve definitely been the one to fuck up and #whitefeminist all over someone, too.
I “read” as a pretty average white girl, but I’ve got all this hidden complexity to how I think about myself and how I move in the world. Now that polyamory is part of that, I feel like I’m additionally subversive: a big fuck you to the white capitalist hetero-cis-patriarchy, all around.
Part of why I’ve been reluctant to identify as “poly” is actually related to the race/gender stuff. I don’t know if this is specific to my metro area, but the online “poly” groups I’ve seen are a LOT of white dudes and their wives or girlfriends. All of which is fine: you do you, y’all. But don’t simultaneously bleat on about how poly folks are persecuted and ignore the facts about who benefits from like every single policy in American law. If you can’t see that these struggles are all bound up together, I do not have the time for you.
I’ve actually gotten a lot more picky about who I date since starting to do non-monogamy. One of my best friends since college — we have a similar cultural background, and who is also realizing she’s bi, and we’ve fooled around a bit, I love her so hard — told me years ago, “girl, you need to stop dating white boys with momma issues.” And I think a similar injunction would apply: “girl, you need to stop dating whitefeminists who don’t get intersectional.”
And to the “what do you want” issue, poly has been a real life-saver for my relationship with my primary, as well: we both have real struggles with mental health, and he’s just coming out of a long depressive episode during which sex was just not an option, and it relieved a lot of the pressure on us both to know that I could get my physical needs met elsewhere with a partner at home who would cheer me on.
I’ve dated people with depression before — hell, I’ve been that partner before — and lord, this was such a better way to handle that whole side-effect.
Carolyn: I bet!
Mina: If there’s one thing I’ve learned since starting to interrogate my own assumptions about monogamy, it’s that whether it “works” is not about the STRUCTURE; it’s about the PEOPLE, and what they each bring to the table. I’m really grateful to have some terrific people around me at the moment.
“Whether it ‘works’ is not about the STRUCTURE; it’s about the PEOPLE, and what they each bring to the table.”
Carolyn: You mentioned ADHD earlier: What other ways do mental health things fit into poly for you? Does it affect your relationships, make you more inclined to approach or function within/around them in certain ways?
Mina: I think it makes me less interested in tolerating bullshit from people. I know I have issues with certain things that are important to successful, mutually nourishing relationships. I work hard at addressing those weaknesses despite the fact that my disability means they don’t come naturally to me (and I do refer to my ADHD as a disability, the comments section can fight about this later if they want). I can list them: Emotion regulation. Conversation that takes turns. I get bored fast, and this includes with boring people or boring conversation. So I have a pretty clear-cut strategy for first dates.
I also, because I am a data nerd, built myself a spreadsheet with a rubric, to keep track of my first date outcomes… because I know I will not remember them if I do not write them down. I have two or three places I like equally for first dates, and I almost always pick the location since I almost always do the asking. I will give the person until I’ve finished one cocktail and one fancy fizzy soda water (I order them at the same time), and if I haven’t been convinced that this person is someone I want to keep talking to for another drink’s worth of time, I say goodnight and I’m done. I do not have time for bad second dates. Which is why I have a lot of first dates — and fuck on a lot of them — but not a lot of second dates. The people I keep around, the ones who I love and I date and I fuck, are folks who find my mind charming and amusing.
I like arranging first dates quickly, far better than endless messaging, for this reason: if you can’t handle me in person, why TF would we date?
Carolyn: Yes! and how much of a sense of who a person is can anyone really get from a few back and forth messages with no context?
Mina: Exactly.
“Sometimes love means that you hurt, but the hurt doesn’t make it any less worthwhile.”
Carolyn: When you and your primary date other people, what does that look like?
Mina: Logistically we both can see each other’s google calendars. We have at least two date nights a week that we reserve for each other — always Saturday, work allowing, and then at least one other evening. We will almost certainly have sex on both date nights. (Unless the world ends, like it did on election Tuesday, in which case we end up watching Community and eating takeout.) Other than that: (1) Verbally communicate when you set a date with someone else, and also put it on the calendar, (2) Text when you leave the bar to go fuck, and (3) Text a status update when you’re on your way home, which also includes something sweet and usually sexy.
Other logistics involve clean sheets — this was more of an issue when we were in separate apartments — and always always always use protection. The norm for “who fucks in this apartment” has been “don’t fuck anybody else in our bed unless I’m out of town, in which case, do the laundry before I get home.”
Carolyn: Laundry is definitely a secret to poly and cohabitation.
Mina: YES. We have a washing machine in the apartment and it’s worth every penny.
For me, I’m grateful to have a primary partner who is more experienced with non-monogamy than I am because it means we aren’t both learning at the same time. It also means he can reflect what I may not see myself. A few months ago I went to a lesbian wedding out of town, as the guest of a friend (the one who told me to stop dating white boys with momma issues), and I shared with him beforehand that I was worried that if she and I fucked again, that it would lead to me Catching Feels, and that I didn’t want to get hurt because of how far away she lives, neither of us are out to our families, etc. He said very gently, sweetie, I think you already do have feelings for her, and that’s OK too.
And I spent some time with that statement, and you know what? He was right. And sometimes love means that you hurt, but the hurt doesn’t make it any less worthwhile.
I think I am less kind about his dates — he seems to date the flakiest damn women — but I do think it comes from a place of wanting the best for him. “Why are you trying to see her again? She’s cancelled on you twice.” He tends to go for quantity over quality, though, haha, so that is perhaps just a difference of priorities for what we each want from dating. I don’t have to remember the names of his dates until he decides they’ll be around for more than two. That’s a useful ADHD-related dating thing: it’s permission I gave myself, and then set the expectation by communicating it to him. Far less emotional labor for me — if i don’t have to learn their names, and he’s happy, then literally I do not care. Or at least, I try hard not to.
Carolyn: Do you experience jealousy? If so, how do you handle it? If no, how do you prevent it?
Mina: Part of how i handle the threat of jealousy is by learning only what I want to know (as in, the names thing), and part is by requesting frequent verbal reassurance about how I am superior to his other dates. I actually believe that he means things like, “you have the best ass in the entire state.” That’s a willing suspension of disbelief in some ways, but also because I’ve chosen to trust that he means it when he says I come first.
“I think jealousy — at least as I’ve seen it among my poly friends — often stems from an unwillingness to interrogate one’s own assumptions about oneself and one’s partner(s). I do NOT think that everything can be resolved by communication, but sometimes it sure does help clear the air.”
I’ve only asked him once to cancel a date because of Issues We Were Having, and that was two days after we moved into a new apartment and the house was still in chaos.
Right now, his depressive episode is finally resolving, and I have six months of backlog of really rough sex that I want to catch up on, and so when he told me a couple weeks ago that he had four first dates scheduled for the week, I got really mad! because it felt like he was choosing sex with randos who would likely fall through rather than fuck me, RIGHT HERE and ready and frustrated. I was jealous of his time and attention, more than the sex itself. We talked about it, and I realized he was seeking something specific that I could not offer (the heady experience of a new partner), in order to build up his sexual confidence again in no small part so as to feel like he could give me what I wanted. I said that I desperately needed emotional intimacy, for a lot of reasons, and so we agreed on more cuddling and more non-sexual physical touch, and set a specific day for a very sensual, loving sex session, but all that only happened because I was willing to interrogate my own reaction.
I think jealousy — at least as I’ve seen it among my poly friends — often stems from an unwillingness to interrogate one’s own assumptions about oneself and one’s partner(s). I do NOT think that everything can be resolved by communication, but sometimes it sure does help clear the air.
Carolyn: What do you want your future to look like? What vision are you working towards or hoping for?
Mina: I want to dedicate myself to work that matters, to issues that matter, and I have the professional skills to do that. I think I want “my future” to look like something that is … my own. And not anybody else’s template.
I realized as I was writing the bio paragraph that I’ve got a lot of boxes marked on my Intersectionality Bingo card. And that means good things and also realistic things. Like, I am not living a conventional life. I still need to interrogate whether my professed desire to be a mother comes from a place of conventional upbringing, or from a more authentic place that I can do in my own way.
I want to have a life partner. I think I’ve found one.
I want to have meaningful relationships, sexual and otherwise, with people who are conducive to my flourishing.
If I decide that going through pregnancy and parenting is something I want to do for my own, legitimate reasons, then I need to decide what that means for my home and professional life.
Right now, “the future” means I keep my head down politically enough to stay off the radar of people who are in a position to dole out consequences in my field, while making enough mischief to be considered part of the resistance. And I need the people in my life — and in my bed — to be part of supporting me when I need emotional nourishment or physical release.
It’s a pretty self-centered vision, TBH. I swear to you it fits into a larger picture of community and democracy. But some days I can only address what’s within my immediate reach, and I think I need to give myself permission for that to be Enough.
Angelina Jolie “Switches Teams,” Apparently Was On A “Team”: What Does This Mean For You?
feature image via WireImage
We’ve heard whispers of it for weeks, but at last, it’s been confirmed: sources allegedly close to the actress have told Radar Online that in the wake of her divorce from professional handsome person Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie is officially sick of men and “switching teams.”
The former “wild child” and mother of approximately 31 children has until now been very open with the press about her bisexuality, which one might think allowed for her attraction to people of multiple genders. But as Radar explains, this current predilection towards women actually stems entirely from a very deliberate, conscious choice on Jolie’s choice to forgo men in favor of women and therefore become a lesbian because of Brad Pitt, which is how bisexuality always works according to the media.
“I’ve had quite enough of THIS, thank you very much.” (Image via Getty Images)
But Angelina, you might say, to what team are you switching? Isn’t gender a social construct? Isn’t sexuality a fluid spectrum rather than strictly binary? Didn’t you just file for divorce like two months ago? Aren’t people free to be attracted to whoever they’re attracted to without it being worthy of a front page over at Us Weekly? “No,” Angelina will reply as she stretches her limbs in an oversized easy chair in the corner of your living room. “These things are very black and white. I used to be gay and then I was straight and now that I’m divorcing the man I was straight with, I’ve decided that I’m gay again.” You shrug and offer her a La Croix.
Now that Angelina is a lesbian again, she’s been very busy communicating with her ex-girlfriend, fellow lesbian Jenny Shimizu. Shimizu and Jolie dated approximately one billion years ago and Jenny Shimizu is currently married to Michelle Harper, but when a woman up and decides to be a lesbian (again), little details like this hardly matter. Everyone’s gotta drop what they’re doing and play their part.
Jolie and Shimizu, hanging out pretty recently I guess.
When pressed for comment, straight married lady Jennifer Aniston asked Vapid Fluff HQ, “Who’s pregnant and alone NOW?!?!” and then hung up the telephone.
As for you, does this mean you’re about to start dating Angelina Jolie? If you play your cards right, maybe. Hope you’re into romantic international flights on private jets with dozens of rich, sulky teenagers glaring at you while you hold hands with their mom.
Poly Pocket: This Is How Bisexual Comedian Gaby Dunn Does Poly
Feature image of Gaby Dunn by Robin Roemer.
When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own.
Gaby Dunn is a 28-year-old polyamorous cis white woman. “I say bisexual but then people say no you mean pansexual and then I say fine queer and then people say queer is a slur how dare you so WHO KNOWS.” She’s a writer and YouTuber and actress/comedian.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Carolyn: When you say “poly,” what do you mean?
Gaby: I’ve said poly as a broader catch-all, but it’s weird because I do YouTube videos for a mostly younger audience so I think they’re just learning these terms and aren’t surrounded by any sort of different relationship models. Unless their parents are swingers in the suburbs. Or not even kids, for adults who watch the channel who are used to mainstream TV and movies. I try to… simplify. You can see them arguing in the comments about what it means. They’ll say, “Is he her boyfriend? Why does she say she has a girlfriend in this video? Why is she talking about dating?”
I have a primary person and then I can hook up or casually date or even have other relationships. So while I’ve been with my boyfriend, I had a girlfriend for a while. I do date/have somewhat serious relationships with other people. This girl was on and off for like a year and was a big emotional part of whatever else was going on. I think non-monogamy is just physical, right? And poly is relationships? That’s how I understand it but I could be wrong!
And I don’t always have to have one primary person either. I had two people I was seeing for a while who were pretty even in terms of how often I saw them and the level of commitment.
Carolyn: How do your relationships impact each other?
Gaby: I like having all my friends be friends so I think that influences how I do relationships. I want everyone to hang out! Which can be sort of shortsighted or selfish because I sometimes don’t understand why people wouldn’t want to. But it helps me a lot if they all get along. The last situation fell apart because of fighting between my boyfriend and the girl I was seeing. They were seeing each other some. They broke up but she wanted to keep seeing me, and that became a problem because now she was his ex.
Carolyn: Does the way you approach relationships impact what happens when they’re over? (Personally I seem to know a lot more poly and also queer people who are friends with exes, for instance.) Or maybe a better question is, how would you characterize your approach/attitude toward relationships?
Gaby: The queer people, everyone stays friends. But I’ve also never had the bad experiences with queer people that I’ve had with cis men so… Take from that what you will, world.
“That always seemed missing to me in monogamy. How can you be with this person and never talk to them about these things? But then I think about how hard it is to do and of course no one wants to do it.”
I think people would say I’m maybe too loose? Not enough rules? Which is a big thing I like about poly actually. It forces me to express myself and emotions in this very clear way that is VERY unnatural to me. I think of the poly discussions I’ve had and I feel like I sound pained. I talk so slowly and have to be so direct and explicit and it’s a thing I don’t think people in monogamous relationships ever have to do?
That always seemed missing to me in monogamy. How can you be with this person and never talk to them about these things? But then I think about how hard it is to do and of course no one wants to do it.
Carolyn: I think it’s a lot easier to do/not do when you’re in a relationship there are lots of models for instead of… not. What were your monogamous relationships like? How did you start to explore poly?
Gaby: That’s true. I think people don’t think it’s an option, or at least a viable option. My monogamous relationships were not great! But they also always had weird caveats for being open. I remember saying to college boyfriends, “Make out with whoever you want. Just don’t lie to me.” Before I even knew what poly was! My only concern was, “Don’t lie to me.” They always did. I think because they thought it was a trick.
Even grown men have been like, “This is a trick.”
It’s not a trick! Just don’t lie!
Okay but how can I lie then?
Just don’t!
Seems like a trick, no thanks.
In high school, I had a boyfriend but I was obsessed with this girl and I had this very teen movie thing in my head that hooking up with girls didn’t count, reinforced by, idk, every TV show and movie I ever saw. So for a long time, poly was like, “I have a boyfriend. I’m gonna be with hot girls too. Is that chill?” And the boy would be like, THE MOST CHILL. THE BEST. THIS IS GREAT. Except a high school boyfriend who lost his mind when he found out I’d been making out with this girl. He was really upset! And I remember feeling so confused. Why is he mad? It’s just a girl? Shout out to that guy for getting it.
With my college boyfriend, I was like, we can be together and see other people too. (I still didn’t know the word.) And he took that to mean, I will lie to you constantly about where I am and who I am with and also hook up with people in front of you even though you are clearly mad. All of college was me being like, “This can’t be right! You’re not supposed to lie!” And him being like, “I will now lie all the time.” I felt crazy. Because “don’t lie to me, but do what you want” seemed so simple???
And I was like, other people must be able to pull this off.
I was monogamous again for a while, and cheated on both those people and felt resentful. And then I dated another dude who was a repeat of college dude where I’d say, “Literally all I want is for you not to lie to me,” and he’d go, “Seems like a trick,” and then I found out all he was doing was lying and he’d fall back on “WELL YOU WANTED TO BE OPEN.” So it was my fault he was cheating because I was the poly one.
Then I dated a poly girl who was lovely, if a little too jealous.
Somewhere along the way I met a comedian named Myq Kaplan who’s pretty big and openly poly and talks about it and does jokes about it on TV and such. He’s rad. He became my best friend around that time and he was like, here are some books you’re going to be okay.
“I AM NOT WRONG. I am not broken! This is just different but it doesn’t mean I’m a fundamentally bad person!”
Carolyn: When did you evolve into your current form?
Gaby: Myq really normalized everything and I saw this successful, happy dude just talking about his life on TV and stage. And he sent me The Ethical Slut and he sent me links to Dan Savage and was like, “Right? Right?”
After the you-made-me-cheat-by-being-poly guy, I was so angry. And that anger became, “Okay, I AM NOT WRONG. I am not broken! This is just different but it doesn’t mean I’m a fundamentally bad person! I don’t have to be good enough for anyone!” Around that time I dated that girl who was great, but I think she wanted someone to be obsessed with her (which she’s since found so that’s a relief/great), and then I met my boyfriend.
He was not an obvious answer at all. He was monogamous and like, on paper the type of dude who says, “My father will hear about this!” But that was the first time I explained everything to someone and they were like, “Oh cool.” And I was like, you’re… fine? And he was like, sure yeah I’m interested in learning this. He’d had relationships fall apart in the past because of crushes he had on other people and didn’t understand why that had to be the case, so I think he was looking for poly too but hadn’t found it until he met me. And with him, it’s been what I fucking thought poly was all along! I knew I was right! You can just not lie!
Because he never thought it was a trick. He was like, “Oh, if I tell you this I’m just telling you. You’re not trying to trap me or get information to use again later.”
FUCKING FINALLY SOMEONE GOT IT
Carolyn: Haha
Gaby: I think monogamy is painted as a war between two people. Like any sitcom! Or even, I’ve had a lot of married men come after me in my life (I must give off a vibe?) and I always say, “Why don’t you just tell your wife you’re talking to someone?” And they laugh like I’m naive. One of them told me, “There are things married people keep from each other.” That really sat wrong with me. Why would I want that? Why would I want to be in a long-term relationship where I’m gaming the other person? Or being gamed? That would make me feel so unsettled. But it’s always in every movie or every show or every song or everything we consume: a couple against each other. They’re never shown as a team!
Carolyn: You never see just simply happy not-jealous not-obsessive long-term couples. Married people hate each other, or someone is trying to pull something over on the other, or there’s this “oh I must manipulate you all the time!” edge to everything.
Gaby: Yes! Why??? I don’t understand and sometimes I feel like an alien! Especially when monogamous married people make me seem naive for it.
Carolyn: “How dare you expect to like your partner?”
Gaby: Or even that you can talk to them! Why is it INSANE that you would say to your wife, “I have a crush on someone how funny.”
Carolyn: Above you mentioned that talking and expressing yourself and your emotions is very unnatural for you and that you have to force yourself to do it instead of falling back on rules. In those moments, what’s particularly challenging? I.e., Even when it’s okay to share, does anything make sharing especially hard?
Gaby: I get embarrassed about asking for things. I think because everyone wants to see themselves as above human emotion and as maybe the coolest person to ever live. So when something hurts me or makes me jealous, my instinct is to go, “No, you’re better than that.” But no one is!
I don’t like telling people not to do things, because I get resentful and my worst fear is someone resenting me in a relationship as being like, the old ball and chain. “Un-fun.” So when I have to say “no” to something someone wants and explain why (based on my personal feelings or my reaction or the emotions it brings up in me) I want to be like I AM A ROBOT I HAVE NO FEELINGS.
But then you have miscommunications. Like if I say, “Don’t hook up with that girl. She’s your friend’s roommate and your friend wouldn’t like it.” And then my boyfriend asks and the friend is like, “Oh go for it. I don’t mind.” He thinks my objection was because the friend would be mad. And once he gets the go ahead from the friend, he thinks he’s in the clear. (Which is a thing that happened.) What I should have said was, “I don’t want you to,” instead of making up reasons other people might be upset to seem like I don’t get upset.
Carolyn: It’s so much easier to make things about other people! How do your relationships shift when you date or sleep with someone new?
Gaby: Time management becomes a big thing. There’s periods where we see each other all the time and then where we don’t really. (We don’t live together.)
I think a lot of my monogamous friends go into a vortex when they start dating someone and hang out exclusively with them all the time so it becomes, “What are we doing tonight?” “What are we doing this weekend?” and that’s not a given here. With other partners too. You have to make a plan. Which is actually more interesting and leads to less boring “I’ll come over after work and we’ll just sit.” But there’s comfort in that assumption that the person is coming home so I get that too.
And I’ve tried to shoehorn like, “Okay I’m going out of town so everyone let’s just hang at this bar together tonight,” but my ex-girlfriend bailed once because she didn’t have any interest in competing for my attention while out at a bar.
Carolyn: How does being poly influence how you understand yourself or move through the world?
Gaby: I think it’s way less stressful because I’m free to be a person. To be flawed in the traditional societal sense. To not have to meet a mold that was set up a long time ago for agricultural reasons and then has continued I assume because of Valentine’s Day? It lets me create a community and to keep people in my life and experience all the different things I want to experience. I don’t feel like being with someone is the end of my life.
I’m not sure I agree with the common wisdom that a relationship is sacrifice. That seems horrible. Why would I want someone with me who is sacrificing enjoyment or experiences?
Loving the Whole Me: A Bisexual Mom on Coming Out to Her Family
I came out to my husband on Messenger of all places. We had been going through a pretty rough patch, and this is what it had come to. I had “come out” to myself about six months before. While I was accepting my identity as a bisexual, I realized I didn’t feel even close to comfortable sharing this identity with my husband. This feeling — that I couldn’t be my true self and be vulnerable in that way — made me question our whole relationship.
That day on Messenger, our relationship was on the rocks. I felt that if I couldn’t be myself with the person who was supposed to be my partner in life then our relationship wasn’t really based on love. You can’t genuinely love someone you don’t really know. We had been seeing a counselor and she had encouraged us to write letters to each other expressing our feelings and frustrations. This worked well for me, because my husband had the unfortunate habit of making a joke or being sourly sarcastic when something made him uncomfortable. In the past when I had told him something that was still a bit raw and unformed — a dream, a new interest, or a potential change in life direction — he was likely to make some fun of it. It was a nervous habit; telling jokes was his way of dealing with stress and uncertainty.
I couldn’t go through him making jokes about this. So, one day at work I summoned up the courage to send him a “letter.” I figured I had nothing to lose. Either he would be unkind by not being serious in a serious moment, or he would be supportive and prove me wrong. I sent him an article which I thought explained bisexuality well. I accompanied that article with a short, simple message saying that although I didn’t realize it fully until recently, I was indeed bisexual, that this was an undeniable part of my identity, and I could no longer comfortably hide this fact.
He never responded.
I waited a day and then sent him another message asking him if he had read my previous message. True to his style, he sent me a reply saying, yes he had received it, and thank you.
I left it at that. What do you say to “thank you?” I had thought the message would provoke an in-person conversation, but I didn’t want to push any further. Things were already tense.
Weeks went by. Maybe a couple of months. We didn’t talk about it. Things would happen where his acceptance seemed to be there — like when Orlando happened and I ordered a large rainbow flag; he helped me put it up. My son asked about what the rainbow was for. I explained that sometimes men love women and sometimes men love men, and women love women etc., and the rainbow celebrated all these different kinds of love. My husband was there and backed my explanation up. My five-year old son thought about it for about a second and said “And trees can love trees and everyone can love everyone! That’s great!” Since he was currently in love with a girl at school he’d known since he was one, his mom who is a woman, and his dad who is a man, this made absolute sense to him from his desexualized understanding of love.
However outside, small moments of implied acceptance like this one I didn’t bring it up as a discussion item and neither did he. It felt like an unspoken quiet in our fragile relationship. We still weren’t talking about it directly.
One month before the Pride Parade we went for a walk on the beach. Our son was at his grandparents’ and we were getting some very rare “couple time.” It was a beautiful sunny June afternoon. Couples were walking hand-in-hand along the boardwalk; families were playing in the sand; teenagers were picnicking and sunbathing. We were the only ones, it seemed, under a damp black cloud. I told him it felt like we were too broken to fix. We had been in counselling and discussion for months. I felt like there was still something holding me back from trying to make it work. Just as we were almost back to our car and headed home I finally exclaimed, “and we haven’t even talked about me telling you I’m bisexual! Why haven’t we talked about that? This seems like a pretty important thing to talk about!” He explained that he had merely wanted to be respectful and was waiting for me to bring it up when I was comfortable. He added that he would very much like to talk about it if I liked anytime. He was waiting for me. I was waiting for him.
We didn’t talk about it that day. We had to get back to pick up our little man. But the air felt clear after that. Something changed on that day; I felt the weight lifting. He had said more than “thank you.” We went on a pre-planned trip to visit some friends in California and decided to make San Francisco our last stop. We stayed just outside the Castro district and spent most of our time in and around this area. I talked openly about how good it felt to be in a city that so fully embraced the gay community. I told my husband that I’d decided to go to the Pride Parade when we got home, which would be coming up just as we were returning from holiday. He asked if he and our son could join me.
It was a scorching hot July 31 the day we went as a family to Pride. My husband had packed us a lunch and some water. We slathered on sunscreen. Miraculously we found a spot within reaching distance of the floats going by, right next to an alley for our son to run around in when he needed a break from the noise, and adjacent to a Safeway for regular snacks, refreshments and washroom breaks. My son was fascinated by the elaborate costumes, the music, and the dancing. He was slightly more impressed by the police and fire floats. He complained endlessly about the noise, squirmed when he needed sunscreen reapplied, ate sushi on the side of the road, and accepted compliments on his hipster hat. After a while he had settled in, and being his cute gregarious self, he managed to be weighed down substantially by the load of beaded necklaces he was given by parade participants.
My husband collected beaded necklaces, chatted with others watching the parade, and helped our son get the best views by putting him on his shoulders and sneaking him to the front.
I was relieved and felt liberated by my own and my family’s acceptance of my sexuality — not that my son actually understands what that means at this point. It was a bonding experience. I got to attend the parade, and felt like I had genuinely deserved to be part of this community now that I was no longer hiding that part of myself.
At the same time, I felt invisible. Traveling with my husband and son in tow, I looked pretty straight. And, although I know that everyone is welcome at Pride, and it shouldn’t matter what what you look like, I wanted to be just a little less visually straight that day. For that one day I didn’t want to be perceived as an ally at the Parade. I wanted to be a card-carrying member of the gay community; to be a part of and visible in a community I had denied myself for so many years.
We watched the whole parade, spent some time on the beach with a friend and her son, and then walked up toward the center of the City to find some early dinner. My son was bragging about his large collection of multi-coloured beads, but had also begun to complain about wanting food. We walked past the Flygirl Productions girls-only event. It was an outdoor party with a DJ and a bar. I had never seen so many queer women congregated in one place before. It looked terribly fun; I had the urge to ditch my family for a drink (just one drink!). Instead, we kept on toward dinner.
Over dinner my husband and my son talked about how much fun they had and swapped stories about floats they had seen, beads that had been acquired, and the noise. My son innocently said something about letting the organizers know to make the parade a little quieter next year. My husband and I exchanged smiles and joked about how different the experience would have been without a five-year old along for the ride. My husband pointed out that our shared workplace wasn’t represented at the parade and we plotted to coordinate their participation next year.
My son still talks about the Pride Parade and pictures of our day are included in our family summer picture album. My son will grow up attending the Parade, thinking it normal for girls to love girls and boys to love boys and for some people to love boys and girls.
We still haven’t sat down and had a heart-to-heart about my sexuality, but now it seems like we don’t need to; the details aren’t important. My husband showed his support by joining me hand-in-hand at the Parade; a symbolic nod to loving the whole me — the true me. We’re all looking forward to going next year and my son will be sporting ear muffs for the festivities.
Sara Ramirez is Bisexual: “Grey’s Anatomy” Star Comes Out, Gets An Alternative Lifestyle Haircut
This morning, at the 40 to None Summit to benefit LGBT homelessness, the gorgeous and talented Sara Ramirez showed up to introduce us to her fantastic new buzz cut and her intersectional truth: she’s the multi-racial daughter of immigrants, and she’s bisexual.
Anyone else just burst into tears? No? Just me?
Most of us know Sara as Grey’s Anatomy’s Callie Torres, half of Calzona, one of the longest running queer relationships on network television. Callie was the first person I ever heard use the word bisexual on the teevee. She made no apologies for her truth, and loved with abandon. She meant so much to me. She inspired me; she brought me comfort. The curve of Callie’s path as a bisexual woman helped me understand and embrace my own bisexuality, and I was gutted when she left the show. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch it since. But today, seeing the amazing woman who brought Callie so much passion stand up in her truth, embrace her intersections, and use her voice to bring awareness to the cause of LGBT homelessness, it’s almost more than my cold black heart can handle.
Shit is tough right now, you guys, but today, in this moment? Sara Ramirez is an out, queer, woman of color, and I for one couldn’t be more thrilled.
What a year for bisexual visibility!
UPDATE: The True Colors Fund has released a full video of Sara’s speech. (Get ready to cry again.)
Bisexual Governor Kate Brown Talks Openly About Surviving Domestic Violence, Shuts Down Opponent’s Ignorance
Kate Brown, Oregon’s current governor, has already made a mark in history; she’s one of the few openly bisexual women in public office in the US (others include JoCasta Zamarripa, Kyrsten Sinema, andMary González, who is pansexual). This week, she worked for another kind of visibility when she came out as a survivor of domestic violence during a debate with her Republican opponent, Dr. Bud Pierce. Brown’s open declaration is important in part because bisexual-identified women suffer disproportionately from domestic and intimate partner violence; in 2015 the Williams Institute found that 56.9% of bi women reported experiencing intimate partner violence in their lifetimes compared to 32.3% of heterosexual women and 40.4% of lesbians. Oregon bisexual activist Lynette McFadzen told LGBTQ Nation “We believe we will see more people coming out, seeking support, finding their bi community, and literally saving their own lives because of Gov. Brown sharing her story.”
Brown’s discussion of her experiences also matters because she used it to refute the ignorant, victim-blaming and harmful claims of Dr. Pierce that “A woman that has a great education and training and a great job is not susceptible to this kind of abuse by men, women or anyone,” a dangerous assumption that contributes to domestic violence going unnoticed and overlooked. Brown responded that “I’m honestly not even sure where to start. I grew up in a middle class family. I went to law school… This is not just about [having access to] power. This is about making sure women are not discriminated against because of their gender, because of their race, and because of their sexual orientation.”
Brown’s point is underscored by the high-profile case of Amber Heard’s abuse at the hands of her husband Johnny Depp earlier this year; despite the immense privileges Heard has access to, she was still emotionally and physically abused, as well as being smeared in the press and subject to specifically biphobic character assassination, which is unfortunately commonplace and which can serve to justify and normalize the abuse of bisexual women.
The gossip website Hollywood Life alleges that jealousy over her former romantic attachments was the cause: The A-list actor was uncomfortable with his estranged wife’s “lesbian friends.” The site claims, “Amber’s bisexual past was reportedly a big problem.” If you didn’t catch the sneaky suggestion of infidelity, the National Enquirer is happy to clear it up any confusion: “Johnny was surrounded by women who kept him fretting about his bisexual bride’s lesbian past!” According to the mag, the “other women” in question included photographer Tasya Van Ree, to whom Heard was formerly engaged, and model/actress Cara Delevingne.
The year so far has been characterized by highs and lows for the bisexual community; the coming out of numerous public figures like Amandla Stenberg, Mara Wilson, Bella Thorne, Rebecca Sugar, Stephanie Beatriz, Lord Ivar Mountbatten of the British Royal Family, and even Wonder Woman. A survey just this week found that the number of people in the UK identifying as bisexual rose 45% in three years. The White House held its first-ever open bisexual community briefing this year. However, as is the case for so many vulnerable and marginalized groups, like trans women, visibility doesn’t mean that problems go away — in some cases, hypervisibility can increase danger. And unfortunately, it doesn’t mean stigma is over, either; a controversial story in the YA lit community this month showed us that, with trade publication Voya Magazine warning readers that YA novel Run includes “many references to Bo [one of the main characters] being bisexual and an abundance of bad language, so it is recommended for mature junior and senior high readers” — even though Bo doesn’t have sex in the book and heterosexual characters do, making the content warning specifically about her sexual orientation.
Kate Brown’s brave explanation illustrates the tension of the current point in history; she’s gained access to legislative power and made history as the first openly bisexual governor in the US, but is still subject to at least some of the same violence that the bisexual community as a whole faces. Brown also faces election this November, when she’ll fight to stay in office where she can attempt to address the fact that “more than half of Oregon women and girls experience domestic or sexual violence during their lifetime.”
Poly Pocket: Gray Ace, Bi & Poly
When there aren’t any models for how you want to move through the world, it’s harder to move through the world. There’s no one right way to do ethical non-monogamy, just as there’s no one right way to do ethical monogamy, and no way is better or worse than any other, just better or worse for those involved. Poly Pocket looks at all the ways queer people do polyamory: what it looks like, how we think about it, how it functions (or doesn’t), how it feels, because when you don’t have models you have to create your own.
Linh is a 22-year-old Vietnamese-American women who is bisexual, gray ace, and poly, and lives in the Bay Area. She is in one long-term committed relationship and is casually dating around with the hopes of finding other long-term partners, and works as a full-time content creator for a tech startup by day, writer of fiction and personal essays by night.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Carolyn: When did you start to explore polyamory?
Linh: The first time I started exploring polyamory was when I was technically someone’s secondary partner. It was really strange because I went from being a serial monogamist to becoming someone’s secondary partner. It was such a drastic change and it really hurt my self-esteem I think. I don’t think I was emotionally ready to be in that position, and my partner lived really far away and didn’t deserve to deal with my jealousies and issues, so I decided to end that relationship.
It’s not all sad, though. That relationship sparked some discussion of polyamory in my current relationship. I realized that polyamory was perfect for me, but only when I felt ready for it (which I did and do with my current partner).
Carolyn: What was that initial discussion in your current relationship like? Was there a catalyst for it?
Linh: I had started hanging out with my current boyfriend near the end of that initial relationship so he knew that my ex-partner was polyamorous. That kicked off the conversation because he had never heard of polyamory before. We were also talking about our sexualities and he basically wondered if I felt stifled never having had long-term relationships with women (or much experience, really, outside of my first poly relationship). We loved each other, but he didn’t want me to feel like I couldn’t date and fall in love with women just because I was with him. It was a really open, honest, and vulnerable conversation and I was scared because I hear about how bisexual women are stigmatized and objectified, but my boyfriend never made me feel like that. I’m glad I’m exploring polyamory with him!
Carolyn: That’s such a great reaction! How long ago was that? How have things evolved since?
Linh: It’s been around a year now! We opened up our relationship summer of 2015 and it’s been great! Jealousy isn’t really an issue with the two of us so we’ll talk openly about dates and crushes and it’s totally fine. Once in a while I’ll go on a date that, after I tell him how it goes, he’ll tell me it made him uncomfortable and so we’ll talk about why and come up with rules from there. The way we go about evolving our poly relationship is really organic in that way.
As for how dating is going for me personally, it’s been tough to: (a) find queer women to date (though Tinder helps) and (b) find queer women who aren’t looking for a threesome buddy. I’ve met plenty of cool people, but haven’t really had a connection with most so I can’t say I’ve found another partner yet. Being gray ace and an introvert makes it tough for me to find people I click with romantically and sexually so it’s probably gonna take a while before I find another partner haha. It’s been fun, though!
Carolyn: What reasons might there be for developing a new rule? What sort of negotiations take place around them?
Linh: Well, mostly it’s from things that we can’t predict! For example, I went on a date with this woman once and it went pretty well. However, near the end I somehow suddenly ended up hanging out with both her boyfriend and her (I think I was walking her to her car, but then it turned out her boyfriend was there and was expecting to meet me). It made me feel weird because, to me, that’s like if you brought a close family member or your best friend on a first date — it’s just awkward. My boyfriend was uncomfortable because he felt like it wasn’t a date with me and one other person, but rather a date with a couple which is something we never thought to discuss before. From then on, we decided that going on dates with couples, intentionally or unintentionally, was a no-no.
Basically, if someone feels like something’s fishy or weird, then that person’s feelings have to be first priority and decisions are made accordingly. It’s been working out for us so far because we generally have the same vibes given the same situation.
“Basically, if someone feels like something’s fishy or weird, then that person’s feelings have to be first priority.”
Carolyn: How does your relationship shift in any other ways when you date or crush on someone new?
Linh: It involves a lot of playful teasing and advice-giving! We both get super flustered with new crushes (as most people do!) and I find it super cute to see him in that phase again, and I know he finds it charming when I’m all blushy and crushy too. It adds a new layer of excitement to our relationship. Similar to how your best friend would be super excited to hear you have a crush on the local Starbucks barista.
He has a lot more experience flirting with women than I do, so I always ask him for advice on, say, response texts or asking women out. He also comes to me when he wants a second pair of eyes at a flirty message, too.
Carolyn: I love that kind of compersion! What’s the best part? What sometimes feels like a struggle?
Linh: The best part isn’t even the dating, tbh. The best part is feeling open and honest with my best friend/lover! In a different relationship, I can imagine feeling this inner turmoil of never getting to explore my queer identity and further digging myself into this hole of feeling “not queer enough,” all because I’d primarily been in heteronormative relationships and am generally femme-presenting. Being poly with my boyfriend makes me feel like myself in a truly indescribable way.
The struggle is the dating lol.
Like I mentioned before, I’m gray ace and introverted so it takes a while for me to open up to people and it’s hard to even be attracted to people. I think I was a serial monogamist before because once I fall for someone, I fall hard — there’s really no in-between for me. It’s super rare, that’s all. Tinder’s great for helping me find queer girls to date, but it’s a terrible way for me to find someone I could be attracted to so it’s all been a real hit-or-miss for me.
And this is a cliche poly answer for a reason, but the other trouble is time. On top of spending time with my boyfriend, I have lots of side hobbies and family and friends I’d like to spend time with so spreading time between it all is already hard as it is. Sometimes it’s just not worth it to meet up with a stranger who I may or may not hit it off with.
Carolyn: Time management is such a real problem though! When I was first learning about poly I read a lot of things that distill to “infinite love, finite time,” and nothing about that has changed over the years. Do you have any boundaries with how you spend your time, or any ways of managing it across all types of relationships?
Linh: “Infinite love, finite time” describes it perfectly!
I wish I had a more concrete answer to your question, but I don’t think I’ve progressed far enough in my other poly relationships to know the boundaries that will have to be set. So far, all of our rules have been pretty organic so I imagine when the time comes, the boundaries set will come about organically as well.
Carolyn: Above you alluded to something you’ve spoken about a lot on Twitter: the intersection of your queer, Asian-American, femme and gray-ace identities. Where does poly intersect with these?
Linh: I think the idea that all of these identities exist in a single person is all at once radical and stereotypical. For a long time, I was afraid I was living out a stereotype. I was afraid I was a “greedy” bisexual, greedy in the sense that I’m poly. Asian/Asian-American women are sexualized and fetishized as is, so my “greedy bisexual” identity made me feel like I was a “bad queer,” someone who took away from the community more than I could ever possibly give to it. I felt like my identity was false, even though I knew it was my truth.
It took me a while to see my identity as not a stereotypical one, but a radical one. It’s one thing to think bisexuals are “greedy” and that Asian-American women are sex objects. But it’s another to accept that a bisexual, poly, Asian-American woman exists and is in full control of her own sexual and ethnic identity. Being queer, Asian-American, femme, and gray ace — this is my identity and I get to choose that that means to me. Not anybody else. My identity isn’t any less of a queer identity because somebody out there decided to take it and twist it into something else. My identity, and all of its intersections, is just one of the many beautiful identities that exists. And they are all just as valid as any other.
“I felt like my identity was false, even though I knew it was my truth. It took me a while to see my identity as not a stereotypical one, but a radical one.”
I’d like to touch on being gray ace and poly for a second. When people think of polyamory, they usually imagine a huge orgy or someone who’s having sex with a lot of people. In my case, that’s not what’s happening at all (power to the people living their lives like this, though! It’s just not for me). I just know in my heart that I am capable and willing to love more than one person — sex or no sex. I’ve already felt this love for some of my friends while I was in perfectly happy relationships before. I thought it was platonic love before, but looking back now, I’m confident that it was romantic love. None of it escalated to sex, but I was happy regardless with our relationship. Not all poly people are in it for the sex. When I say I am capable of loving more than one person, I really do mean it. Just love would be enough for me.
Carolyn: That is really beautiful! …That is geeky but it’s also true. What do you want your future to look like? What vision are you working toward or hoping for?
Linh: Ideally I’d be in a triad with my boyfriend and another woman and we’d be a happy little family! It’d be cool if we were all in love with each other, but if my boyfriend and partner were just good friends I’d be perfectly happy with that too ☺️
Margarita With a Straw Comes to Netflix, (Almost) Delivers the Disabled Queer Character We Need
I heard whispers of Margarita With a Straw when it first came out in 2014, mostly among my activist friends. It looked like the cinematic unicorn we’d been searching for: a love story between two disabled women of color, presented without sensationalism or pandering. The best movie out there about crip queers. Legitimately fun. I had my doubts – because honestly, consuming media as a disabled person is an exercise in disappointment. When a movie that romanticizes committing suicide so your able-bodied girlfriend won’t “miss all the things someone else could give her” grosses $205 million worldwide, you learn not to expect much. So I was cautious when Margarita finally popped up on Netflix. Could it be? Was it really that good?
In short: yes, mostly.
Margarita is pretty damn close to the movie I’ve always wanted. It’s funny, touching, visually rich, and only slightly too syrupy toward the end. Its protagonist, Laila, fulfills most of my dream criteria for disabled characters. And save for a few veers into lazy storytelling (one in particular – we’ll get to that), it sets an encouraging standard for what disabled queer film can look like, and what it should already look like by now.
I’ll spare you a ton of plot up front; plenty of able-bodied reviewers have that handled. Suffice to say that Laila leaves her home country of India for New York, where her cerebral palsy and emerging bisexuality collide to blow up her entire life. She falls in love, reckons with her body image, comes out to her family, endures shattering loss, and generally does a lot of living in an hour and 40 minutes. But what strikes me about Margarita isn’t the arc of the story or its major events; it’s the little details, and as much what doesn’t happen as what does.
The first half hour alone features Laila getting into arguments, doing creative work, swearing, loving her family, celebrating her college acceptance, and masturbating in her wheelchair – almost of none of which we ever get to see disabled folks do on screen. And that last one, of course, shows us where we’re headed the rest of the way. Yes, this is a “disabled person discovers their sexuality” movie, but Laila is never healed (literally or figuratively) by that discovery. She’s one of the messiest characters in this movie. She’s clumsy about her desires because she’s figuring them out for herself, without an able-bodied savior. And in fact, when her aha moment comes, it’s not courtesy of some white guy who “likes her anyway” – it’s thanks to Khanum, a blind Pakistani-Bangladeshi badass who woos her at a police brutality protest (AKA the gayest meet cute of all time).
via GLAAD
It helps that Laila and Khanum’s relationship is, well, hot. You can feel that they’re into each other from the start, and Khanum in particular comes across as someone who fully embraces what she wants. She says “I just like to be who I am all the time” and means it. And when she reaches out to touch Laila’s face because she “just wants to see her,” it’s easily the sexiest scene so far. She’s doing what she has to do to flirt, and as a result, knows how to use her body. She isn’t trying to hide from its realities; she’s sexy because of rather than despite her blindness.
And that’s the best part of Margarita: it doesn’t “despite” disability. Laila and Khanum’s disabilities matter in their lives. And you know what, thank God. Because so often we’re told – by authority figures, significant others, ourselves, and yes, media – that the “solution” to disability is to minimize its presence. Margarita counters that disability doesn’t need to be solved. Instead, it opts for the truth: some people are disabled, and most of us are out here being happy and doing stuff. We’re not necessarily sick (there’s noteworthy contrast between disabled and ill bodies in one secondary storyline), our disabilities can change shape day to day (Laila uses both a power chair and a walker), and we aren’t only happy because it makes able folks feel good. We are happy because we enjoy being ourselves. Imagine that.
Okay, about that unfortunate veer. I don’t want to give it more ink than it’s worth, so here’s the gist: after they move in together, Laila cheats on Khanum with Jared, the cute-I-guess British guy who types up her notes during class at NYU. (At least we know she’s exercised her rights in the disability services office. Ugh.) Anyway, this plot is so boring it’s exhausting. There are so many more interesting relationship problems than “whoops, the bisexual one couldn’t keep it in her pants.” Especially because Laila explicitly identifies as bi – she actually says the word, which is rare in film/everywhere! – I was so let down when the writers made her into the Unfaithful Slut. Bisexual characters too often get blamed for ruining relationships and I’m tired of watching that. At the same time, seeing a disabled woman a) make a gigantic mistake and b) pursue her sexual desires to a reckless degree was kind of refreshing? So I couldn’t hate it as much as I wanted to? Shows you just how starved we are for well-developed disabled characters.
I am unequivocally disappointed, though, that both of Margarita’s leads (Kalki Koechlin and Sayani Gupta) as well as its director (Shonali Bose) are able-bodied in real life. That actually surprised me given how well-received the film has been among disabled folks; I naively assumed that anything we liked that much had to feature at least one actual disabled person. Guess not! Admittedly, Koechlin and Gupta do an admirable job, and according to interviews Bose is bisexual and has a cousin with cerebral palsy, so it’s not like she’s pulling all this from nowhere (as able-bodied people are wont to do). But still, it’s frustrating to realize that even in the best movie of its kind to date, real representation – beyond good acting and secondhand understanding – apparently remains too much to ask.
Disabled characters are cropping up in more and more media, and it’s past time to start doing the real work of hiring disabled people to play ourselves. Margarita With A Straw fails on that front, but offers a strong primer on how to negotiate the plot and nuances of a disabled story. This was the best we had in 2014; now I want a movie that’s just as solid and made by disabled folks on both sides of the camera. Margarita can’t be our only option for disabled characters who aren’t straight white dudes. Cue it up on your next Netflix afternoon, see what it does well, and then let’s take the next step. There’s so much more to do.
Here Are 22 of Autostraddle’s Best Articles on Bisexuals and Bisexuality
Bisexual issues, writers and representation have been a part of Autostraddle since our beginning; every day and in every way we’re here on the home page and behind the scenes, writing, editing, emailing, tweeting, Photoshopping our team members’ faces onto stock photos for important post graphics, pushing the envelope when it comes to ways to use the Dolly Parton emoji in Slack. But those things aren’t always visible, and we aren’t always as visible as we could be. We don’t always write about bisexuality — we’ve multifaceted people who live at a lot of intersections, and we cover a lot of topics — but for the sake of visibility today, let’s take a look through some of the best writing we’ve ever published on bisexual issues. Most of these are written by bisexual people, some are written by allies of ours on topics related to bisexual representation or experience, some are written by super amazing famous people like Roxane Gay or Gaby Dunn or our interview with Mara Wilson; all of them are great. Some of the comment sections on these pieces got dicey, because that’s unfortunately the nature of covering bisexual issues on the internet; please keep that in mind when reading and refrain from contributing from any fights in the comments, which will only reignite issues for the original author.
This is, of course, only a fraction of what we’ve published by and about bisexuals, and we are very excited at the prospect of publishing much more in the future!
Impossible Machinery: On (Not) Coming Out to My Dad as Bisexual, by Maree
I decide that every time I can, I will say the words My Ex-Girlfriend and I do, all the blood rushing to my face as I try to make the mentions seem off-hand or casual, searching my father’s face for any sign of surprise, or recognition or understanding. At one point, I think he nods. But he does not address it outright, and I cannot bring myself to do so when we say goodbye. After he gets in his car, drives away, I stand outside with my brother as he smokes a cigarette, mentally kicking myself.
Mara Wilson Knows Your First Crush Was Miss Honey: The Autostraddle Interview, interview by Audrey
I did not know if I was ever going to come out publicly. I’m not exactly paparazzi material, but I do remember worrying “What if I’m out on a date with a woman or someone non-binary, and someone sees and tweets about it?” I had hinted at it on Twitter, and thought maybe I would just be one of those kind of Bi/Queer women who never makes a statement, you just see them dating a woman one day. (Ideally, that woman would be Janelle Monae or Kate McKinnon.) But I had already had a rough month, full of loss and stress, and the Orlando attack really shook me. I was sad, frustrated, scared. It was an impulsive decision, emotional rather than rational, but I guess at that moment I didn’t want to hide anymore.
Anne of Green Gables Is Obviously Bisexual, by Heather
“We must join hands—so,” said Anne gravely. “It ought to be over running water. We’ll just imagine this path is running water. I’ll repeat the oath first. I solemnly swear to be faithful to my bosom friend, Diana Barry, as long as the sun and moon shall endure. Now you say it and put my name in.”
We’ve Always Been Here: Honoring Bisexual History, Imagining Bisexual Futures, by Audrey
“In the 70s we fought very hard to break the labels out,” said black bi elder ABilly Jones-Hennin. “I was part of the movement in the 70s, and we started to say that it is important for the public to recognize that there are lesbians, bisexuals and transgender folks.”
It’s A War Out There: How Queer Female Friendships Can Save Us All, by Gaby Dunn
I was out as a bisexual, but it mostly served as a way for these male friends to ask insulting questions with impunity. And because I didn’t know any better, I saw this as a hazard of friendship. This was my lot in life; the chill bisexual who took it as a compliment when she was referred to exclusively as “the girl” by her male group of friends. It wasn’t until I was 25 years old that it occurred to me that I could seek out other queer woman and surround myself with them instead. And not just “could,” but that doing it was vital to my sanity and my success. It was something I can’t believe I’d ever gone without.
We See You: An Open Thread for Bisexual Women Dating Men, by the team
We get a lot of feedback and questions from bi women who date men and/or who are in long-term relationships with men; while there’s bucketfuls of information out in the world about dating men, it’s aimed at straight people and doesn’t touch upon a lot of what comes up in different-gender relationships for bisexual people, and queer women’s spaces tend not to discuss the issue in much depth. Many of our bi staff and writers who date men have the same issues and questions. So many women feel like there isn’t a space to talk about their experiences in this area. So! That brings us here; we’ve tried to make the space we want to see in the world in the form of this open thread.
More Than Words: Bi Bi Bi, by Cara Giaimo
Bisexual people have suffered disproportionately from invisibility, erasure, biphobia, terrible representation on The Real L Word, shockingly low emotional and physical health, and even worse New York Times headlines than most identity groups. The bisexual community struggled for decades to reclaim a word in order to describe an identity that still slips through the cracks. While communal quests for inclusivity are noble — and it would be great to find an umbrella term that all the people it covers want to stand under — we have to make sure that, in searching, we don’t negate that history.
37 Books By, For, or About Bisexual or Otherwise Non-Monosexual People, by the team
The Internet, and actually also real life, can be a minefield for people who want to learn about or talk about bisexuality. The effort of trying to sift through the straight-up biphobia and the fetishizing porn aimed at straight men can wear you out long before you manage to find anything helpful, insightful, or illuminating. To try to make this process a little easier, we’ve compiled a starter of a list of resources. Here you’ll find academic books and nonfiction books documenting the experiences of bisexual people, fiction or memoir that depicts bisexual people, and a few online resources.
You Need Help: Do I Call Myself Bisexual?, by a roundtable of bi team members
In terms of what will resonate personally with you most, and what you want to call yourself inside your own head, that’s a different conversation. What do the words queer or bisexual mean to you?
The Second to Last Woman I Loved, by Roxane Gay
I had gotten in the habit, you see, of dating women who wouldn’t give me what I wanted, who couldn’t possibly love me enough because I was a gaping wound of need. I couldn’t admit this to myself but there was a pattern of intense emotional masochism, of throwing myself into the most dramatic relationships possible, of needing to be a victim of some kind over, and over, and over. That was something familiar, something I understood.
Trust No One (Or, Everything I Know About Love I Learned From The X-Files), by Rachel
“How long have you known you were bisexual?” she asked one day. We were in my bed; she spoke into my shoulder with her arms around me. I don’t remember what I told her. Months later, I found a folded-up note in my locker, which was not unusual; it was unusual that it concluded with “What I’m trying to say is I love you.” I folded it back up immediately and hid it between the outer case and inner body of my graphing calculator and went to class. I never told her I had read it; it would have required admitting something was real that I wasn’t ready to believe in, a version of myself I wasn’t ready to believe was possible.
You Need Help: You’re Bisexual and Your Girlfriend Wishes You Weren’t, by Rachel
It sucks that your girlfriend has had these negative experiences with other women! It really does! But her ex-girlfriends aren’t every bisexual woman. And more importantly, you aren’t her ex-girlfriends. You’re you. And your girlfriend has a responsibility to deal with the baggage she’s brought into this relationship; while you can certainly support her in doing that, it’s not your job to contort yourself to fit how she’s feeling
The L Word and “But Not Too Bi”: Flipping The Script Is Not Much Better, by Rose
Alice could easily be a lesbian who slowly came to her true sexual identity after believing she was bisexual; this is also realistic. And Tina’s cheating on Bette – a relationship that was on the fritz anyway – isn’t necessarily a problem absent a cultural stereotype of bi people as cheaters. People of all sexual orientations cheat, after all. Certainly, none of these situations are necessarily unrealistic. So is it merely a lack of diversity in experiences, or are they problematic on their own?
5 Ways Bi Women Can Pursue Better Health and Wellness, by Audrey
Compiled from the wisdom of numerous reports, online resources and experts, here are five ways that you can take care of your own health in the face of high risks, economic pressures and often incompetent care providers.
Becoming Visible: On Coming Out as Bisexual, by a roundtable of bi staff members and readers
In high school I tried to embrace it, but all of the girls I ever wanted to date ended up with the boys I wanted to date. I wasn’t ashamed of it or anything, but my fear of rejection prevented me from ever approaching women outside of the context of hooking up at parties. By the time I got to college, I was so used to downplaying my sexuality that I didn’t feel “queer enough” to be a member of the queer community.
Queer Texas Rep. Mary Gonzalez Is Hope and Action and The Coolest Politician Ever, by Gabby
It’s going to GLBTQ functions and talking about race, and people who are differently abled and their needs and talking about all of these specific things (water, energy etc) and even talking about my issues with depression. These are all things that don’t get talked about in a really transparent way and I think that’s so important to being in the queer world: honesty and transparency, because that’s where we find our liberation.
Oh Gay Cupid! True Life: I’m an Equal Opportunity Makeout Artist, by Stef
I was shy and single and in the market to go out for a series of awkward drinks with foxy strangers, so I clicked the box that made the most sense and moved on with my life.
Asylum Seekers and “Dishonest” Sexualities: Bisexuality at the Border, by Fikri
Can we really expect the UK Home Office to believe the stories of bisexual asylum seekers (and others who deviate from expected gay narratives, including those who came out later in life and asexual people) when gay activism and media coverage often replicate similar dynamics of biphobia and bi invisibility? Non-monosexual asylum seekers are not only interrogated on their sexual and relationship histories but are expected to “display” their sexuality in rigid, restricted ways even while in the UK, when it is exactly scrutiny of their sexual orientation and lives that they are escaping.
Evan Rachel Wood is Bisexual, by Riese
Evan Rachel Wood Bisexual is Just Like Us!
For All The Girls I Loved Before I Knew I Could, by Audrey
In college, my long-distance boyfriend who I loved a beautiful, frightening amount for a very hard 17 months gave me a pass to kiss girls while drunk. We never talked much about why I wanted to do that. It just seemed like the thing to do. Texas, my glorious, red as blood Texas, was already a weird place to grow up as an anti-death-penalty, skeptical-of-capitalism vegetarian. What if queerness meant Texas wouldn’t feel like home? What if queerness meant my skin wouldn’t feel like home?
Coming Out As An Amorphous Weirdo, by Stef
From what I’d heard, this was the sort of thing I should have figured out during puberty, or (as the cliche goes) at the very least experimented with in college. I was fairly certain I was still attracted to boys, but my eyes had been opened to a whole new world of possibilities. At the same time, the terms I’d heard (“bisexual,” “pansexual,” whathaveyou) did nothing for me, and I felt like none of these things directly applied to me. Sometimes I’d look at my friends who were just straight or just gay, or hear people on this very website confidently talking about how they’d known they were gay since they were little kids, and tried to imagine being so certain about anything.
His Girl Has A Girlfriend: On Bisexuality in Hip-Hop, by Brittani
Hip hop and R&B remain genres fraught with tension when it comes to relations with the LGBTQ community. Between Nicki Minaj’s faux bisexuality and Chris Brown’s what-seems-like-weekly homophobic rants, who would’ve thunk that male artists would be so affirming of the queer lady lifestyle…kind of? In these industries, being a gay male is equated with weakness and failure as it’s the exact opposite of the “I got bitches” mentality that’s so prevalent. Why then are lady loving ladies the holographic Charizard card of urban music?
Bisexual Teens Speak Out In the #ILoveBiSelf Twitter Chat Tonight! At 7 ET
Today is Celebrate Bisexuality Day, and a group of passionate teenagers are taking to Twitter to make sure everyone knows it.
Join the #ILoveBIself Twitter Chat on #CelebrateBisexualityDay at 7 pm ET! #BiWeek pic.twitter.com/Fzb19qfrRH
— GLSEN (@GLSEN) September 20, 2016
GLSEN and five members of the National Student Council launched a Twitter campaign called #ILoveBiSelf that will culminate tonight in a live chat at 7 p.m. E.T. These five bi high schoolers will be talking about what it’s like to be bi at school, what schools and communities can do to support bisexual young people, and a lot more. This chat led by youth is so important, because they are the authorities on their own experiences. They were kind enough to chat with Autostraddle as well.
“I advocate for bisexual youth via social media and do my best to help empower those like me,” said Ellie Peña, a high school senior in Houston. “I feel like people are becoming more comfortable with themselves, as acceptance of the LGBTQIA+ community has been growing larger. The rise of self-love within our communities that I have seen in both real life and social media is incredibly remarkable.”
They said they never knew about bisexuality while growing up in a conservative Latino family and they hope to help other young people avoid that feeling of isolation.
These young people are proud to be bi, and they have deep understanding of bisexual history and activism. Katie Regittko, a junior in Raleigh, NC, said they struggled with identifying as bisexual because they, like many people, grew up with the idea that bisexual means an attraction to exactly two, binary genders. Once they learned that historic and contemporary bisexual communities have proudly claimed a gender-expansive understanding of bisexuality, the label was a perfect fit.
“Using the term bisexual to describe myself felt like coming home to an identity that genuinely fit my feelings, which was a really freeing experience,” Katie said. “Identifying as bisexual is also liberating in the sense that we’re reclaiming a term that was wrongly used to describe our identity as a mental illness in the DSM III. Today I use the terms bisexual and queer to identify my sexuality.”
In addition to hosting groundbreaking Twitter chats, these five teenagers are all involved in activism with their schools and communities. And they all agreed that social media and the internet are a key part of activism for Generation Z.
“I am a co-leader of my GSA at school, and I participate in leadership classes and programs through local organizations. My work is focused on advocacy for transgender people, for gay and bisexual people, against structural racism, and for the abolition of prisons,” said Emme Goldman, a trans woman in 10th grade in Madison, WI. “The use of technology and social media as tools to speak to personal experiences and injustices has been one of the most empowering things in the progress and propulsion of social movements.”
According to a survey from the J Walter Thompson Innovation Group, more than half of teenagers today identify as something other than heterosexual, which is substantially higher than any other generation — millenials clock in at 35 percent according to the same data. But even as queer teens are coming out in droves, they face many challenges. Whether it’s parents and teachers who don’t believe bisexuality is real or peers making harassing comments in the hallways, it may seem like life for queer teens hasn’t changed much in the last 10 years.
But there is at least one huge difference: now, more than ever, queer teens are naming themselves and seeing each other. That feels especially poignant on Bi Visibility Day.
“I feel that it’s important to spread awareness about my experiences as a bisexual teen because I think that a lot of bi teens share similar experiences. We’re often the easiest targets of biphobic comments like “pick a side” or “it’s just a phase” from our peers, teachers, and families,” said Madison Mizsewski, a senior in Danville, CA. “The only way to make living as a bi person easier is to educate those around us, and sharing my experience is one way I can add to the collective educative voice of the bisexual community. GLSEN has helped me spread awareness about what it’s like to live as a queer kid by not only giving me a platform with which to share my story, but giving me a supportive community of peers and superiors to lean on when I need to.”
There’s still a lot of work to do, which is why GLSEN is so adamant about supporting bisexual teens as they advocate for themselves and their community. In fact, the Bi Awareness Week campaign was their idea, and Autostraddle writer Gabby Rivera, the Youth Programs Manager at GLSEN, stepped up to help make it happen.
Gabby said she had to unlearn a lot of tired stereotypes about bi women and hopes to help stop those ideas in their tracks for the next generation of LGBT folks.
“If amplifying #ILoveBIself, using the talent and energy of GLSEN staff to create graphics and hosting a Twitter chat can help bisexual youth spread their messages of acceptance and love for each other while smashing absurd and ignorant misconceptions about their identity: I am here for it. GLSEN is here for it. Punto,” she said. “I hope this campaign galvanizes LGBTQ youth everywhere to continue speaking up and out for what they believe in and the issues that important to their physical and spiritual well-being. You are the driving force of our movement and all LGBTQ adults should be doing everything we can to act in allyship with all of you and rise in solidarity together.”
New Merch: Celebrating Bisexual Awareness Week With a Brand New Tee!
First of all–HAPPY BISEXUALITY DAY EVERYONE! How are you celebrating this momentous occasion? Are you baking a cake for Lord Ivar Mountbatten? Have you had your heart-strings tugged by Maree’s story [Impossible Machinery: On (Not) Coming Out to My Dad as Bisexual]? I hope you are really enjoying this day, wherever you are, and enjoying your rad Bi+ selves and friends!
Bi Bi Bi Unisex Tee
We just added (TODAY!!) this brand new tee in the Autostraddle store. The design of this shirt simultaneously declares bisexual visibility, celebrates music of the millennium, and tells the haters “SEE YA” in one fell swoop! It’s screen-printed with a neon mint ink and a subtly contrasting purple hue that only just brings out its secondary message. The one that tells those jerks erasing bisexuals to take a hike!
We’ve printed this design on the Unisex Jersey Short-Sleeve Bella + Canvas tee, which “fits like a well-loved favorite”, and it’s a bright, magnificent purple, which I think is the color of every bisexual’s soul.
Do you want this on your body?
Visit the Autostraddle store and bi one for yourself!
(See what I did there?) Hm. Yes.
As always, buying our merch is a huge way to support us so we can keep going and doing this thing! We appreciate and love all you Scissoring-and-GalPal-clad humans out there! ♡