 For our sexuality themed issue, Hermes decided that instead of having Aongus Burke '98 write another article about sexuality, we'd get a panel of people to discuss the issue. This month's hot button issue is the continuum theory of sexual orientation -- the idea that people can fall anywhere between the poles of exclusive heterosexuality and exclusive homosexuality. Since Burke insisted on participating, we forced him to do the transcription. We also got 5 other people representing varying points along the continuum to drown him out. They come from the non-exclusive (and assuredly non-essentializing) categories of BiLeGa facilitators, Queer Alliance members, Health Education staffers, high school gay-straight alliance founders, and Hermes staffers. They are: Abby Bass '98, Laura Clawson '98, Abby Goldberg '99, Michael Keating '99, and Paul Ohan '99.Enjoy.
Burke: I brought you together today thinking I'd get 2 straight people, 2 gay people, and 2 bi people together, one of each gender, but how useful do you think those sort of categories are? Are they too simplistic, or do you think they capture something? We might say gay and straight are too simple, but is even bisexual too simple? Clawson: Well, I just prefer queer. I'm not terribly comfortable with saying either [I'm a] lesbian or bisexual. I just try and avoid the issue, I guess. Bass: I don't know if it's necessarily an avoidance of the issue. I think it's a more useful way of dealing with it. I have a problem with categorization to begin with. I find it very difficult to accept the fact that there is some category -- gay, straight, bisexual, lesbian --that you can define that everyone fits into. Goldberg: I think if you divide it up into three categories that everyone fits into you're ignoring all the grey areas, you're ignoring the continuum. You see the three set points, but you don't see everything in between. Keating: I've always assumed, and this is just an assumption, that there would be...people who would be [for example] halfway between gay and bi and vice versa and there'd be all different kinds of variations, but I wonder if anyone would contradict me on that, that there are actually concentrated groups around different types of sexual interest. I've always thought there were be an equal distribution. Ohan: Well, I don't like 'queer'. I think that gay and straight are bad categories in themselves but whatever, to use queer just fucks up a movement that seeks equal rights, which is basically what all gay and bisexual people are looking for. All of a sudden to start to try to break these categories down you really just individualize yourself. That just breaks any form of community down. To use the word queer, that's so generic, in some way that's not really addressing the issue of what you are. And in a weird way I just think that stereotypes, just like labels, are necessary to just to get your voice heard for a while, and then whenever it does happen then you can start breaking down. Goldberg: And certain labels are more loaded than others. I think, personally, that queer is more loaded than gay, there's more behind it. It really, for me, refers more to culture. Bass: I want to press you Paul on something you said -- that the basic goal of lesbian, bisexual and gay people is equality or equal rights. I'm not sure that I think that's the case... Ohan: I just think that if you're going to use a label, you're defining yourself for some reason, to be acknowledged in a society. If that's the case, then stick to something and approach society. If you want to do something, then you're going to have to play in the system and sometimes use labels...and use them to your benefit. To say I'm queer, I'm straight but I guess I've hooked with a man -- those are too many different subjects or categories that can just screw over everybody. The left side, liberal thought -- everyone's factioning. Conservatism is on the rise. With things like that you've got to be strong just to deal with it. Burke: Don't you think a label like queer is the perfect remedy for that? Instead of breaking people down into lots of little groups it unites all people who are in some way opposed to the dominant sexual order, if you want to call it that. Ohan: I think it's a nice little blanket. You can be as gay, straight, bi, whatever as you want and call yourself queer...but homosexuality in any form has always been looked upon as something evil, wrong, and gross in our society and to use the word 'queer' is just so feathery, light. It doesn't address the subject that, like, I'm gay, I want my rights, I want to be left alone. Because when you use those terms and use them in their face people are going to have address that subject and challenge their way of thinking and I think queer just covers it over. Bass: I think that's a really interesting interpretation of the word, because I always think of queer as really in your face much more so than gay... Clawson: Yeah, I think the origin of 'queer' as an insult is really telling...That origin of queer is so fresh in people's mind that using it is really in your face. Ohan: Do you get more offended when someone uses dyke or queer to you? I mean they're evil labels, they're evil stereotypes, same as spic or nigger or mick or wop. Clawson: I mean I think that queer has been successfully reclaimed to a degree enough, that... Burke: Well, maybe only on this campus and a few other places. Goldberg (to Clawson): But do you feel that you'd be offended if someone who wasn't gay called you a dyke or a queer? Don't you think it takes on a different meaning when it comes from someone who doesn't share...? Clawson: Well it's, as Claire Potter observed my frosh year, one of those in-group/out-group things. In some ways, I guess, it's like being called a girl versus a woman. I'd prefer my friends to call me a girl because I have certain problems with the word 'woman,' but if some sixty year old man called me a girl I'd be pissed. Burke: I wanted to move back to something Michael said before about how you thought that maybe there was a contiuum with people evenly distributed across the way. Clearly that's not how most people look at things. The vast majority of people out there identify, if they identify as anything at all, as monolithically straight. Should we assume that that's the case just because there's lots of homophobia out there? Or should we maybe assume that there's something more to it than that -- that maybe most people do fit into one of these three categories and that some people are in between? Or should we assume that everyone's bisexual to some degree? How do people feel about that? Keating: I think I should qualify it a bit. I don't think that there's an even distribution of sexuality across the population necessarily...I don't think that homophobia is the only reason that we see more straight people, straight culture, straight behavior than queer behavior. But I think that there's probably some degree of bisexuality in almost everyone or...maybe I should just say everyone. But it doesn't just fall on a couple of points. Like maybe there are people who consider themselves monolithically gay but they're probably not monolithically gay, [but] maybe enough so they can call themselves that. But I think that there's probably always something in between and there are all kinds of different points in between. You could break it down into percentages if you wanted to although I don't want to get too quantitative about it. That's always been an assumption that I've made, that maybe there's more heterosexual behavior naturally ingrained in people in the population as a whole but queerness is not just relegated to a hundred percent or half and half or nothing. Clawson: I always think it's interesting facilitating BiLeGas [where]you ask people to identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual and a lot of people always say "You know, you should just love who ever you love, and be open to that." And it's like, okay, why are you saying that when you're asked to identify as queer but most of the time you identify unproblematically as straight. I think it's really interesting the way that works. People don't say to straight people that you should just love whoever you love and not call yourself straight, but they do say that to queer people. Burke: Yeah, I gotta say that I don't agree with the assumption that everyone's bisexual out there. I consider myself to be pretty much monolithically gay at this point. When people say to me, oh, everyone's bisexual to some degree, I feel like that does some weird sort of violence to me. Goldberg: Like you must not know who you are. Burke: Yeah, definitely that, but also the fact that, I'm sorry, but women just don't turn me on. Physiologically it just doesn't work for me. Ohan: You've never had any minor form of sexual attraction to a woman? Burke: No, not really. I mean I can think of a couple of incidents where the line was maybe a little fuzzy, but... Ohan: Not enough for you to act on it? Burke: No, never. I think I would be a terrible failure, it'd be a disaster if I ever tried to get in bed with a woman. Just...uhh! (laughter abounds) Burke: What about the purely physiological aspects of it? I read of a study where men and women watched porn films, gay porn films and straight porn films. The interesting thing is that men and women reacted very differently to them. The men almost always got aroused by the gay porno flick or the straight porno. Keating: It was either/or -- they'd either get aroused by the gay porno or by the straight, but not by both? Burke: Yes, almost never by both. Whereas, actually, women got off almost equally by both. And that definitely seems to match up with the fact that so many more women, at least on this campus, are willing to embrace a label like bisexual and very few men are. Bass: See, I have big problems with sexology or sexuality as a field of scientific inquiry. You get into problems trying to quantify arousal and all these things that I don't know what's really being measured. Burke: I think in this study they did very direct physical examinations of people [actually, they measured changes in penis size for the men and the moistness of the vaginal walls in women as they watched the films]. Bass: I think arousal is something much more than physiological states. I think what is going on with all this focus on labels and on identifying oneself and putting myself in a box is the need to know about other people and the need to understand what is really going on out there in people's bedrooms...I think that bisexuality always presents a problem for people [for that reason]. I don't like the term bisexual [even though] my sexual practices are probably categorized as bisexual in that I'm attracted to both men and women. But I find it interesting in how people are thrown off by bisexuality and they end up seeing it as some sort of gender transcendance or that you're in a certain s tage of your life and that... Goldberg:..You're in progress. Bass: Yeah. It's a hard thing to deal with for most people because it defies their categorization of sexual attraction. And I think that our sense of what sexuality is is so focused on gender and genitalia that we overlook other areas of sexuality that are important like smell, taste, touch -- all the other things that don't necessarily match up with gender. Ohan: What you said is totally the basis for stereotypes, that people need to know, need to define. But I think they're fine, stereotypes. I mean, I used to not dig the word bisexual. I was like fine, call me bisexual, whatever. And at the same time, it's fine with me, because if someone is viewing me as bisexual, I'm probably also viewing them as straight and then I also know what they're doing in their bedroom. And granted that there's all these areas of grey but I think that [these labels] are kind of necessary...Go with them. I mean what's really wrong with calling yourself bisexual? Bass: Because I don't want people to assume they know who I am. I'd rather have people thinking about what they think I am and what they think makes up those categories and be able to think that they can project what they think I am on to me. Goldberg: Everyone has very different ideas about, for instance, what that means, what that category means. What they're picturing, what they're imagining is very different from the way you actually live your life or the way that you feel. That's why I don't like categories, because on a continuum if you stick them in a category you're ignoring a lot of things about that person. You're just making it way too simple. Clawson: I think that categories sometimes privilege the present moment. I think one of the reasons that people are uncomfortable with the idea of bisexuality is that they can't think over a long period of time. Just like, if you're bisexual, you must be sleeping with a woman one night and a man the next night. And that's probably a cultural thing. If we were in a culture that was more comfortable thinking in the long term it would be an easier category to deal with. Keating (to Burke): Would you say that you think there are people who monolithically straight, monolithically gay, and then there are people who are in between and [of those] some who are leaning one way or leaning the other, [and some who are] not leaning at all but somewhere in between straight and gay, but not one night one and one night the other? Burke: Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I just don't like the assumption that everyone is inherently bisexual or polymorphously perverse or whatever... Bass: You're just rejecting all psychology! Burke: I feel like it's something that's been done by the queer movement in a way to sort of say, look, you're all like us anyway, more than you realize. I think that's kind of suspicious. I don't like that strategy. I feel like, even if I am a minority, I don't think I'm any less entitled to equal rights or equal consideration or equal respect. I don't think I should need that [argument that everyone is bisexual] and I think we use that as a sort of crutch in the movement to incorporate everyone into it in some way or another, to say that everyone's potentially a part of the movement. Keating (to Burke): I don't know if I need to qualify what I said before, but at least in the way I was thinking about it, I wouldn't assume that anyone was bisexual. I would assume that you are very, very, very gay relative to any heterosexuality you may have in you so that you'd never think of heterosexual activity. And I'm not attracted to men but I would assume that there is something that maybe would go by degrees...But the idea that there are people who are monolithically gay, monolithically straight, and there are people in between works for me also. I have no reason to doubt that. Bass: I think what was very interesting about what you said was how you said [he] was very, very gay relative...I think we tend to take categories out of context, and think that there's something in gayness that makes it...that is essentially gayness. I don't agree with that. I think the only way that we know what gay, bisexual, and straight are is in relation to each other. So then, what does it mean to be gay? I think it means different things at different moments to different people. I think that some people may think that that makes it hard to have a movement, but I think that's the strength of the movement -- to question the essential nature of any of these categories. 
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