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My Queer Body: A Found[1] Sexuality
My sense of being is grounded in a world that is deeply queer.[2]
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I feel this pressure to get to know myself and then make a big presentation about the results. But that’s not how I think, not how I write, not how I live. Unlike the theology I was taught, I don’t believe we are moving toward one great and terrible day of revelation or self-discovery, and this is not how I understand sexuality either. I don’t think of knowledge as ultimately “revelatory” or as simple information transfer. It is a slow unfolding, but more than anything else, it is a shared shifting of everything.[3]
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The coming-out-of-the-closet metaphor has its limits.[4]
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I go back and forth between thinking I am on the asexual spectrum (aspec) and thinking that I am sexually repressed because of my fundamentalist Christian upbringing.[5]
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I don’t know what that word means. What’s aspec?[6]
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I didn’t realize I was ace until I was in my twenties. And realizing it meant I had to go digging for it. I didn’t have to go digging anywhere back when I thought I was just a straight woman—that was pretty much, y’know, what was expected of me.[7]
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I’ve been reticent to embrace asexual as an identity marker because I still feel like I know so little about my own sexuality and do not want to feel pinned down to a label.[8]
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Have you ever wanted to be invisible? You can become an identity that no one thinks exists and isn’t represented anywhere. So, virtually you will become invisible. Kinda like spiritually invisible rather than physically invisible. So, like, do you want that?[9]
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THERE IS NO HETERO EXPLANATION FOR THIS.[10]
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I consider myself part of the [queer] community. As a person who’s aromantic and asexual, I am of the opinion that anyone who is aspec should be able to be part of the queer community if they want to (some people don’t feel that they want to). We don’t experience romantic and sexual attraction in the same way that heterosexual people do. I consider it obvious that we deserve a place in this community, and for that reason I consider myself queer.[11]
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I think the reason a lot of [aspec] people struggle [to identify as queer] is that, especially online, a lot of queer people are like, “No, you can’t sit with us.”[12]
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Of course I’m queer. But I think being on the ace spectrum is only part of it for me and I’m not sure I want to be public about it until I can articulate more than the ace piece. Not that ace isn’t “queer enough” on its own, but it’s not the only factor, and I haven’t decided how I might communicate to, say, people I know mostly through social media now, or how I would identify myself in a bio.[13]
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I recently came across the term ‘theosexual,’ which is not an actual sexual identity (more of a jest). But I felt like it captured something true about how I was raised to orient all my energies around a divine figure. In a way, I think leaving my faith (and leaving God), has left a vacancy for these energies, and often vacuums are catalysts for a reorientation/reshaping of the whole structure.[14]
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Why did I start crying when I typed “of course I’m queer”?[15]
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I initially never considered that I might be asexual because I’m a diehard romantic. But as I surveyed the spectrum of ace experience, I learned that you can be asexual without being aromantic (aro). I’ve experienced romantic feelings since my first crush at age 5. But it’s important to note that I always viewed the objects of my affection as rivals to God because evangelical Christian purity culture cast God as my true (and very jealous) husband. As a result, I had an intimate and romantic (though in many ways abusive) relationship with God, but also felt very guilty about human romantic interests. I even hated myself for having crushes on movie characters/actors.[16]
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I guess I’ve never said I’m queer before. I’ve said things like “I operate from an intellectual/emotional space that is deeply queer” (not “I’m queer”) or “I’m probably on the ace spectrum” (not “I’m ace”). It’s like I haven’t allowed myself to just be a (complicated and queer) body, and so my language hovers in provisionality and performance. But who we are is never divorced from performance: “I am” is not a static category. So, it’s not an inherent contradiction to say “I am queer” and also leave it open-ended and malleable about the specific performance of my queerness. But I’ve been acting as if my own performance of myself is somehow divorced from both my verbal declarations about myself and my internal cognition about myself.[17]
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I almost added the ace pride flag to my Twitter bio last night. I want validation of my sexual experience. I want to be able to say: “Look, this is a real thing. My experience is real.” I’m really tired, whatever sexuality I am, of being viewed as broken or less than.[18]
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It is not a handicap to have one thing, but not another. To be one way, and not another. We are different shapes and ways, and our happiness is unique. There are no rules of balance. I wish that I could share with you the utter joy it brings me to spend three hours on a Saturday afternoon reading Emerson, or Melville, or Virginia Woolf...or discussing T.S. Eliot or James Baldwin with a dear friend until dawn...the fulfillment that I get from going to church, from reading theology, from reading science, from...praying. But I can’t. Because I am me, and you are you, I can’t relate to the total fulfillment that I get from these things. It’s impossible.[19]
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There’s this scene in the movie Princess Cyd where one of the characters (an academic and writer of novels) is judged by her teen niece for not being very sexually active in the last five years. The novelist responds by asserting that everyone’s experience of pleasure is different, and that her pleasure (sexual or asexual) is valid, too. People have disparate desires and ways of negotiating those desires.[20]
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My sexuality is complicated by the body/earth hatred of the religion I grew up in. I’ve told you how evangelicalism instilled in me a disdain for the body, and I don’t like its metaphysical dualism, how it splits the human person into mind/body. However, that said, I do think maybe I find writing about sex and sexuality more compelling than the bodily experience of it. Maybe I am out of touch with my body, but I enjoy other types of physicality. I love dancing. Eating. I hate running, but like the feeling of having run. I like cuddling and handholding and kissing and hugging. Why can’t these things be my version of sexuality?[21]
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I want to know my body.[22]
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I still feel like I know so little about my own sexuality and do not want to feel pinned down to a label.[23]
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The poem then is a record of its own unsettling, a trace of the mind’s unsatisfied and unsatisfiable search for resolution, for escape, to know itself through self-creation and to unknow itself.[24]
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I’m queer.[25]
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I’m aspec.[26]
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I’m
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[1] “Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems” (https://poets.org/glossary/found-poem).
[2] Blog post by the author, “Homophobia Lite,” December 22, 2020 (http://www.rebekahdevine.com/blog/2020/12/22/homophobia-lite).
[3] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.
[4] Blog post by the author, “How My World Became Queer (3/6),” January 24, 2020 (http://www.rebekahdevine.com/blog/2020/1/24/how-my-world-became-queer-36-queersighted).
[5] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.
[6] Cameron Esposito in “Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca,” Queery with Cameron Esposito (podcast), January 24, 2021 (https://www.earwolf.com/episode/sarah-costello-kayla-kaszyca/).
[7] “Angela Chen,” Queery with Cameron Esposito (podcast), January 10, 2021, https://www.earwolf.com/episode/angela-chen/. Chen is the author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Boston: Beacon Press, 2020).
[8] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.
[9] Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca, “The Perks of Asexuality and Aromanticism,” Sounds Fake But Okay (podcast), February 7, 2021 (https://soundsfakepod.buzzsprout.com/218346/7710982-ep-169-the-perks-of-asexuality-and-aromanticism).
[10] Text on the outside of a card given to the author by a friend, December 2019.
[11] Sarah Costello in “Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca,” Queery with Cameron Esposito (podcast), January 24, 2021 (https://www.earwolf.com/episode/sarah-costello-kayla-kaszyca/). Edited for length and clarity.
[12] Kayla Kaszyca in “Sarah Costello and Kayla Kaszyca,” Queery with Cameron Esposito (podcast), January 24, 2021 (https://www.earwolf.com/episode/sarah-costello-kayla-kaszyca/). Edited for length and clarity.
[13] Author’s text to a friend, February 1, 2021.
[14] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.
[15] Author’s text to a friend, February 1, 2021.
[16] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.
[17] Author’s text to a friend, February 1, 2021.
[18] Author’s conversation with a friend, June 2020.
[19] Miranda Ruth in the movie Princess Cyd, directed by Stephen Cone (Wolfe Video, 2017).
[20] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.
[21] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.
[22] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.
[23] Excerpt from an email to the author’s therapist, September 7, 2020.
[24] Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness (Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2010), 54.
[25] A thing the author is saying to her body about her body.
[26] A more specific thing the author is saying to her body about her body.