Queer Baseball Players and Francesca Lia Block

[queerbychoice]

Major League Baseball Player Comes Out as Heterosexual

Hmm. I see the potential for progress to be made.

The Out magazine editor's I'm-not-naming-names-but revelation annoyed me, though. I mean, how many major league baseball players can an Out magazine editor be hanging around with? How hard would it have been for a reporter to follow him around and watch for a major league baseball player to show up? That revelation was playing with fire.

In other news, I read Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat recently to find out why so many people on my friends list grew up obsessed with it. I almost threw it across the room and refused to finish it after the very first page, when the main characters were introduced as being a beautiful skinny blonde popular girl who's dating the best-looking guy in the school, and her boy friend, the best-looking guy in the school. Who wants to read books about popular people? Upon hearing this description of them, I immediately lost all interest in hearing anything about their lives and dismissed them as abhorrent, thoroughly unpleasant people to be around.

The book did get better from there, when I forced myself to keep reading. The book does an excellent job of supporting extremely unconventional family structures and the idea of inventing one's own family structure to suit one's own needs, and I'm sure these revelations about the appeal of hitherto unimagined family structures must have really revolutionized a lot of young readers' lives in a wonderful way. And even the characters managed to become a little less abhorrent. Still, there's something thoroughly plastic and unreal about the whole thing that I definitely don't like at all.

Comments

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

ok. i think i can manage to write something now.

"i mean, i've liked guys since before as long as i could remember."

me too. well, since puberty.

"as soon as liking girls was introduced to me in 7th grade, i've had no problem with checking them out"

the concept that it was even possible for a girl to like other girls "that way" didn't even occur to me until near the end of my sophomore year in high school. when it did occur to me, it occured to me first on a purely intellectual level: "hey, what if it really is possible for girls to like other girls? i wonder why it wouldn't be? what does it mean to 'like' anybody anyway? even if girls can't 'like' other girls sexually, they mostly seem to have other girls as best friends, so if they really like girls better as best friends and they only like boys better for sex, then why do they always move in with boys instead of moving in with their female best friends and just inviting boys over for occasional sex? shouldn't who you're best friends with be more relevant to who you'd want to live with than physical attraction to some boy's body is? and why does physical attraction feel so soulful and deeply connecting if it's just an animal attraction to a body shape and doesn't correlate to whose mind you actually feel the strongest friendship with?"

these are extremely important questions. very worth thinking about. you can read more of my own thoughts on them here.

"however, when i look back, i've always liked guys. there was never really a time when i've been more attracted to girls than guys."

there isn't any quota for "minimum volume of attraction to girls that you're required to experience in order to be awarded a queerness license." words like "bi" and "gay" and "lesbian" and "straight" are often used by different people to mean quite different things. i've heard some people say, "i consider myself bi because i've been attracted to both genders on occasion, even though 99% of the time at least recently i'm only attracted to this one gender"; but i've heard other people say, "i consider myself lesbian because even though i'm attracted to both genders i'm really more attracted to women." i've also heard some people say "i consider myself a bisexual lesbian" whereas other people say "i'm not a lesbian because i'm bisexual." the different people are defining the terms in different ways, to suit their own purposes. i think that's a good thing. words are tools: people invent them in order to communicate what they want to say about themselves. words constantly take on new meanings over time, because people change the meanings in order to communicate different things. so the question in your mind shouldn't ever be, "am i bisexual or am i straight?" but rather, "what words can i best use to explain to other people that i've always liked guys, and there was never really a time when i've been more attracted to girls than guys, but as soon as liking girls was introduced to me in 7th grade, i've had no problem with checking them out (involuntarily at first. blushing, the whole shmeal)?"

the words you already used are fine. they communicated your experience to me clearly. you don't have to try to reduce it to a one-word label like "bi" or whatever, because sometimes one word just isn't enough to communicate everything you want to say, and that's just fine.

(to be continued)

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

"i don't choose to like girls because guys suck or because it's a huge 'trend' now."

me neither. i chose to like girls because i had a best friend who i loved more than anybody else - platonically, you understand - and then it suddenly occurred to me that maybe the reason she kept insisting to me that she'd never liked any boy ever was that she really liked girls instead, and that if she did like girls and was keeping it secret from me, it made sense that i might be the one she liked. and i hated the idea of hurting her by not returning the feelings, and i hated the idea that sexual attraction could be something so shallow and meaningless and unrelated to love that i could be incapable of feeling it for the person i loved most in the world. so i asked myself: what does the act of having sex actually consist of? what is touching in general really about? why does everybody use hugging and similar forms of touch to express affection to their friends, and experience pleasure at being hugged by friends of the same sex, but draw the line at having sex with those same friends and claim that that form of touch would only be capable of giving them pleasure if they received it from a member of the opposite sex? and why is the line that they draw different in other societies from in our own, like how in much of europe a few centuries ago good friends of the same sex casually kissed each other on the cheek in greeting whenever they met, yet in our own culture if you suggested to george bush and dick cheney that they should greet each other every time they meet by kissing each other on the cheek, they'd frantically proclaim that to be the most disgusting and totally unpleasureable thing they'd ever heard of?

in ancient greece it was taken for granted that all same-sex best friends would have sex with each other to express their affection. heck, barely half a century ago in our very own united states, when teenage girls couldn't ever have sex without suffering lifelong disgrace, it was taken for granted that most teenage boys would "practice" on each other from time to time while they sat around sexually frustrated because teenage girls were so sexually unavailable.

"and i'm not just bicurious (least i don't think so). am i bisexual by choice?"

i don't know. are you? you should choose your own words according to whatever you feel best expresses your experience.

"every gay/bi girl i know has told me that 99.99% of all gay/bi girls have said that their preference has been this way since birth"

there are online surveys here and here which can help give a general sense of the range of opinions/experiences out there. you can even add your own to their data!

"what in the world is my sexual preference? and please don't bother telling me that it's ultimately up to me and what not. 'ultimately' is a rare thing. it's not ultimate yet."

what if i say it's just plain up to you, right now?

what does "sexual preference" consist of? a label for yourself? you certainly have a choice about that. a plan about what genders of people you're willing to have sex with? you certainly have a choice about that too. a desire to behave sexually with certain people? in my experience, when you break down the details of what different kinds of touch mean to you, and why our society claims that some kinds are only pleasureable with members of the opposite sex, you tend to find that these things can be chosen too.