queerbychoice (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
queerbychoice) wrote2002-09-17 10:20 am
queerbychoice) wrote2002-09-17 10:20 am
Because I Feel Like Asking
[Poll #60817]
Essay Question for Bonus Points:
Was there anything particularly interesting or unusual about the order in which you experienced these events?
Example: I first heard of the theoretical existence of queer people when I was seven years old, but since I'd never heard of any specific queer people I just treated it as a kind of urban myth, and I didn't actually give much serious consideration to the notion of "What if there really are actual queer people?" until the day I turned queer myself, the spring of 1992, when I was 15, at which point my thought process proceeded all at once in the span of about five minutes along lines something like this: "What if there really are actual queer people? But if people are really capable of same-sex attraction, why would only some of them be capable of it and not others? How horrible it would be if you could fall in love with someone and they'd be physically incapable of falling in love with you too, even if they really liked you and really wanted to! How horrible if love could be limited by something so superficial as body types! Wait a minute, that's what it would mean if everybody were heterosexual too . . . I don't believe love should work that way. I resolve to love anybody whose mind is worthy of me, no matter what body type they have."
And then I didn't meet an actual queer person other than me until nearly two years later, March 3, 1994, when I was 17. So in the intervening time I had nothing but a cheap local public access queer TV show for queer company, and after August 1993 when I discovered David Bowie I had him for company (though I was rather traumatized at the end of high school when my best friend Christine informed me that David Bowie had changed his mind about his queerness and been calling himself hetero since 1983 . . . but that was later, I'd met other queer people in person by that time). I didn't have access to queer books (lack of privacy) nor to the internet (I didn't get internet access until my second semester of college). So I grew up very isolated in a way that probably no middle-class queer teenager in the Western world ever will be again, now that internet access is so much more widely available.
Essay Question for Bonus Points:
Was there anything particularly interesting or unusual about the order in which you experienced these events?
Example: I first heard of the theoretical existence of queer people when I was seven years old, but since I'd never heard of any specific queer people I just treated it as a kind of urban myth, and I didn't actually give much serious consideration to the notion of "What if there really are actual queer people?" until the day I turned queer myself, the spring of 1992, when I was 15, at which point my thought process proceeded all at once in the span of about five minutes along lines something like this: "What if there really are actual queer people? But if people are really capable of same-sex attraction, why would only some of them be capable of it and not others? How horrible it would be if you could fall in love with someone and they'd be physically incapable of falling in love with you too, even if they really liked you and really wanted to! How horrible if love could be limited by something so superficial as body types! Wait a minute, that's what it would mean if everybody were heterosexual too . . . I don't believe love should work that way. I resolve to love anybody whose mind is worthy of me, no matter what body type they have."
And then I didn't meet an actual queer person other than me until nearly two years later, March 3, 1994, when I was 17. So in the intervening time I had nothing but a cheap local public access queer TV show for queer company, and after August 1993 when I discovered David Bowie I had him for company (though I was rather traumatized at the end of high school when my best friend Christine informed me that David Bowie had changed his mind about his queerness and been calling himself hetero since 1983 . . . but that was later, I'd met other queer people in person by that time). I didn't have access to queer books (lack of privacy) nor to the internet (I didn't get internet access until my second semester of college). So I grew up very isolated in a way that probably no middle-class queer teenager in the Western world ever will be again, now that internet access is so much more widely available.
no subject
When I entered seventh grade all at once I actually cared about people. That was the year that puberty hit, and I fell suddenly head over heels for a boy after having sworn the previous year that boys were stupid idiots whom I would never be stupid enough to give the time of day to. The boy was the first person I ever actually recognized as a human being with feelings of his own and actually cared about . . . and even then, my recognition was pretty fuzzy at first because I didn't really at all grasp that I couldn't just command people to fall in love with me . . . the notion that anyone could possibly have the audacity to not fall in love with someone who'd fallen in love with me was quite unheard of in the books and Disney cartoons which had provided me with only instructions on love (since my happily married conservative parents did not permit me to watch trashy TV shows which might have portrayed less happy love affairs). But anyway, from that point onward I began to process the notion that both males and females were actual human beings just as real and alive as I was, wherease before then such an idea had never really occurred to me.
. . .
I am one of those people who basically ALWAYS thinks of EVERYONE else sexually until they do something which renders them undesireable and causes me to exclude them from further sexual consideration. Thankfully though, I've at least learned to ask a few questions and see whether I can easily provoke them into saying something that will render them undesireable before I actually go so far as to act upon my mad lust for everybody by throwing myself at all of them.