You don't have to know.

On this National Coming Out Day, I would like to just say a few words to those of you who have never come out because you've never been sure what to come out as.

There are a lot of people out there who spend a lot of time thinking vaguely that they should be coming out as something or other, but who don't.  Or who come out as one thing, but it doesn't really fit, and later they might come out as another thing, and that doesn't really fit either, even though they themselves haven't really changed.

There's a secret about this whole sexual orientation thing that very few people know and even fewer people will tell you, and that's this: it's all made up.  It's a convenient fiction.  The idea that human beings possess this innate quality called a "sexual orientation" is a modern concept, and the term itself is a term of art that's existed for less than a full century.

It developed because it appeared to describe a phenomenon that people observed in the world, that there were certain people who "oriented" in one way or another in terms of the biological sex and/or social gender of the people who they chose as sexual and erotic focus objects.

(And certainly some do, though this is merely one of many landmarks on the vast human sexual map by which one might reckon directions.)

And this idea in turn developed because, in the second half of the 19th century, people were starting to talk about a whole bunch of laws, inherited from legal codes that were essentially based on Catholic church law, that said that certain types of sexual behavior were impermissible and punishable.  The question, at root, was one of whether a modern secular state with a stated commitment to egalitarian treatment of its citizens could ethically or reasonably uphold and enforce laws that a) derived from religious edicts and b) were inherently anti-egalitarian.

The idea — and the words — of "heterosexual" and "homosexual" actually came to exist, in fact, because an Austro-Hungarian writer was trying to make an argument that these laws were baseless. It didn't really make a lot of sense, he argued, to say that a sexual act that wouldn't be an offense eligible for penalty if it took place between two people of different biological sexes (hetero-sexual) should suddenly become either offensive or something for which someone could be penalized  if it took place between two people of the same biological sex (homo-sexual).  He made this argument, and coined these terms, in a letter written in May of 1868.

I've written a whole lot more about all this in a book I have coming out in early 2012, called Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, about which more here, but that's not why I'm writing this blog entry today.

I'm writing this blog entry today to point out a few important things:

First, that if you're one of those people who has never felt like the current scheme of sexual orientation made sense to you, or never felt that it made sense of you, that's okay.   The concept we call "sexual orientation" is just a tool people invented to think with.  It's not some kind of immutable natural law that everyone has to fit into somehow.

Second, that for hundreds of thousands of years, no human being, anywhere, ever knew what their sexual orientation was for the very simple reason that the whole idea of a thing called a "sexual orientation" didn't exist.  People seem to have managed just fine without this piece of putative knowledge, and you know what?  They still do.

Third, that regardless of how or whether someone makes a public claim to a particular sexual orientation or identity, you shouldn't think for a nanosecond that you automatically know everything there is to know about their attractions and desires, relationships and loves, erotic intrigues and sexual sorties.  You don't, and you can't, not least for the reason that the vocabulary we have and the terms we use for this stuff is severely limited and capable of describing only a very small portion of what human beings actually do.

I'm also writing this blog entry to make a political point: because sexual orientation, as much of a fiction as it is, still matters a lot in our culture, so does coming out.

Our culture believes deeply in the doctrine of sexual orientation.  It does so because it allows our culture to pretend that there is a specific, knowable, thing called heterosexuality.  And it does so because it makes it that much easier to pressure people to conform to its prejudices about what biological sex, social gender, erotic behavior, and reproductive sexuality "are supposed to" look like and be like.  It does so because it makes it easier to punish people who don't adhere to the party line.

Being public about the fact that you don't toe that line is, therefore, important.  It's important to be seen and to be known as someone who should not be presumed to be part of the heteronormative sexuality machine.  This kind of visibility and presence is how cultures of sexuality change.

It's how we got where we are.  We became a culture of "heterosexuals" and "homosexuals" because people were being described, and eventually describing themselves, as "heterosexual" and "homosexual."

It's how our own culture has changed massively, in terms of all kinds of visibility and rights and representation for all kinds of biologically-sexed and socially-gendered and erotic and sexual and reproductive experiences and lives, just in the time I've been alive: because people have taken the trouble to describe themselves, to point themselves out as whatever they are, to identify the ways that they are unusual or different or simply not what it might otherwise be presumed they might be.

So when I say it doesn't matter if you know what kind of sexual orientation you have or don't have, I mean it.

And when I say it does matter that you come out, I mean that, too.

"Queer" is a very useful word in this regard.

In my particular, personal case, "queer" means that I'm a person whose sexual existence fits into precisely none of the pigeonholes the culture I live in has offered me a chance to put it in.  And because "cisgender femme omniflirtual genderfuckophile smartypantssexual happily unmarried to a medically unmediated intersex Belovedary" is kind of a mouthful that contains several terms I'd have to explain at length to most people before they'd have the slightest clue what I was on about, when I come out to people these days, I just say "Hi, I'm Hanne and I'm queer."

No, people still don't necessarily know what exactly my sexual orientation is.  And that's okay.  Like I say, you don't have to know.

And, to any of you who cannot come out — and I have the utmost trust in your ability to know best whether your safety, health, ability to earn a living, etc. would be damaged if you do — that's okay, too.  We've got your back, and we'll keep on working toward a day when no one who wants to come out will feel that sie has to stop hirself from doing so because the consequences are just too steep.