"My sexuality comes with a label
that at least one of you
has never even heard.
It comes with shitty..."
My sexuality comes with a label
that at least one of you
has never even heard.
It comes with shitty Peter Pan jokes
and uncomfortable misunderstandings.
My sexuality comes with a helping
of skepticism I never asked for but
I would take all of that
over the way people
from my own community
treat it like a
trap.
There was a girl I used to kiss who
would to get drunk and
try to convince me
I was a lesbian.
She would ask pointed questions
about the men I’ve loved and
the men I’ve hated.
When I let slip that
the first time I slept with a woman
was something on the verge
of religious, she treated it
as evidence
in the case she was building against me.
Like I had to be proven wrong
in order to be deemed worthy.
On a first date, I have watched women
treat old lovers like horror stories, like
being left for a man was somehow so much worse
than being left for a woman. Like
infidelity wore a name tag and
only came in the shape of the ones
who “couldn’t pick a side.”
They all looked at me with these crooked grins.
They had no idea who they were talking to.
In a club, over the boom of the music,
she asks, "you’re a lesbian, right?“
and all I say is yes.
Because I want to dance with a beautiful girl,
because I don’t want to have to shout to explain,
because I don’t want the truth to be the wrong answer.
When she presses me against the brick and
kisses me senseless, I wonder
if she’d call me a liar
if we met in the light of day.
He says, “I don’t have a problem with gay people,
but bisexuals are just greedy.”
He says, “I don’t think bisexuality
really exists.” He says,
“You made out with a girl once, right?
Did you like it?”
She says, “I only date Gold Star Lesbians.
I don’t want to be anywhere a penis
has touched.”
She doesn’t seem to care how
fucking transphobic she sounds
or that this makes her no better
than the straight men who talk about women
in terms of “going where someone else has been”
like we are used strips of tarmac.
My sexuality gets talked about like it’s
a gateway drug you grow out of
on your way to being declared 100% Gay
or a calling card of the wayward little
straight girl looking for attention. Listen.
I have never kissed a woman for any other reason
than because I desperately wanted to
and if men looked at us
that was their business
not mine.
I am not here to be the butt of your punchline,
your queer college girlfriend, your science experiment,
the one you “turned gay” or “turned straight”–
my sexuality has nothing to do with you.
It is one of the few things I have
that truly belongs to me
and it’s disgusting that the people
who should know better
still treat it like a novelty.
- “PANSEXUALS” AND OTHER CREATURES OF QUEER MYTHOLOGY by Ashe Vernon
(via latenightcornerstore)
