Born: February 24, 1973 in New Jersey, USA
Current Residence: New York, New York, USA
5/1/00: bisexuality is an identity category; it, like homosexuality, heterosexuality, etc. implies a state of being, a static identity. myself, i tend to resist the words altogether. i don't object to people calling me gay or bi or whatever they choose, but i don't use any of these words to apply to myself. i'm a little more comfortable with "queer" because it means simply "not straight" and ends up, ultimately, applying to just about everyone.
choice and bisexuality are not the same thing. choice is the freedom to reject or accept the concept of any sexual identity or any identity category. bisexuality is just one more construction. choice is the ability to embrace the constructions of others or to construct something of your own.
5/1/00: one can also reject the assumptions inherent in categorizing "relationships" based upon sexual activity. i don't believe in kinds of friendship and kinds of love. (this makes me sound promiscuous, but i'm not.) i'm currently very much in love with someone with whom i will most likely never have sex as he has chosen to identify as straight. does this makes us a homosexual relationship? my sister may be the only person i would trust to collaborate with me on raising children; does this make ours an incestuous hetero "relationship"?
6/3/00: i find that the bullshit and cruelty and willful ignorance and prejudice and violence are endemic to humanity rather than to any particular race or gender, etc. the women involved in fred phelps's hateful pickets of events like Matthew Shephard's funeral were not displaying their masculinity; they were demonstrating a nauseous aspect of humanity.
people are so profoundly disappointing to me so often largely because i recognize their potential to be magnificent. if i expected everyone to be horrible all the time, i don't think i'd find it as depressing as knowing how beautiful we can be and witnessing how seldom we are.
i live in new york city because i love hearing five different languages on my short walk to the subway in the morning. i like knowing that a great many people around me recognize gender as a construction and refuse to believe that there are only two "kinds" of ANYTHING.
i respect separatism to a point, but i feel it has destructive elements. it is the personal, cultural equivalent of political isolationism, which makes me uncomfortable, as do single-sex schools, etc.
9/10/00: i have a lot of respect for what Gayle and Frank are trying to do but i must admit that a part of me tends to roll his eyes and sigh somewhat dismissively at this whole search for belonging kind of thing. i don't believe in an "us" or a "them"; there is no "we." i don't feel particularly connected to the queer "community" not only because there is an irritating leaning towards biological essentialism, but also because i don't have much interest in constructing a false sense of community based on aesthetic or carnal preferences. what i like to rub up against seems to have little bearing on whether i will feel any kind of real connection with someone. i'm not particularly interested in being a part of some kind of queer frat, an organization in which i am supposed to consider someone my brother based on the letters he wears on his sweatshirt.
the dialogue with PFLAG is useful because it is a vocal and public way to present a point of view that seems to be somewhat invisible at the moment; debate and the exchange of ideas seems a more valid purpose than trying to give kids with identity crisis a sense of belonging. rather than asking them to feel they are "one of us" or of anyone else, they should be encouraged to be defiantly, beautifully, themselves.
1/7/01: my definition of queer is pretty much anything other than "straight" in the "someday you'll grow up and meet a very nice girl and she'll make your penis hard and that will mean you are in love and you will get married and that's where babies come from" kind of straight.
i tend to consider my "straight" friends who recognize that they might possibly have made different choices, developed different tastes, etc. or even that these tastes might be altered in the future by impulse and circumstance, queer as well.
so my definition is pretty broad....
—f