"I get up, make breakfast, eat, and send my kids to
school. I go to work, I come home and start making dinner. After dinner is done
and the kids are in bed I might get to sit down with my spouse and watch some
TV. Then we go to bed and the whole thing starts the next day. This is my Gay
Lifestyle."
I can't remember anymore where this quote came from, who
said it or where I read it for the first time. After all this time, I doubt that
the words are an exact copy of the original. I have pulled them from my mind so
many times that had they been a letter they would be crumpled, stained, and
unreadable now.
This thought catches on my mind because it is both perfectly
right and astoundingly wrong. While it's true that my lifestyle looks exactly
like this picture, my life is profoundly more nuanced than the picture implies.
I am a pansexual woman who has never been in a relationship
that wasn't sig-gendered, heterosexual normative. Most would wonder if that
qualifies me to claim to be queer at all. And yet there is no doubt in my mind
of what I am. It's there in the commercials I like, the books that I read, and
the jokes I don't laugh at. It's in the way I raise my children, and the causes
I fight for. It's in the walls I have built around myself, and the friends I
rarely talk to; it's in the times the touch of my husband thrills me, and in
the times when it doesn't.
Loyal, fickle, sex-crazed, lonely, unable to decide,
determined, torn, ambivalent, mercurial, steadfast, warm, antisocial, needy, independent,
the list goes on and on. I have been all of these things, and everyone of them
has been affected by my sexuality. You may not see it when you look at me, but
I am not fully me without it.
Now if we're talking about sexual experience... that's where things get complicated.
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