A rose by any other name: Queering Pigeonholes

I've been asked (by a friend) to explain myself categorically, that is: to label myself, to submit myself to the mainstream's categories, for the ease of people trying to decide about me, to judge me, to evaluate me. It's an interesting 'ask'.

I'm a misfit. I don't easily categorize, and I don't fit into categories at all for people who are Serious about labelling. I don't start off intending to frustrate a system of categories, I have no activist intent, I'm just unable to align with their structures and remain Myself. So 'misfit' is a tag that Others might apply to me. 'Eclectic' is another; it seems positive, kicky, rather non-judgemental. I guess 'strange' works. But I think the word that fits me is queer, both in its outdated usage and also in its recent usage.

Back in the Day, 'queer' meant strange, peculiar, or non-functional. You could be a queer bird if, for instance, you registered to vote as an Independant. A professor who was very academic might be a queer chap. If an arrangement was made and your behavior upset the agreement, you'd have queered the deal. Counterfeit money was 'as queer as a three-dollar bill". If you affected bow ties as your favorite cravat, if you favored fountain pens as your preferred writing stick, you might be 'queer'.

Queer came to be a pejorative term used about some marginalized people. People who were gay, or bisexual, or polyamorous, or asexual - people who didn't fit in to the socially acceptable categories. Eventually, 'queer' became a pejorative term among some mainstreamers and it was subsequently also claimed and owned by the people the phrase sought to oppress.

The kind people of UU offer a contemporary explanation of 'queer', and true to its own self the word can mean different things in different contexts. At it's most abstract, 'queer' is a person, group, behavior, or philosophy that exists outside of generally accepted norms. Queer is, in fact, ab-normal and somewhat a-morphous and so it is subject to being all things to all people, to being a trend, to being a pose.

And so people make up Categories because it Simplifies social interaction: that's a boss, that's a laborer, that's a clerk, that's a cop, that's a teamster. Humanity's tendency is to forget that these categories are just shorthand, they're just a social construct; people aren't really just bosses, laborers, clerks, teamsters. We forget that our categories were originally tools and we let the pigionholes become masters of our perception of each other.

As for me: fuck these categories. They don't fit me, they don't like me, and they certainly don't benefit me or serve me. I think that being Bisexual in a Monosexual world is fundamentally Queer.