I recently received this message with questions from an 18-year-old man who had just come out for the first time, and my answer to him directly is below, but in truth, everything I’ve written here applies to anyone who is young, struggling with their identity, and feels worried that they’ll be alone forever…
A Kyrgyz fashion-world celebrity has drawn criticism after apparently calling for the mass execution of “nontraditional” sexual minorities and prostitutes in the Central Asian republic. In a Facebook post on August 10, Amina Yusurova, a fashion model and national director of the Kyrgyzstan World Beauty Congress, wrote: “Round up all the people of nontraditional orientation and blow them all up on one island.”
“When’s the last time you dated a woman?” I get asked this all the time, and it’s probably my least favorite question regarding my (bi)sexuality. There are a couple of reasons why the question bothers me so much. First, it’s a loaded question, based on the false premise that you have to date men and women equally in order to be “truly” bisexual. With this question, people are implying that I’m gay because I’ve only dated men for the past few years.
Perhaps it’s not the summer holiday that I had in mind, but here I am waiting to board a delayed flight back to the UK. August marks an influx of younger passengers, who have hot-footed their way from the school gates to the boarding gate with their red-faced parents in tow.
When my partner was newly pregnant, we began interviewing midwives and took what has become for us a normal precaution: Before meeting with the one we liked best, we sent her an email introducing ourselves and our relationship. Still, one of the first things she said to us when we sat down was, “Just so you know, I’m very comfortable with lesbians.” The thing is: we’re not lesbians.
“I think Trump is very good on gay rights,” gay billionaire and major Trump supporter Peter Thiel told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd back in January, at the start of the Trump presidency. “I don’t think he will reverse anything. I would obviously be concerned if I thought otherwise.”
So I’ve been thinking about the most common way to categorize LGBTQ identities at the moment – the idea that sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression are three separate things – and about its limits. Specifically, can gay men really be described as cisgender, and, if so, what does that say about the usefulness of this system of thought?
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