grinninfoole

Today is a day to support people coming out and proclaiming their sexual identity to the world. Gay, lesbian, bi, or some other label; trans- or cis- gendered; celibate, monogamous, polyamorous, or whatever else. This is a time for people to step forward and push back against the mass of society trying to stifle their joy, their love, their relationships, their choices, and the bedrock truth of their lives. It's also a time for those of us who care for those people, and those of us who believe in liberty, to speak up in affirmation.

So that's what I am doing now. I'm going to come out as heterosexual, cisgendered, and basically monogamous (though poly curious). I like women. I emotionally identify with them. I find many of them sexy. I tend to go for paler skin and skinny (like our advertising culture uses to sell to us all). and shorter than I, though I'm by no means exclusive about this. God help me, I'm even kind of attracted to Miley Cyrus. I know that this may seem like the opposite of coming out--instead of speaking up for something repressed, I'm proclaiming something constantly validated and assumed. However, I'd like to point something out: everything I just told you about myself is a taste (or preference or orientation or what-have-you). Or, to put it a sexy way, a kink.

The difference between me and someone who likes rubenesque women, or bearded women, or a foot-fetishist, or a transvestite, or just about anything else, is that my kinks are common enough, and reinforced enough, that hardly anyone recognizes them as such. There's nothing weirder about wanting to suck dick than to lick pussy. Or both. Or neither. Or only with whipped cream and a cherry. Heck, I find the poo, pain and/or blood kinks disturbing, but that really is just me. The consenting adults can do their thing with my blessing (though, please, no poo in my whipped cream, OK?) Double heck, even the folks with non-consensual urges like pedophilia aren't that different from me in their feelings. The damage comes from acting on those feelings, and I feel sympathy for anyone struggling to live a full human life while protecting others from those impulses, and I think we should do more as a collective to help them do so.

(Honestly, while I agree that sexuality is largely, if not completely, orientational and that 'gay reparative' therapy is therefore misguided, I do hope that it isn't completely so, that there we can make meaningful choices about our sexual feelings, because I'd like to think that pedophilically inclined people can choose to grow into something healthier. And, yes, I know that homosexuality and pedophilia are completely different things, and I'm not trying to morally equate them. I just made a logical leap.)

All of us, when you strip away our street clothes and public manners and let us rock out with our metaphorical cocks out, can be weird, gross, amazing, tender, inappropriate, transgressive, and awesome. It's best when we can do it with love and kindness, and it's so much easier to do that when we can be out and proud about who we really are, whoever that is, because there are people out there who are just what we're looking for, and who are looking for us, too.

So happy coming out day, everyone. May we all love long, and prosper.