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What does it mean to be gay or a lesbian?
I posted this on a lesbian forum but I thought my questions and my rant are relevant to anyone who doesn't identify as straight.
Rant below:
If a self-identified straight man has sexual experiences with other men, people will insist he's gay or bi. If a self-identified straight woman has sexual experiences with other women, she's just "partying" or "experimenting" and is assumed to not really be gay at all.
Society hasn't decided if being gay is about what actions you take, or the feelings you have internally. Society hasn't decided if it's about sexual attraction only, or if it encompasses romantic feelings too. Society hasn't decided if being gay is defined by your past, or by your present.
I hate labels and struggle to label myself. Twice in my life, I've fallen in love with men and had semifulfilling relationships with them, but I've never felt sexual attraction to a man and men's bodies either bore me or disgust me. People will insist to me that I'm bi. Others refer to me as a lesbian.
I feel like labels are a trap. It's a shorthand that assumes one word can encompass a person's past, present, and future. That one word can encompass how a person experiences sexual and romantic attraction. And maybe it DOES actually hold true for a lot of lesbians that all their feelings and behavior, now, then, and for forever, only involved other women. But the rest of us are left with two equally stupid options:
Find some way to define yourself with other labels. There are hundreds of them and the list only grows longer. Most non-maintstream labels have limited recognition, and even among circles "in the know" you end up with some godawful monstrosity of a label like "gray-ace gynesexual panromantic". The more "exact" you try to get, the more ridiculous your label becomes, and the less it will be recognized. (I'm not trying to shit on those of you who really like this system. I'm a biromantic homosexual! However, it's a system with extremely limited and obscure uses. The average person knows about 3 sexual orientation labels at best)
Call yourself a lesbian for simplicity's sake and risk offending lesbians who think you don't deserve to say so, and confuse anyone when they learn about feelings and behavior of yours that wasn't/isn't "lesbian"
I'm curious where you guys stand in this debate. Even the people who disagree with me. Especially the people who disagree!
"True" lesbian/gay or not, all of us might feel like we're being erased. So when disagreeing, it would do us all some good to be polite and try to have empathy.
Questions:
Who should call themselves gay or a lesbian?
Do labels do more good or more harm?




For me, people should be able to use whichever label they find reflects themselves. I call myself queer, or bi, because it's simpler than saying I'm pansexual. More people understand that.
But, I primarily am attracted to other women, so sometimes I refer to myself as "mostly" gay/lesbian.
Labels are nice because they allow us to find others that are like us, who understand us. But I look at them as fluid. We shouldn't be held to the label we choose for ourselves. Our sexuality is our sexuality, no need to explain it on others' terms.
I guess I don't have a ton of experience on this whole thing, but I'm still more than happy to throw my 2 cents in.
1) I call myself gay around people just because it's easier than calling myself pansexual. But I don't think that anyone, especially people with different sexual orientations, should be in a position to judge people if they choose to use that label, and don't entirely fit it's constraints. in modern society, it's a lot easier to just say, "Oh, I'm gay/lesbian" than going into the depth of you sexual attraction, as you said.
2) Yeah, in a respect i think they do. They split everyone into separate groups, for other people to easier understand, and personally, I don't like it when people are arbitrarily set into groups because of one defining feature, bar a few exceptions. The argument "it makes life easier for everyone" isn't strictly true, cause some people just don't know how they feel, and couldn't label it if they tried.
Like i said at the start, that's simply my two cents, and i don't have a ton of experience beyond taking the easy road and just saying "Yeah, I'm gay," which is arguably lazy, and part of the problem. But ultimately, i do feel labels do more harm than good, when it comes to the sheer spectrum of sexuality & gender.
I don't know if I can really answer the first question, being asexual (which, admittedly has similar questions of identity, but are different for a number of reasons), but the second question reminds me at some level of a post I saw on Tumblr (through K, as it happens) a couple days ago about the social construction of gender roles, that, to paraphrase, basically said: 'gender roles are detrimental, but opting out of the institutions of gender is not really a realistic solution for the world in which we live, and thus writing them off isn't really practical advice' (post found, more eloquently than I could put it, in full: http://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/123472655682/i-think-a-mistake-that-a-lot-of-folks-make-when).
Now this isn't a perfect parallel, but it mirrors a bit of how I feel about labels. It would be nice for society to be one where labels are obsolete, and we treat the spectrums of gender and sexuality as they are: as spectrums, and don't worry too much about placing ourselves and others in rigid boxes that don't really fit quite right, but it's hard to make the case for that where straight and cis are still such entrenched societal defaults.
It's ok to let your label get as specific as you want, so long as you understand that lots of society won't understand those terms without you teaching them. And even then they might not accept those terms. You have to be comfortable with that.
Call yourself what you want. I think it's totally fine that you want to stay away from uber-specific labels.
I think someone can describe themselves however they think beat fits how they desire to be perceived or what they believe about themselves. I'm as straight as one can imagine, I think - but I've had a sexual experience with a man and I was entirely ambivalent about it. It's a thing that occurred in that moment - I wasn't repulsed or excited. I identify as a straight man.
Should? I hate "should", terms and labels are a options for communicating, that's about it.
We can't hold the whole of our experience in our heads. There's just too much. So we conceptualize - a quick, simplified model to represent a larger set of ideas. Labels are names for concepts as applied to (in this case) people.
The problem with concepts is, because they are simplified, they are by nature wrong in some way, at least. There's also nothing stopping a concept being based on ideas that are largely wrong, just to make it worse.
So we're a little stuck with concepts so it doesn't take a week to introduce ourselves. We just have to remember that a concept represents, sometimes very loosely, some part of the real world, it's not the real world itself. They can be little more than provisional placeholders for a better understanding that would have to come with time and experience.