SEXIS WRONG

designates a whole range of people who can’t be divided up
into the rigid binaries of homo/het or male/female. We are
the transgendered, the bisexual, the kinky, the nonmonogamous,
and the sexually undefined. We are the people whose
sexual desires and gender identities make us outcasts, even
in a queer community whose founding principle was sexual
freedom at any cost.
Bill Brent, publisher of Black Books Press and radical sex
magazine Black Sheets, remembers that the gay community
of the 1970s was more like what the sex community is
now. “I think that a lot of things shifted in the gay community
when it became more aggressively political around 1978. It
was necessary, but there was a sacrifice in terms of a certain
laissez-faire attitude about an individual’s right to invent their
own sexuality.”
As the gay community slowly emerged from the underground,
its values shifted. Rather than being a radical experiment, gay
life was codified and defined. The “Castro clone” emerged, a
reminder that what it meant to be and act gay was no longer
up for grabs. There is a well-defined gay type: clean, professional,
white, mono-gendered, and unambiguously attracted
only to the same sex. Queer-friendly books, movies, and TV
shows offer us images of homosexuals who are fundamentally
nice boys and girls with the same values
as your typical middle-class suburban family.
None of these happy homos are fistfucking at
naughty clubs or enjoying more than one lover
or changing their sex.
The more inclusive term queer became popular
in the 1990s as a way to combat the cloneish
aspects of the gay community. But when the Pride parade
rolls around, for example, it’s clear that the queer community
is largely dominated by homosexuals, and the rest of us are
relegated to some sort of “queer runoff” status or worse.
Brent, a longtime participant in what he calls “mixed-gender
sex spaces,” says, “Most of my sexual activity is with men,
but I get tired of gay men who act like my playing with women
is some kind of aberration. To them, we’re exotic, just as
gays and lesbians seem exotic to a lot of straights. And this
can be a little frustrating when you’re trying to deal with a lot
of the same issues, like social acceptance, health care, and
individual sexual freedom.”
Ironically, the mainstream queer community has created
its own seething, semi-invisible underground of individuals
whose sexual choices don’t register on gaydar. I would argue
that just as we look to the cultural underground for the future
of art and entertainment, we must look to the sexual underground
for the future of queer. Just because Ellen DeGeneres
can display her well-aerobicized girlfriend on TV and Dan Savage
can adopt a kid doesn’t mean the revolution is over. It’s
just gotten started.
Carol Queen, a bisexual pioneer, writer, and much-loved organizer
in the sex community, suggests that gender identity
is one of the new frontiers in queerness. She explains that
one of the things that makes people identify as queer these
days—even if they aren’t a card-carrying homo—is “a gender-role
critique, particularly in sexual relationships.” Even
heterosexuals are attracted to this aspect of queer, she says.
“Plenty of hets aren’t crazy about gender roles. That’s the
first thing people turn to queers for—a living, breathing, loving
critique of the pink/blue dichotomy.”
Transgender politics, displayed forcefully in 1999’s hit indie
film Boys Don’t Cry, are just the tip of the iceberg. As
more female-to-male (FTM) transsexuals become visible and
male-to-female surgeries improve dramatically, new permutations
of transgenderism have surfaced. San Francisco’s
Cheryl Chase heads the Intersexual Society of North America
[www.isna.org], an activist organization for intersexuals
(people born with physical characteristics of both sexes). And
activists like Matt Rice and Patrick Califia—both FTM—are
making it obvious that being a transsexual isn’t about using
hormones and/or surgeries to “go straight.”
Ironically, the mainstream queer
community has created its own
seething, semi-invisible underground
of individuals whose sexual choices
don’t register on gaydar.
Rice says that people’s reactions to his identity have changed
a lot over the past ten or more years. “When I started working
at [San Francisco gay bar] the Lone Star, and I said I was
transsexual, men would assume I meant I was MTF [male to
female]. They had no idea that FTM existed, and they would
say, ‘Aw, don’t wear dresses—you’re such a cute boy!’ Now
when I tell them, they say, ‘So what?’” Rice explains that he’s
had to educate men in the queer community in order to be
accepted, but that acceptance was generally given willingly.
“It does take the support of a community to make that kind
of change,” he says. “And what I didn’t expect was that my
friends ended up being gender activists too. They stuck up
for me when people talked behind my back.”
And of course, FTM and MTF aren’t the end of the story,
either. Plenty of transgendered people in the queer underground
aren’t in any hurry to pick male or female. They might
take hormones but not get surgery. Or they might crossdress
without having any plans to ever change their biological sex.
And when sexuality gets thrown into this genderfucked mix,
A PERVERTED UTOPIA 317