moominmuppet

The reasons I hid my relationships and sexual involvements over the years are hugely complicated, and have been one of the bigger mindfucks in my life. It's taken a long time to sort out the multitude of often conflicting reasons that was such a strong pattern, most especially in middle and high school.

Reason the first (starting with the simple stuff): Access. Mom and Dad always accepted me having both male and female friends. I love them for that, but it also gave me an odd conundrum: if I told them I was involved with a guy (because I wasn't yet aware I was queer and women were an option for me), odds were good we'd get watched a lot more closely than they ever did about my friendships with guys. What halfway sane and horny teenager wants to risk fucking up that bit of excellentness?

Reason the second: my own weird gender shit. "Dating" meant my guy friends might stop treating me as a friend and start treating me as a "girl". I was horrified by that idea. Most of my early grope and tickle was with close male friends, and very much as a rough-housing tomboy. I got to second base and dry-humping about three years before I got to kissing, largely as a result of that. (kissing would've "changed things" in ways that wrestling and riding each other on the bed wouldn't) It was partly about fear of losing my real friendships with these guys, especially Chris (the reason Appetite for Destruction is still a powerhouse libido album for me today). It was also partly about my own discomfort about being pushed into gender roles that never felt comfortable for me, and reactions that I didn't really understand until I encountered the concept of genderqueerness years later. One of the reasons Chad and I fit so well together is that he actively recognizes and appreciates both my masculinity and my femininity. I feel grokked deeply enough to feel free of all that shit in ways that's extremely rare for me with male-identified male-bodied people (genderqueer and female-identified people, regardless of their bits, don't trigger that defensiveness in me. Trans guys feel downright safe to me, because they're more likely to get it than almost anyone else).

Reason the third: My own weird poly shit. I consider myself deeply and inescapably poly. I was long before I had the conceptual framework or emotional maturity to understand that about myself. I have "officially" been contractually monogamous for a total of two weeks and one day in my life; a week with Jordan once, summer after graduation from high school (I freaked out, broke up with him, was so relieved and happy I lost my virginity the next night with him), a week or so with Scott when we dated at the beginning of freshman year in college (an awesome guy, and it mostly ended because it was freaking me out in weird ways I couldn't, at the time, understand), and one day with Mike when we were trying to resolve relationship issues and decided to give monogamy a try (he wasn't even back to Cleveland before I was calling, freaking the fuck out and declaring we needed a different solution or an end to things). That's it. There were times when I wasn't sure whether the situation implied I was "supposed" to be monogamous, and that stressed me the fuck out, but those were the only times I actually officially tried it. Not to say I haven't been de facto monogamous or celibate at plenty of times in my life, but that's worlds different inside my head from committing to it as a indefinite promise. Monogamy isn't just unnecessary for me, it's actively harmful to my psyche. I describe it often as "feeling like someone just built a white picket fence around my sexuality". First I shut off my sexual reactivity to the rest of the world, and then it shuts off to my partner. I start perceiving my own sexuality as a threat, a risk, a potential problem. So I shut it down. This way leads misery. I respect why monogamy suits many people much better than it could ever fit me, I don't equate monogamy with jealousy and possessiveness in any necessary way, and I have no real problem respecting the agreements that others have in their lives or avoiding crossing those boundaries. Now that I get it about myself, now that I have a conceptual framework that makes space for who I am, it's all fine and dandy, and pretty fucking full of joy. In high school and college? It fucking sucked. I'd want intimacy and commitment and connection and all those things beyond furtive FWB involvements, but I couldn't comprehend that it might be possible to "have a relationship" and also not feel the horrible way I always felt when I tried (because I just accepted as fact that if you were in a relationship that of _course_ it was going to be monogamous). So I mostly had FWB involvements, with heaping doses of "I don't know if we're acknowledging this publicly or not" piled on, and then dealt with a lot of pain when those didn't actually assuage my needs, and left me feeling hidden and uncertain about everything. I adore having friends with benefits. Now that I understand the difference, and know how to navigate multiple different sorts of relationships, they have a wonderful place in my life. Now that I'm not using them to replace what I also need emotionally in terms of romantic relationships, that is. Find the poly community in a way in which I was capable of recognizing it and imagining myself in that kind of dynamic, was a Hallelujah light-bulb moment in my life when I was about 20. Life changing. I'd encountered it online prior to that, but it was at a point when I was 16 that I sort of half believed it was just online fantasy, not something people actually and really did. Highly amusingly, this was AFTER my first threesome. I am queen of obliviousness.

Reason the fourth: The parish. Weaponized against my Dad, as I talked about in the other post. They were always looking over my shoulder, and I knew some had hostile intent in doing so. Made me paranoid as fuck. I could go to a silly Davison carnival with a friend (can't recall whether it was Brian or Steve), and have 23 goddamn people ask Mom about it at church on Sunday (we counted). Paranoia? My reality.

Reason the fifth: School bullies. Most of the bullying in my life was psychological; I've always been more capable of defending myself (and others) physically, and only had a few fights or situations where I felt physically unsafe. Thank you, big strong body. The psychological shit, though... Fearing that any expression of interest might be a setup for a prank to humiliate me. Being publicly mocked for my weight, my lack of social or fashion sense, my geekery. Believing because of that that no one would possibly _want_ to be publicly affiliated with me in that way, it could only humiliate them. The bully obsession with the sex life of the american teenage girlgeek, and the joy they had in cornering me and interrogating me about what was happening between me and anyone I was seen with. Alan, the first boy I ever loved, held hands with me once, awkwardly, at our local mall on the way to see Last Temptation of Christ. I was cornered the next day at school and harassed mercilessly for details. Whatever could have been between him and me when we were in high school basically died that day. I was terrified, humiliated, didn't want to expose my precious little connections with people out where they would get us treated like that.

The shit that lasted in my head, long after I'd put all the rest satisfyingly to bed, was Reason the fifth. Oh, I knew people could be sexually attracted to me. I had plenty of hot, hot evidence of that, in corners, surreptitiously, hidden, hidden, hidden. I don't even know how much was my idea to hide and how much any of theirs, but I wasn't capable at that point of believing they could possibly want it any other way, anyway. It took years to get over that. It wasn't helped by continuing that pattern with all the confusing and "maybe secret maybe not" hookups in college, either, especially with Mike, who seemed to loathe his attraction to me 90% of the time (the other 10% was when the chemistry would get too powerful and we'd fall into bed again, and then there's be another moral crisis and declaration from him that it could never happen again. Until the next time it did, usually with at least months between occurrences and all kinds of fucked up awkward-not-quite-friendship dynamics between us in the meantime. That's the first five years of our history, before we ever (quite shockingly) became a real couple for several years (my most serious relationship to date aside from Chad, one of the greatest loves of my life despite being 100% certain that the best thing we ever did for each other was to break up). Unsurprisingly, not being a "dirty little secret" in Mike's life was some of the earliest shit we had to sort out between us when we suddenly got actually and truly involved.

It's a lot of why I will never deny a partner, or my history with them. No one will ever be my dirty little secret. Ever. I don't mind if casual partners don't proclaim me to the world; I get the complexities involved in being publicly affiliated with my life, and it's one of the biggest distinctions between "casual sex" and "relationship" in my life. Again, something I could navigate healthily once I finally understood what I needed, and what I needed to fix in my life. And one of the reasons I've chosen "mostly single" over "bad relationship" time and time again in my life, without compunction.

It is, again, one of those huge things I've found with Chad. When we started developing feelings, we had a number of very serious talks at my instigation to make extraordinarily sure he understood what he was getting into by being publicly seriously involved with me. I am ridiculously open about taboo and generally private topics. It's hugely important to me to be so. It also means, though, that just dating me will "out" people in all sorts of ways. When I talk at length about how I really only connect on a primary partnership level with other queer folk? That says things about my partners. When I say I don't date guys that don't like assplay, and rhapsodize about the joys of pegging? That says things about my partners. My experiences being weaponized against my Dad have left me very leery of connections close and public enough to redound into negative effects in other people's lives. Even after years of intentionally keeping myself and my life as far from any new parishes as possible, I discovered that the moment Dad retired from life as a parish priest, there was a huge weight lifted from me, a sense of freedom that shocked me. I had no idea how much of that I was still carrying around, still worrying some parishioner might stumble on and use against Dad. It's been one of the great struggles in my life as a sexuality activist, how to balance my need to follow my passions with my fear of being used against someone else.


And I may still have more to say about all this, but right now, Katy awaits!