If you've ever read Adrienne Rich's "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," you know its not an easy text to get through. It challenges all the notions we have about heterosexuality and what it means to have a gendered sexuality.
A few weeks back was National Coming Out Day. I heard so many amazing, heart-wrenching, empowering stories from my friends and total strangers about the bold and fierce ways in which they discovered and revealed their sexuality. A common thread in many of these stories, is realizing at a young age that something about you is essentially different, and knowing that difference by use of the language you are given as you grow up. One of the reasons I love Adrienne Rich's essay, is because she makes room for everyone who hasn't shared in that "essential knowingness." There is something very real and tangible about living your entire life believing that you are legitimately straight, and only later returning to events, moments, people, that lead you to believe otherwise. Its not always dramatic, its not always heart-wrenching and filled with fear. Its the realization that you have been successfully gendered inside of a system built to turn out heterosexual persons. The system works, and in some scenarios, flawlessly well, to make people experience boundaries and binaries as infallible.
I want to say that finding the language to question this type of a system is hard. It is necessarily difficult. It means seeing equations with solutions different then you thought the numbers would add up to. But it is not broken, and it is not wrong. On the contrary, it is -- exciting. It is empowering. As you question your production by this system, know that one of the most important discoveries is the fact that you were brave enough to ask the questions in the first place. Relish in that moment. As for where to go next? Its hard to say. But I know that having this dialogue feels right.
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