Still Discovering

I’ve spent the past two days at CUAV’s speaker’s bureau training. The organization has a proactive program in place to promote an end to hate-motivated violence. To accomplish this, they send out public speakers to San Francisco District Schools to talk about Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer topics. Most of the speakers are LGBT or have LGBT family members.

Connie, whom I have met at various events since Gwen Araujo’s murder, is the main contact at CUAV. She mentioned her speaker’s bureau training to me a number of times, but every time it came up, I had something else going on. This was the first time I was finally able to make it...and I’m glad I did. I met 17 other great individuals that were going thru the training as well. CUAV has really been short on the numbers of speakers lately, so they really need the increase. In fact, they’ve had more requests for speakers than actual speakers available. Hopefully this will allow them to fill their ranks a little better.

In our training, though, we had a wide variety of people, cultures, and races. There were lesbians, gay men, transsexuals, genderqueer, bisexuals, questioning individuals, androgenous...you name it, we had it. During our two day discussions and training, though, I finally came to realize something:

I’m not bisexual.

I guess I used to consider myself such, but it wasn’t until this weekend that I finally realized that I like more than just men or women. Gender is not a constraint. I also do not like confining myself to the gender binary. Why limit oneself?

So, what am I? Well, like an omnivore that eats both meat and everything else, I figured I would be an omnisexual. It just sounds so cool. When I looked it up on the internet, it appears the synonym is ‘pansexual’, but that sounds kinda weird.

“Yeah, I’m pansexual....I wanna have sex with a pan.”

OK, so, you can call me pansexual if you want, but I’m sticking with omnisexual. More interesting, though, is that a lot of people that consider themselves pansexual or omnisexual are simply calling themselves ‘queer’. I’ve heard it being used for a while now, but I never really connected on the thoughts behind using it. I thought it was simply about people being gay or lesbian and just wanting to use the term queer instead...but it’s not. It’s a reclaimed word, reclaimed from those using it as on offensive word. It’s come to signify those that do not conform to heteronormative societal norms. It’s about simply liking who you want to like without having to worry about the societal pressures of a man having to love a woman, and vice versa. It’s also about liking people who may not fit the gender binary.

The problem with the word ‘queer’, though, is that not enough people know what it means...thus, I’ll likely use the word ‘omnisexual’, but also refer to myself as ‘queer’ in the midst of friends who might be able to comprehend it.