Inside the Current Issue

Straight Until Graduation

Megan Bicycleta

I'm sure you've met a fair amount of kids who are "queer until graduation" - people who test out the waters of queerness, seeing what it's like to hook up with folks of all sorts of sexes. These people are into opening up their dating pools, increasing their options, playing around, having fun, drinking until they're gay, etc. And, hey, there's no harm in that! I'm sure they've made a lot of queer folks happy between the sheets. However, upon graduating, they cut down on their pharmaceutical intakes, quit dropping acid on the weekends, look into getting a steady form of employment that offers societal credibility, and, well, they go straight. Hell, maybe they were straight all along.

Nobody knows.

I'm not one to impose labels on anyone, though - they might just enjoy vacillating all over the Kinsey scale, just to keep things interesting. That's fine. I've been through my own process with the whole question of sexuality and identity politics, and I've traversed the inverse road of most of these sexy college kids. In fact, I was straight until graduation.

In Portland, Oregon, I had a college boyfriend. If you saw me now, you might laugh to hear that, but then if you saw him, it would all make sense. He was fairly faggy, and his somewhat aberrant gender presentation is what attracted me to him. Actually, when he broke up with me, a friend even chided for taking so long to realize that he was gay - some people just want to claim prior knowledge of this stuff. Well, then. Before I ever hooked up with this faggy college boyfriend, he turned to me and whispered, "but I thought you were gay ... " - I retorted, "I'm not, but are you gay?" (Everyone on campus thought I was queer for years, for some reason. I just couldn't figure that one out ... ) It transpired that neither of us identified as totally gay at that point in time, so we had a fairly decent relationship for a year and a half, during which we'd talk about all of our library crushes on folks of all genders with each other. We also discussed gender and queer theory with each other at length. It was a very queer straight relationship. He expressed an admiration for dykes (as did I), and a frustration with gay boy culture - he found it vapid and superficial. He seemed to want to be a girl, and I thought that was pretty darned attractive. But all straight things must come to an end, and so our relationship disintegrated into disappointment and miscommunications immediately after graduation.

Dejected by the break up, I went to Olympia to watch The Transfused (a queer rock opera) with some friends, moved into a big dilapidated house with a few transguys, and started washing dishes at the Roxy, a drag queen diner. On a hot weekend in July, I stuffed myself into a tiny car with a bunch of folks and we headed down to San Francisco for Gay Pride. The sheer numbers of beautiful women blew my mind. Women in leather pants, women in crazy dresses, women wearing nothing but hotpants and duct tape on their tits, women on motorcycles, women on bicycles, women with signs proclaiming "I'm vegan; eat me" and the like; in short, there were a lot of hot ladies at the dyke march. The women swarmed the streets, arm in arm, clutching their friends and bottles of alcohol, banners and flags. The streets were entirely taken over with women. Women were chanting and singing, making friends on the road and making out on billboards above us (and I don't mean just rendered on a sign in a one-dimensional manner - there were women on the billboards, on roofs, on fire escapes, on every part of the city from the ground up). Needless to say, I was converted. I had been somewhat attracted to women previously, but it was only at this point that I really acknowledged it to myself.

I promptly returned to my hometown and promptly got myself a hot date from the Rock and Roll Camp for Girls (an adult volunteer, not a little girl, you perv!). That didn't last for too long, as I couldn't really handle it when she shaved her head to match me and memorized all the songs that my band had. When she asked if she could leave a toothbrush at my house, I knew that it was time to get out. Prior to this, I had kissed a few girls years at our college's celebration of Coming Out Day/Week, as my then-band mate coerced me to kiss her housemate. "Aw, c'mon, Megan, just give it a shot; it's Coming Out Week!" - so I did give it a drunken ridiculous shot, which mostly just entailed us smashing our teeth up against one another in an inept manner while this girl told me about how she had a crush on my housemate. I responded, "Good luck - you and the rest of the college!" (my housemate was a pretty hot ticket on campus, and was, at this point, straight), and they (and not we) ended up hooking up.

Later, as a CUNY student, I recall having my eye on a couple of the ladies in my classes. I think it turned out that these girls were either straight or not single, or both. At any rate, it wasn't meant to be. I also recall having one badass butch professor who taught Feminist Literary Theory and was tough as nails, having weathered traditional academia prior to the advent of Feminist Studies. She'd say things in class such as "when I was talking with Audre Lorde one day in our reading group," and I would laugh incredulously, not believing that she had known any phenomenal queer feminist thinkers. But she did know a lot of great seminal feminist thinkers, and I was the asshole, interjecting my ignorant presumptions into the class. I think she's forgiven me by now. She always pushed her students to think critically, which I certainly appreciated.

I also had professors who were very sympathetic to queer studies, and while I thought they were gay, I think they were probably just sympathetic. That's okay. I was so convinced that one of these professors was gay that it kind of delighted me, as I imagined us to be secret compatriots in an underground queer academic situation. Until he mentioned that he had visited his girlfriend's family over the break, and I saw my visions of a gay brother-sisterhood evaporate. However, I interrogated my own preconceived notions - what did I know of this "girlfriend"? Perhaps this "girlfriend" was formerly a "boyfriend," or was a different kind of girl altogether. I couldn't make any assumptions.

I suppose that's what queerness is all about: defying normative assumptions. And here I was, imposing my normative gay assumptions on to this person. I'm constantly learning more about my assumptions of gender and sexuality, reexamining a lot of things regarding "the gay," and working on queering all of my previous notions of queer. Interrogating my previous ideas on gender and sexuality helps me not only resist normative standards of sexuality, but it also helps forever expand my notions of what and who I find hot in the world. While seeking to escape the heterosexual matrix, I also seek to carve out new definitions of the "hott," the "gay," the "queer," and have fun with the constant play of gender in the world. I hope you do, too. (Oh, and if you are one of those queers-until-graduating folks, I just hope you're not a heartbreaker, you heartbreaker!)

Megan Bicycleta recently completed her MA at CUNY and is currently an ESL teacher.