Thursday night’s Cinekink programming ran a rather unusual gamut. Starting with Courtney Trouble and Tina Horn’s short film/QueerPorn.tv trailer, What Makes Us Queer, moving into Angela Tucker’s documentary (a)sexual, and ending with a handful of kinky shorts (though it should be said that several were not so short), the film selection encompassed almost every identity modern sexuality has to offer. Since I’m a juror for the shorts program, I don’t feel that it’s fair to divulge my feelings before I deliberate, but let’s break down the first two films.
In early high school, I was really into hardcore punk. Since I was living near Boston at the time; which has a huge tough guy, straight edge hardcore scene, and because I was in high school; which is basically the only acceptable time to like pop punk, outsiders never understood what music I meant when I said “hardcore punk.” They thought I either liked watching meat heads shout about brotherhood or that I was going to this year’s Warped Tour. For the record, I was into shit like this.
But what was really bizarre was despite how misunderstood the label was in the mainstream, within the insular hardcore punk scene, “hardcore punk” meant almost nothing. We had a million other subgenres and micro-labels to describe what we were into, from “Finnish-style 80s thrash” to “vomit crust” to “dystopian grindcore.” Sometimes you’d catch nerdy record geeks arguing about definitions by the 7″ distro, but overall, I think most people within the scene understood that microlabels were fun descriptors and not much worth worrying about.
Watching the models of Tina Horn and Courtney Trouble’s QueerPorn.tv site explain their own non-traditional sexual identities, I felt like the current queer scene is experiencing a similar phenomenon. To the oblivious outsider, “queer” is an old fashioned word for gay, often with offensive connotations. Unless you love Foucault, have taken a gender studies class, or have friends who have and won’t shut up about it, “queer” is a bizarre categorical marker that you are likely unfamiliar with. Yet, for those who understand it, embrace it, and identify with it, “queer” means almost nothing, because it encompasses almost everything.
Since labels are designed to give you an idea of what something is without experiencing it firsthand, “queer” is actually a pretty piss poor identifier. If I announce that I’m queer, but what I mean is that I am male bodied and I sleep with female bodied women exclusively but that I’m down for a finger up my butt, that’s confusing for any passing homo who hears the word “queer” and assumes I’m up for some dick dueling. That’s why half the interviewees in What Makes Us Queer went past the Q-word and rattled off their self-made list of hyper-specific descriptors. “I’m a butch-femme, cys-gendered, switch faggot-dyke.” Despite the fact that that identity is riddled with apparent oxymorons and contradictions, it at least gives some idea of what this person’s sexual tastes appear to be.
All this is to say that it’s 2012 and crazy ear-punching music like Skrillex is getting Grammy nominations and trans-men are buttfucking androgynous femme-faggots on the Internet and it is the fucking future. Like, we live in a science fiction novel and there are iPhones and the fact that it is now officially the future needs to be recognized. Considering how many “straight” identified men are secretly cruising for boners on the reg on Craiglist and that half of the female OKCupid profiles I find list themselves as bisexual, I think it’s safe to say that “queer” is here to stay. And by becoming the norm, queer loses the original “strange, odd” definition that made it make sense. So I propose we drop the convoluted connotations of “queer” and embrace a word that directly promotes the openness and ambiguity “queer” aspires to. Why don’t we just call ourselves “sexual?” Then, if anyone needs more clarity, we can tell ‘em we’re a leather-slut-poly-dyke-bio-femme-power-bottom-old-school-thrash-peace-punk, and make it all perfectly clear.
But of course, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If one segment of society is vocalizing their free wheelin’ range of sexual attraction, there must be another group that just isn’t really down with all this boning. Not that they have a moral (aka hypocritical) objection to it, they’re just personally not down to fuck. Makes sense right? Of course it does.
Angela Tucker’s (a)sexual is an eye-opening look at what I see as becoming a much bigger movement in the next decade. Like vegans, asexuals are a subculture that consciously chooses to avoid and abstain from a pleasurable experience that the majority of humanity is all but obsessed with. Profiling Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) founder David Jay and a slew of other self-identified asexuals, as well as briefly talking about Morrissey, Tucker digs into a movement that, while I think it makes perfect sense, is apparently baffling to the rest of the world.
Why is this such a confusing concept? As a long time reader of Savage Love, I’ve seen Dan (whose snarky talking head makes an appearance in (a)sexual) deal with dozens of people complaining about partners who have no interest in sex. The archetypal wife who gets a headache just before bed each evening. Also, being obsessed with sex is kind of a hassle. There have been many times where I’ve fantasized about ditching my insatiable urge for orgasms so I could quit jerking off and accomplish something. Sexual desire is like a bottomless pit and no how many hook ups, one night stands, and intimate nights of making lurve with a partner you toss into it, it’s still going to snarl at you for more.
Less about the concept and more about the burgeoning movement, (a)sexual wisely lets those who have embraced the identity tell their own stories. The common thread is the distrust and disbelief asexuals encounter when they are open about their identity – David Jay is shown arguing with media pundits who refuse to accept his lack of sexual interest several times – and the ways that asexuals create bonds and intimacy without sex.
In the latter half of the film, the pace gets bogged down slightly by a tighter focus on Jay and the convoluted way he makes his social network his relationship. But just when it starts to get old, Tucker cuts ahead two years and interviews a very different Jay who has begun to accept that some of his theories were flawed and is questioning whether he will need to engage in sex to create the intimacy he desires.
The obvious solution is for asexuals to date other asexuals, but since the community is so small at the moment, that’s not an option many of the film’s subjects are ready to bank on. However, during the post-film Q&A Tucker noted that Jay has since had sex – apparently he was like “meh” about it – and that he met another asexual at one of the film’s premiers and they are now dating. So fucking cute it gives me an asexual boner.
Right now, asexual is a small fraction of the population who view their disinterest in sex as an orientation, not a choice. But as radical sex movements like queerdom continue to expand and grow, I predict that we’ll see a rise in voluntary celibacy and asexual identification. The future sexual divide will no longer be gay versus straight, but sexual versus asexual. Are you a hetero-romantic-cuddling-non-masturbatory-intersexed-asexual or a poly-bisexual-femme-butch-strap-on-slave? That, my friends, is the real question.
