labingi

Sorry to clog up your DW inbox with long replies, but I feel I want to share a personal example to explain why this matters to me.

Around 2006-07, I had a platonic female partner and, at the time, it was far and away the best LTR of my life. I was in my early 30s and it was the only really healthy and comfortable LTR I'd ever found. I was in a very queer-friendly community, but I felt unable to talk about this relationship, something like a gay person in the 1950s maybe, because as a straight-leaning friendship bonder in a platonic relationship, I couldn't label my partner "she" without automatically being assumed to be lesbian. There's nothing wrong with being lesbian--but I'm not. If there's one sexual orientation category it's clear to me I'm not, it's that. My options were to (a) circumlocute around pronouns all the time, (b) introduce a long discussion of platonic partnership into every casual mention of my relationship with any casual acquaintance, or (c) just be go through life mislabeled. Today, I'd choose (c), but I found that painful at the time, so I mostly chose (a).

It was hard! I couldn't celebrate my beautiful partnership. I couldn't talk about it hardly at all. When I introduced the relationship to one of my best friends, he just ignored it (didn't reply via email). Later he said he didn't know what I meant so he figured it wasn't significant. When I mentioned it to another good friend by email, she ignored it to. Miffed, I later called her out on this, and she said that when I said the relationship was platonic, she figured that this woman was trying to take advantage of me for some personal gain and that's why she was pretending to want a relationship when she wasn't really attracted to me, but she figured I wouldn't believe her and would just have to learn that the hard way, so it was best that she not say anything. She assumed a woman she'd never met (and I had known for years) was an opportunistic manipulator (but I was too naive to see it) purely on the basis of the fact that we didn't have a sexual relationship. That's all: no sex = obvious manipulation, not real relationship. (She also said she figured I was a repressed lesbian but would have to come to terms with that in my own time.)

That's the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say this "love=sex" move is damaging. I really can't overstate how much it has screwed with me personally in my life. And whether my own media representation is male, female, or a mixed pairing, I don't really care. Just gimme some representation.

(Sorry for the long unloading.)