Once, a very drunk man in a pub referred to the friends I was with and me as lesbians. I explained how wrong he was, we got talking. He told me he was of a generation that recognized only gays and straights, really. I nodded; this is hardly new to me.
He got drunker and told me his great idea about gay towns and gay schools and straight towns with straight everything, different everything for gay people than for straight people.
I tried to appreciate where he was coming from: how much sense gay schools would make to people who lived through Section 28, how even if he didn’t remember homosexuality being illegal, he would have grown up in a culture where it hadn’t long been decriminalized.
But my brain loves taking surreal ideas to their absurd conclusions, so my attempt to be charitable didn’t last long. I couldn’t help wondering where I’d fit in. Would I have to live in Straight Town with my straight husband? I’d miss my queer friends! A lot of them, if judged on a relationship they were perceived to be in, would have to abruptly move house at odd intervals. What would happen when a child in a Gayville school realized they were straight? Imagine the weird but necessary fostering programs.
I felt a little sad for this guy, that he thought that’d work, that the world cleaves neatly into gays and straights. No edge cases, nothing outside the binary, no problems.
Even compared to that convoluted utopia, the world I am aware of is more complicated, marginalized, chaotic, misunderstood, and amorphous, but also capable of a kind of beauty that wouldn’t be possible withotu that complexity
