This Book is Gay Read Free Page B

with a deliberately slippery word might seem like a contradiction in terms. For me, that was the point. I feel that ‘straight’, ‘gay’ and ‘bi’ don’t adequately cover or include the way I feel.
    For one thing, those terms suggest a rigid and inflexible take on gender. For people who see sex and gender in any way other than binaries, the options of “one, the other or both” simply don’t fit.
    In addition to that, I find that gender/sex is a relatively small part of sexual attraction for me. It seems odd to define my sexual identity by a small facet of it. While some people – some LGBT people or people into kink, for example – choose to solve this problem with more specific identities, I’d rather not try and sum it up in that way.
    For me, identifying as queer is a way of placing myself outside straight, mainstream sexuality without having to identify with other ideas I can’t relate to.’
    Kerry, Brighton.
C IS FOR CURIOUS
    Curious, or questioning, as is often now used, means just that – someone who is in the process of asking the big questions. I think all young people should spend time thinking about desire. I think everyone would be a lot happier if they took a few weeks to dwell on what does it for them. It’d resolve a lot of tension and grief, I expect. A whole lot of people ‘experiment’ – they give it a little go to see if they like it. Some do, and do it again, and some rule it out, happy in the knowledge that they’re not missing out.
    Like anything in life, sometimes you don’t know until you try. I wouldn’t eat prawns until I was eighteen – the mere idea of them freaked me out. But then I tried them and it turns out they’re DELISH. Don’t worry, I’ve more than made up for it since.
    (I stress, in this instance, that ‘prawns’ is not a euphemism for anything.)
A IS FOR ASEXUAL
    There are two ways of looking at asexuality. The first is as a lack of, or little interest in, sex (with anyone). The second is as a refusal to define your sexual orientation or uncertainty about your sexual orientation – a more modern use of the term. Asexuality is not celibacy (abstaining from sex). Asexual people MAY have sex – to have kids, to try it out or to experiment – but asexual people will characteristically have little desire for either men or women, so if you go back to our flow chart, they would typically lose interest after the first question.
    Asexual people will often have romantic feelings towards people, and they may well have boyfriends and girlfriends and do all the lovey-dovey, holding hands and hugging parts, just without the willies and mimsies.
    This is – you guessed it – FINE. Some people just aren’t that sexual and, like all identities, this one might change over time. I have found that a growing number of teenagers identify as asexual while figuring out their identity.
T IS FOR TRANSGENDER
    Right at the very outset of this discussion, let’s not get it twisted.
    Here we go:

    Now this is really tough, and you’d be forgiven for making mistakes when ‘trans’ is so often used as shorthand. When it is, it almost certainly means transgender or transsexual. You may also hear genderqueer, which, like queer theory regarding sexuality, is more of a refusal to be pigeonholed than an identity in itself.
    There are broader issues regarding gender identity, in that we are still very much stuck in a binary culture which says some things are for boys (slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails) and some things are for girls (sugar and spice and all things nice – P.S. who wrote this ANTI-FEMINIST HATE ANTHEM? To think we tell it to children in NURSERY).

    Advertisers would like us to believe that being female somehow feels different to being male, but we will never really know. Culture tells our parents how to dress us as kids, and it becomes