Give me even the Kinsey scale

The entire dispute that's come up over Alexander the Great and his sexuality due to this new movie frustrates me to no end. We have fallen so lockstep into the notion that you are either gay or straight that we have so lost the forest for the trees.

The truth is that once they manage to uncover the sexuality genes, it will answer very little. Conservatives will continue to act like homosexuality is a deviation, progressives will continue to act like there are straights and gays and that difference must be embraced. Progressives are closer to the truth, but still I worry.

I want the Kinsey scale back in a lot of ways. In politics, it's pointless to talk about where you fall on some scale, because the issues are rights and that is black or white in many ways. Either you have the right to marry someone of the same sex who is your lifelong partner or you don't. If you are slightly bisexual on the Kinsey scale is irrelevant, because you have your life that you have now and that deserves respect. Period.

I worry because of categories. Straight and gay have become hard and fast categories and while there are short term advantages to that, in the end the reason the equality makes sense is because categories are lies. Alexander was a gay man who had sexual relationships with women to consolidate power. Or he was a bisexual who liked men more. We will never know. The question to my mind is, why is this a question?

Categories are useful. I am with someone--that's a category that men use when trying to decide to talk to me. Gay and straight are useful categories, if for no other reason than they make it easier to decide who to hit on and who to avoid.

But we have to remember that categories are something we impose on chaos to make sense of things. I am a straight woman. As a rule, I fall for men. More than that, I fall for manly men who smell strongly and dress a certain way and, as my friend Kiki pointed out, I even have a thing for guys who can fix cars. (Not a bad fixation--boyfriends may fade away but a good car mechanic is forever.) But for my hyper-butch fixation, I still fell for a woman once and had a love affair with her.

I usually identify as straight, which seems fair. I have a boyfriend I am dedicated to. Beside my relationship, I mostly am oriented to men. But women can and do flummox me. Am I straight? Yes, because most of my sexual feelings are aimed at men. Am I gay? No, of course not. Am I bisexual? No, not by most definitions. Not really. I love women and am fascinated by them. But I generally only want to fuck men. My one affair with a woman doesn't change that.

I am not a bisexual. I am straight. I live straight, identify straight and always will. I will never insult true bisexuals by taking a weak attraction to women and turning that into a genuine sexual identity. But this is where my ugly questions raise their head.

I know my history and know it well. There is no doubt that Alexander the Great was gay. He had a constant companion that he was clearly in love with that was a man. But he married women and by some accounts made love to these women in a genuine way. Does that make him straight? No, and you can't turn him straight no matter how many women you fling around. I'm not a lesbian for loving one woman out of many men, and Alexander wasn't straight due to obligatory heterosexual encounters.

My boyfriend made a funny joke, though I forget the occasion, but the joke was something like, "Fuck all sorts of pussy, eat women out, no matter the number, suck one cock and you're gay." The joke is mocking straight male homophobia, implying that one crack in the straight male armor is the end of straight maleness. Interesting, but just more evidence for my point.

I see the other side of this, a desperate, grasping side to the religious right where they interpret even mild hetrosexual behavior as "evidence" of lurking heterosexuality. The religious right lives for "reformed homosexuals", who are generally bisexuals who hide themselves well. Kiss one girl, and you are straight.

I see both sides slipping into an either/or mentality and I think it's not going to achieve progressives any battles. We have got to approach gay rights from the angle or fairness or nothing will get done.