When it comes to categorizing my sexual orientation, I can’t seem to neatly place it under a label, not because I’m particularly special or that it’s beyond labels, but because they don’t quite capture its fluidity and ambiguity. That’s not to say that other people don’t experience that same type of fluidity and ambiguity (they very much do), it’s just that I don’t see the point of labeling my sexuality nor do I find it entirely helpful. I find that asking the right questions is the key initial step to learning and growing since pointed questions indicate an understanding of a subject while also realizing where the gaps and ambiguities lie. To me, my sexuality is a question mark, a staring point that paves the way for more questions and exploration.

I’m primarily attracted to men (cisgendered, trans, and male-presenting people) than I am to women. Men drive me crazy, send me into a frenzy, and induce me into an obsessional madness. While I can be VERY sexually attracted to women, the attraction doesn’t extend beyond lust. I can love them as friends and sisters but they don’t induce the same erotic obsession that men do. I think part of it is that men also inspire a miasma of angst, frustration, and anger that I don’t experience with women. There’s enough distance, polarity, and conflict with men that they inspire a fascinated longing. With this description, it would be easy to say that I’m heteroflexible and leave it that. While that’s accurate, I feel like it serves as a period, rather than a question mark, at the end of the sentence thus possibly ceasing any further inquiry. The label confers certainty. It answers the question of whom I’m attracted to and could be possibly attracted to.

But sexual orientation is just one ingredient in the complex concoction that is sexuality. The label serves as a categorical vector but it doesn’t portray the vicissitudes that desire brings. Of course for many people, a label is a point of departure, a a framing device that helps one situates one’s desires and how those things operate. Last year I would’ve identified as asexual which is not my baseline but rather it was a thing that latched onto me for the time being, and there were a myriad of reasons for why I identified as such- hormonal changes, different priorities at the time, exploring different facets of myself, etc. At the time, the asexuality pointed towards something more than just mere sexual orientation and attraction, and what those other things are I can’t really say yet.

Keeping my sexuality outside the realm of categorization and leaving it in the realm of the semiotic a lá Julia Kristeva keeps it both familiar and strange. The undulating felt viscerality of it all is experienced in all its nuances and slippages. It’s one that warrants interpretation but also disinvests in the clinical detachment of analysis. It’s not initially linguistic, scientific, or sociological but phenomenological and embodied. It divests in form and hermeneutics while also being rife with meaning. In our culture, I think we have an uneasy relationship with ambiguity. Everything needs to be ordered, rationalized, analyzed, and codified, and while these things make life more efficient and livable they don’t leave much room for people and things who occupy the thresholds or the in-between spaces, or those who don’t occupy any spaces. Ambiguity leaves too much room for misinterpretation and misunderstanding but it’s in these follies that we learn and discover especially if let ourselves be humble enough to entertain the fact that we can be wrong. It also confronts us with the fact that we’re perpetually in media res. These ambiguities make it known that we’re in a constant Heraclitean process.