Category: Life

I suppose I was a bit enigmatic with my previous post on Policing Bodies. Part of it was anger at a whole bunch of shit I had seen happen to others. Part of it was me expressing anger at what I felt was my inability to come out, but in doing so pretty much came out without being specific as to what.

So to be clear: I’m polyamorous. It’s an umbrella term for a form of consensual non-monogamy, in which a person can have multiple partners. There are as many forms of this as there are relationships, all being a little different. Some dynamics might involve having multiple romantic partners, some might involve one romantic partner and multiple sexual partners, some might involve one relationship having a greater time commitment compared to others, some might involve a more equal spread. There is no one formula.

I think the thing I appreciate most about being poly is that I get to have relationships in a way that feels right to me. I don’t have to follow a script – if it feels right to meet once a week, cuddle, and watch movies – I can. If it feels right to not have any sexual context, that’s fine too. Without a model to funnel me into, monogamy aside, the outside loses the ability to pressure certain expectations of what I should do.

I’ve been in a polyamorous relationship for a year and a half, but didn’t come out previously to non queer friends, even my most trusted ones. I was mostly monogamish anyways, I told myself. Plus I kept having bad experience after bad experience coming out elsewhere, and I thought it was better to not say anything.

Then I met this guy, purely by serendipity. And we started to date. And it’s been going great. And just like entering a serious gay relationship brought coming out to the forefront, so too did this. But I felt like I couldn’t, so I wrote that post.

Thank you for your words of support. They inadvertently started the ball rolling. On Tuesday I gave you the details JT. Then something unexpected happened that removed all hesitation. So after a quick check-in at home, I outed myself on Facebook.

I was told during one of those coming outs that this information had no place in the public sphere, that it belonged to the bedroom. I disagree very strongly with this, because these people are important relationships in my life, as important as a monogamous couple would attribute each partner.

I think it’s fucked up to erase the existence of a person. I understand why people stay in the closet, and I don’t fault them for it. I’m upset at the environment that made it so.

I can hear the “but they’re just not the same as a monogamous partner!” Really? They’re just as important to me. The funny thing is, and as you noted Tina when I ran into you today, this isn’t actually all that uncommon with queer couples.

Pretty much all my queer friends are poly. It’s a living, breathing network of people. It doesn’t work for everyone, and that’s cool too. It’s just another way through which to experience this world, and if it suits, great, if it doesn’t, great.

As a final bit, to come out completely:

Though I did come out as gay first, I actually identify as pansexual. This means that gender isn’t a factor in who I’m attracted to. It just so happens that I’ve always been with men (the mystery date is also a guy.) I don’t mind when I’m considered gay.

I’m currently spending lots of my time questioning how I see myself, in particular in relation to my body. I identify as male, that lines up with my sex, I use male pronouns, and have a mostly masculine gender expression. I don’t expect that to change. Nevertheless, there are parts of me that really don’t jive with that. So I’m exploring.

Holy shit that felt good.

So I got my tax refund the other day, and I promptly purchased two items: new shoes to replace my ripped-in-four-places boots, and a new laptop. It’s an 11.6″ Acer V5, which was on sale at FutureShop for $379.

The laptop came installed with Windows 8 – more on that later. In any case, I replaced it with the latest version of the popular Linux distribution Xubuntu. To pretty it up, I installed the Cinnamon desktop environment and Docky. The end result is pretty and functional.

After installing Linux, everything worked out of the box. Bluetooth, wifi, sound – even my networked printer was detected. The only exception was the brightness buttons weren’t doing anything. That was resolved by adding a line to a file (“acpi_backlight=vendor” to the grub configuration.)

I also installed Windows 7 inside of VirtualBox so that I could get the occasional Windows-only thing running like Netflix. I was able to get the American Netflix selection by setting the DNS servers inside of Windows to those run by Unblock-Us.

For the above screenshot, the left window is in Linux while the right one is in Windows. I get the best of both worlds running together thanks to VirtualBox’s seamless mode.

The laptop itself is great. It has a low-power Intel Core i3-2365, 4GB of RAM, and 500GB hard drive space. It also has 802.11n dual-band wifi, gigabit ethernet, a multi-finger touchpad, USB 3.0, and VGA+HDMI out. The machine is small with its 11.6″ screen, and so quite light.

The included processor is powerful enough to run Netflix on Windows smoothly, yet energy efficient enough to have the whole system be relatively cool to the touch. It isn’t anywhere near as powerful as a top-end mobile processor, but that’s irrelevant since it fully meets my needs. I also don’t need the thin profile or other luxuries afforded by today’s ultrabooks.

Going back to Windows 8, it’s a pretty solid operating system. But it isn’t at all suitable for laptops and computers lacking a touch screen. It’s designed to keep things far apart to make it more usable with a finger – which is the opposite of what’s ideal for those controlling a mouse pointer.

Furthermore, Windows 8 is very much of the smartphone design philosophy: few options and intuitive. That means that most of the stuff I like to do with a laptop, which involves exerting granularity, are not available outright. You need to take extra steps and jump design paradigms. This is great for my parents and those who want a computer that’s easier to use, but not so ideal for myself.

I think what you’ll see are most applications migrating to this new iPhone-esque design philosophy. I can’t imagine how more applications that need all those options will shed their apparent complexity to make the jump, but that’s more a lack of imagination on my behalf. I’m sure most people thought the same when the transition from command-line to graphical interfaces was happening during the eighties.

I was asked how I was doing the other day.

I confided in the person that for all the obstacles I had been facing at that time, I was actually feeling pretty damn good. There had been a development in my personal life which was really fantastic – but I couldn’t tell her what it was.

Doing so would have meant that I’d come out a second time. And I am not yet ready to face the potential consequences of such revelations. Thankfully, and I’m deeply appreciative of this, she was fine with my lack of elaboration.

My hesitation is due from bad experiences coming out on this, even within gay/lesbian circles. It shouldn’t have to be like this. News about how I’ve come to know myself better and evolve shouldn’t be met with derision.

But we live in a society that’s terribly oppressive of those that make their body their own. That defy this society’s script as it pertains to relationships, gender roles, gender expression, sexuality, weight, and all other matters that relate to one’s body. Sexism, which is so omnipresent as to become invisible, is a big part of this.

It’s ridiculous that we would disparage people for taking ownership over their own selves. For entering into non-monogamous relationships, for being read as male and wearing a dress, for young adults fucking someone twice their age, for being HIV+ and having sex, for refusing to pass on fucked up notions of gender to the next generation. We don’t care that these are acts of the self or between consenting adults. They’ve defied the script, and that’s enough.

We judge them. We hurt them. We kick them out of our homes. We deny them jobs. We don’t let them get a roof. We make fun of them in the street. We turn them away from shelters. We make them the subject of newspaper articles. We downright hunt them. We rape them, then blame it on the fact that they didn’t follow the script – it’s because of the clothes you wore! Yes, we police bodies like nobody’s business.

There is no public discourse about how this is all really fucked up. The best we get is about how some aspects of it are fucked up – gay rights, trans rights, fat shaming – and that’s important. We don’t want to erase narratives. It’s in addition to that that this other picture needs to be deconstructed.

Not that we’re even making the great strides that we the privileged have been patting ourselves on the back over. This country barely tolerates the most arguably acceptable of these deviations, gay rights, in it’s most mundane of forms: the homonormative marriage. A third of Canadians in 2012 still opposed same-sex marriage, including more than half of Albertans. Ten years after they saw that no, the sanctity of their own marriage wasn’t magically diminished because two people they don’t know got married.

It’s fucking oppressive shit, and it doesn’t bode well for an end to this policing of bodies in the near future. There’ll be more minor wins, here and there, but until we finally take a step back and realize that the whole system needs to be smashed, we will perpetually justify our own existence against this most restrictive of scripts.

End Note: Are you a straight cisgendered monogamous couple? Fucking eh! That’s great! The point isn’t that that’s bad, it’s that this society does not tolerate anything else.

Baked Good of the Day: Vegan Coconut Milk Truffles. This was a joint effort with a friend and turned out absolutely delicious.