I know my sexuality will continue to change and develop, and for the first time in awhile I’m not that worried about what label to use.
I need something that means “mostly gay but not fully committed and open to other possibilities,” but, alas, such a niche label has yet to be imagined. But those labels don’t quite suit me either. Often when I tell some people that I’m distancing myself from gay, they immediately suggest I identify as bisexual, or pansexual. I hooked up with trans and nonbinary people and stopped describing myself as gay, preferring to use the more inclusive catchall “queer.”Įven within the LGBTQ community there’s a pressure to pick your labels and stick with them. I once argued that I wouldn’t touch a vagina for $1,000.īut in the last year or two, I’ve started to rethink my relationship to the label “gay.” I started to realize that anatomy and gender are not the same. I was bewildered and repulsed at the thought of female anatomy. I felt pressured to pick a label and stick with it, and for a long time “gay” worked because I didn’t think about it much. With “Born This Way,” she became the most high profile person in pop culture to say, “Don’t be ashamed of your sexuality because it’s a natural part of who you are.”įor me, the “Born This Way” narrative made it difficult for me to accept that my own sexuality could develop and change over time. She was responding to the still all-too-common rhetoric which characterizes sexuality as a choice.
Obviously, Lady Gaga didn’t write “Born This Way” to advocate for the sexualization of children.
Why, then, do adults who knew me as a child insist that I was gay all along? How could they have known, when I myself didn’t know it until sometime during 2011, a full 13 years after I was born? So you can see why I have a complicated relationship to “Born This Way.” When I was six years old, I wasn’t a ladykiller. With all of the journalistic sensitivity I can muster, I’d like to ask: what the fuck? The heteronormativity so deeply ingrained in our society raises its ugly head, and we assume that baby boys are lady killers and baby girls are saving themselves for their daddies to give to their husbands. Now, we often assign a sexuality to newborn children - straight until proven otherwise. Kids are not gay or straight, they’re just kids. That’s because people are not born with a sexuality. They still had a good few years left to develop. Bullies teased me for being gay when I was younger, but when a six-year-old boy calls another six-year-old boy gay, he means “weird” or “gross,” not “has sex with men.” Sure, it wasn’t a very nice thing for that boy to say, but it didn’t make me question my sexuality or think about my romantic and sexual attractions, because romantic and sexual attractions did not exist when I was six.
It was not something I thought much about before middle school. Those boys made me realize that I was queer. Then it was Joseph, a boy in my choir class who kissed me a few weeks before eighth grade ended. Then it was Jackson, the nerd-jock crossover of my wildest dreams. I had a crush on Christian, a charming boy in my grade with mischievous eyes and a perpetual smirk. “Born This Way” also came out around the same time I did, at least to myself. It’s also a monumental LGBTQ anthem in which Gaga embraces her bisexuality and affirms other LGBTQ identities, singing “I’m beautiful in my way / ‘Cause God makes no mistakes / I’m on the right track, baby I was born this way.” Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” is a bop - it topped charts in 25 countries and became one of the best-selling singles of all time.