Swinging right out of the gate:
- Humans are social creatures, meaning all behaviors are socialized and not implicitly inherent.
- The title is meant not as a suggestion of an action we must take, but as an epistemological statement about human nature.
- I am a straight man. (...crickets... Okay.)
Very obviously, "queer" generally means non-traditional, non-heteronormative in nature. If we were using this definition, it would force queer people to be framed as a minority in perpetuity, because the framing for these things changes. (Traditional — especially in what is now Ghana, and across much of Africa and the Americas — queer people were accepted culturally until the introduction of Christianity.) I also think the standard wording is bioessentialist in a way that frames queerness as an "other" and ties love to a "correct," populist type of sex. It also won't serve for a meaningful conversation.
I think a more apt definition — even though it is very obviously not the most academically approved — is: people who treat love (and expression in general, but mostly love for this essay) as more than just an affair of the law. Allow me to elaborate.
Also, philosophy and lived experience aren't exactly the same thing. Society is genuinely so interwoven right now. The philosophical approach doesn't seek to invalidate or erase years of queer history, only to provide a framework that exists alongside it.
I think for the longest time in human history, love — more like marriage, honestly — was governed by laws (Sharia law, natural law, dogmas, castes) and morality (the Bible, the Quran) and a bunch of other, generally nonsensical things. Maybe not in the very beginning, but even up to now these laws govern, affect, and inform how people approach relationships. They actively dictated how men and women interacted with each other, what they believed about each other, and so on. They also, very consistently, treated women as objects in a contractual, almost cattle-esque manner — and the framing of choice and love as co-existing forces is extremely relevant for this exact reason.
It means that:
- Most women had almost no say in who they married — or even in what they could frame as attractive — often being pawned off by their fathers for quick cash. The parallels to slavery are uncanny. Because it was.
- People were really just never truly "in love" for much of history, and we have seen years of coercion, rape, and abuse go without naming, callout, or accountability.
I'd argue that the few instances where men and women could have truly been in love would have been in instances where women were acting in the social capacity of a man — having choice, freedoms, agency. Women like that would either be ostracized by their society for failing to fulfill womanly duties, or would already just be queer people: dressing like men, entering male spaces, etc. And yet, that is what we reference and consider traditional and heteronormative. (You, probably: "Fair, honestly. That's literally what it is.")
I think queerness starts at the conception of love, and love starts at the beginning of choice.
Love cannot be the laws of marriage that tell us we must have kids, that women are merely vessels for life, that vaginas are merely sheaths for swords. "Real love," as I mean it here, is one that doesn't seek to objectify, possess, or simply own because the law says so — or in the ways we are used to under more capitalistic, oppressive systems. A man and a woman choosing to live together for 40 years without marriage, choosing not to have kids — where they both agree on what they want and neither is coerced — is, by this definition, canonically queer. Compare that to the many men who have relationships outside of marriage: that is heteronormative. They are collectors. The women are objects.
But Jed, this doesn't prove your thesis statement that we ALL must be queer. Calm down, Janice. That was just groundwork.
I think the idea of what it means to love is very skewed, and this is thanks to years of law, religious propaganda, and indoctrination. The definition of love and the definition of sex have become so closely conflated that there is no love except that buried in the orifices of a partner. As adults, we come to realize rather quickly that the ability to have sex with someone doesn't mean you love them. The issue is, we tend to treat it like it does. "I love women, so I have sex with women." Not true. "I love men, so I have sex with men." Just not true.
Even within the queer community, we know this. We see the evolution of people from straight, to bi, to lesbian — and it's not that they changed. They were always lesbian. If you looked at who they truly loved, you could tell. They were just following conventions. The rise of sex work makes this more apparent, I think. Reducing queerness to sex is just extremely reductionist. So many queer people in the past died without ever really engaging in queer acts. We can't erase them.
I also think that sexual attraction can be socialized.
Sparta. Yes, I know it isn't the best example. Yes, they were victims of a horrible system. Yes, they were groomed. But they were also fully capable of following the tradition, and continuing a tradition which required them to, at the very least, begin to find other males attractive — and they did. In Greece and Rome, objectification allowed men to dissociate themselves from being called gay while still finding men attractive. There were definitely a number of genuinely queer men among them, but for most, they were the subject and their partner was more of a sexual object than anything else. (I'm sorry I don't have more examples involving women, though I would like to assume most Sapphic relationships wouldn't have had the same dynamic.)
This partly proves that tradition alone isn't sufficient in characterizing what it means to be heteronormative. Ladyboys are a very good study for this conversation — when people can't identify that they are men, "straight" men would probably find them attractive simply because they are attractive. (This is more of a gray area.) Beyond that, our sexual preferences are very obviously socialized. Look at the sheer diversity of what was considered beautiful before globalization. Look at the increase in previously niche fetishes. Sexual attraction is largely an environmental thing. It shouldn't be an absurd claim to believe that simply being able to have sex with another man doesn't make someone gay.
It is also extremely strange that so many pedophiles are characterized as gay when, in principle, they really aren't. They are heteronormative in the sense that they engage with the same systems of exploitation and possession. I am not saying that gay people can't be rapists. I am saying that if someone's primary selection, when given a choice, is always women and never men, they are an opportunist and not queer. They see vulnerable people they can silence and choose to exploit them as a means to sexual gratification. That cannot be what it means to be queer. We can't let such a narrative remain remotely possible.
So, my thesis statement — and I want to be clear, this is my opinion:
What happened is, due to what can only be called gender segregation and stratification, it was functionally impossible for people to truly love the opposite gender. Men and women were treated as different species, never really in the same social circles long enough for genuine intimacy to develop. But they could love people in the same social circles, of the same gender — and they did. There are many ways to love: gifts, concern, effort, the five love languages, the list goes on. For millennia, we have done this across gender lines while calling it friendship.
There is a certain way your Ghanaian auntie will laugh and touch a certain person where you just know there is more than friendship there. She just never explored it because society wouldn't allow her. So she married a man she could never really laugh with, had children she would rather have had with a woman, and had sex while imagining what it would be like to be honest with herself. And it's not only her. The jokes online about men and women from the past who were "close friends" and slept naked together. The men and women across history who wrote desperate elegies to dead friends — elegies they would never have written for their partners. We don't need empirical evidence that these people had gay sex. They were very obviously exhibiting love.
Because love isn't only found in holes. It is found on the skin, in the breath, in the eyes.
Everyone says they are straight, but are they really? I've personally always thought we might all just be a little bi.
In the end, I suppose the title is also a suggestion of action. I am telling you to love — to choose daily to love, to interrogate what it means to love.
There is a delicate interconnection between sex and love. But they aren't the same thing. And philosophy and lived experience aren't exactly the same thing either — society is genuinely so interwoven right now that the two can be hard to pull apart. So many queer individuals are more heteronormative than, hypothetically, a man who genuinely doesn't participate in gender roles. The philosophical framework here doesn't seek to invalidate or erase years of queer history. It only asks to exist alongside it.
AI WAS USED FOR EDITING AND FORMATTING!! NOT FOR WRITING!!