50 Shades of Gay

Ambersky

I came across this TED talk recently and it reminded me of some of the conversations here in this forum. Conversations about boxes and labels the need for self chosen names or labels, the dominance of one group within the LGBT community and discussions about the inclusion or exclusion of those individual letters.
Im old school in the way that Im very comfortable with being Lesbian and suspicious of any efforts to remove that category and replace it with something more "inclusive" when I believe there is still so much lesbophobia around.
This video is interesting the speaker says she thinks its not a case of there being too many boxes that we want to put people into, it that people are so diverse there are too few boxes usually available. She really asks us to look at the diversity in every individual and sets up an amazing project to photograph thousands of self identified LGBTQ people across the USA. She says there are 50 million shades of Gay.

Its quite a long talk granted, but I think its interesting. It kept me watching when I only planned to check out a few mins of it. I think it opened me up a little, I think shes right that there is far more diversity in people than we usually allow for often even in ourselves.
In some ways the talk is a good argument for the inclusion of the Q in LGBTQ. iO Tiletti dressed and lived as a boy from age 8 to I think she said 13. She grew up in a fairly unique community that accepted that and she does not consider herself Trans and spontaneously decided she wanted to be a girl again at 14. The video may raise some interesting questions if anyones interested. Its got me thinking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAJ-5J21Rd0

lemon_sherbert

Thanks for the link Ambersky I really enjoyed that video. It's so funny, because for a while labels really made me very anxious, as someone who values and seeks a lot of certainty in life, I've been describing myself as a 90% lesbian for quite a while now. It's really the best shorthand I'd been able to come up with to explain to people where my romantic/sexual inclinations lie, and the first one which I was happy with. I'd described myself as gay and bisexual, but they never sat quite right with me. I tend to use queer occasionally as well, but lots of non-LGBTQ folk don't tend to understand that one. So I really enjoyed that it was the percentage scale she adopted in her project. A nice idea too, forcing people to put an actual face to the issues.

Butterface

This video reminded me of my mother telling me her neighbour's daughter identifies herself as queer, and asking me what that meant. I had no idea what to tell her, so I just said she's gay. I know the girl, and she has been with girls for as long as I've known her, so I wasn't sure what the queer label was supposed to denote.

I'm pretty old school when it comes to labels so it's only the big four LGBT that I use, or my friends identify as. What is the Q supposed to include? Or is it like a catch-all word for "everything else"? I hope I'm not stepping on toes here, I just tidied myself into the lesbian box as soon as I was done pretending I was bisexual!