(hell, yeah) Scarleteen

elinor asks:

Help! I’m in a relationship with a man (I identify as a straight woman) who identifies as queer. He’s mostly had sex with men in the past (there might have been 1 woman), but this is first heterosexual relationship. It’s also my first relationship with a queer man. I really care for him, but I am struggling with checking my own heteronormative attitudes. For example, I don’t know how to get over the fact that he enjoys watching gay porn, and mostly gets off to men. We still have great sex together and I know he is attracted to me, and I try to remind myself of this when I find myself getting bothered by what turns him on. I’m learning to love, not accept, that he is queer and that he has made me shift my thinking about relationships and sexuality so much. However, I still don’t know how to get myself out of these moments, sometimes ongoing, of insecurity.

I know many people experience different romantic vs sexual attraction, and from talking to him, I feel like he is a little more sexually attracted to men, and a more romantically attracted to women. We also have a very friendly/open sort of relationship (we started off as really good friends) where we talk openly about everything (something that seems to weird out my straight friends, especially when he talks about having sex with men). I love that we have this, but I can’t deny there are plenty of moments when he tells me how hot his favorite male porn star is or how horny he is after watching some video and I feel confused. We have talked about this, and he assured me that he wanted to be with me. Yet, I still feel increasingly insecure. I don’t want to make him feel like he has to repress a part of himself in order to be with me (and he is the type of person that would hide it from me if he saw it was hurting me). Can you give me some pointers on how to deal with this on my own, or what I should talk to him about?

Heather Corinna replies:

I’m glad you asked this question. I’m hoping I can give you some helps to evaluate your feelings, explore them some more, and find some things to talk about with your partner and perhaps work through and adjust together. I do suspect this is something where we might do a lot better having a conversation with some back-and-forth, so when you’re done reading this, if it doesn’t really do it for you, or you want to talk some more, you can hop on over to our message boards here and I’ll be glad to talk with you.

Before anything else, I’d be real with yourself about how bothered you are by what, as you say, turns him on. I’m not sure what you mean by that, but if there’s a big conflict between what he finds sexually exciting and whats to do, or how he wants to do it, and what you’re comfortable with and works for you, I’d start with a step back to make sure that a sexual relationship is really the right one for the two of you, or that it feels best emotionally to be in a sexual relationship with him right now rather than dialing things back to a more gradual place while you figure out what you’re really okay with and what you’re not, and how you two do and don’t mesh in this regard. In doing that, I’d encourage you to let go of worries that you’re being heteronormative or heterosexist: figuring out what you’re comfortable with or not in your intimate relationships like this truly isn’t going to impact someone else’s rights and liberties.

One thing I’d say to your questions and issues here, and I say this both as a sex educator, but also as a queer person, is that something that tends to get lost in translation for people who are only attracted to people of one gender when trying to understand those of us attracted to more than one is that gender is often a lot less relevant — and sometimes even totally irrelevant — for many of us who are queer and attracted to people of more than one gender.

Now, that can make some people feel more comfortable, while it makes others less so. If you’re someone, for instance, for whom gender is a huge part of who you are, then a partner who could care less if you were a man or a woman might feel uncomfortable. You might really want your femininity or womanhood to be something a partner is super-duper into; for whom it is very relevant. I can’t speak for you in this regard to know, nor can I say how important or unimportant your gender is to your partner. But, on the whole, gender often is far less important to queer people than it is to straight people.

On the other hand, that gender-whatever-thang can be a very freeing thing for people, especially in a world that puts gender so front-and-center all the damn time. And if you have the idea that the fact that you’re a woman somehow makes his feelings for you more iffy because he’s had a lot of history with men, and is also attracted to men, seeing that gender probably plays way less of a part for him as a queer person than it does for you as a straight person might give you some breathing room. At the very least, I’m hoping pointing that out might help you recognize that chances are good that gender in this equation is probably a bigger issue for you than it is for him.

I think if you can take some time to think about what role you want your gender — or gender, period — to play in your sexual or romantic relationships, and how, ideally, you want a partner to see your gender in that regard, how much focus and weight you like it to have, that could give you some good starts for talking about some of this together.

Something I’d suggest thinking about for yourself with this, too, are your feelings and ideas about male sexuality. When I say “male sexuality,” for the record, I’m really talking about however you conceive that yourself. Sexuality is so diverse that while we hear a lot about “male sexuality” and “female sexuality,” and our world tends to have often simplistic ideas about this that we can’t help but pick up, in actuality, there are so very many parts of sexuality for every person, and we all differ so much in our sexualities (and the ways we experience, perform and present our gender) that I find those terms to be mostly useless because the diversity is so great even amongst people of one given gender. But where they’re not useless is when ideas about those things may be playing a part, as they often are, in our sexualities or sexual relationships: then it makes sense, I think, to explore our feelings about those ideas.

Read the rest at Scarleteen here!