Editorial | Issue 2

Editorial | Issue 2

I am a white, middle-class, straight guy with a BA. I wish sometimes I were more exotic. I see bisexual Spaniards with mullets and tattoos and I get awfully jealous. But I have had to come to terms with who I am and make the most of it. And since the world is basically built for white, middle class straight guys with BAs, it’s been a pretty easy ride. Imagine then how much harder it must be to come to terms with yourself, and your place in the world, if the world isn’t designed for you.

Zane Pocock’s article this week looks into a simple idea with a complicated name: Heteronormativity. The Hetero-normative agenda is like background noise in society, constantly framing straight as ‘normal’, and queer as an aberration. It is the basis of the moral assumption that we cannot teach an idea of queer sexual identity in schools, and it helps to maintain homophobic attitudes throughout our society.

It struck me when reading Zane’s article how painful an experience it must be for young queer kids to sit through sex-ed in high school and not have their idea of sexual identity mentioned. Can you imagine how uncomfortable it must be to sit there knowing that you don’t identify with what the teacher is saying, and how horrible it must feel when your sexual preferences are entirely ignored? Many queer teens must already know that their identity differs from the straight and narrow, and the least we can do is assure them that it differs not at all from some pre-conceived notion of normal.

Last year Logan Edgar and I entered the Great Southern Drag Off. Far from just having a rip-roarer of a time, we were trying to get a point across. Two straight men can dress up in drag, spend an evening with a group of queer people, and feel perfectly comfortable with their own sexual identities. And if we can do that, then queer people should be able to do the same in everyday society.

Everyone, even us boring straight people, have to go through the process of creating our own sexual identities. And that’s where Maddy Phillipps’s article this week comes in. Maddy is a liberated spirit when it comes to sex. There seems to be little that she isn’t willing to try once, and often again and again. She is the personification of sexual liberation. But even she has her own hang-ups, her own foibles, her own likes and dislikes. The point of discussing sexual hang-ups in Maddy’s piece isn’t to shame people for being into what their into, or disliking what they’re not. The point is that sex is an amazing and fantastic thing, and that if you’re lucky, you get to share it with awesomely fantastic people. Your sexual choices and experiences belong to you and you alone. The beauty of having control over our own sexual choices is highlighted by the tragedy and horror that occurs when someone takes this control away from us.

So go have sex with someone, or by yourself, or with multiple people. But do it cause you enjoy it, because you want it, and because you’ve decided to do it. Sex is fucking awesome after all.

Joe Stockman – Editor
This article first appeared in Issue 2, 2012.
Posted 4:53pm Sunday 4th March 2012 by Joe Stockman.