238. Pride, Where It’s Safer To Be Yourself In Public
Wow, it’s been a while. 5 months. I’ve been moving house and trying to get my life in order (again!), and it’s going okay so far. It’s just very very slow.
Anyway, in case you were wondering, this comic is referring to [SPOILER LINK]. 😀 I guess because I’ve never been monogamous I’ve just normalised so much stuff, like my girlfriend not wanting to tell her family that she had an enbyfriend as well as a husband (which I can’t blame her for), and my intrusive manager accusing me of having a less intimate sex life with my boyfriend as a result of us having sex with other people, etc. And I know that to a lot of people non-monogamy looks like a choice and we don’t belong at Pride, but gosh I can tell you honestly that this is not a choice for me – any monogamy that I have ever tried to fit into has for me been deeply painful.
Now that I’ve watched that TV show yesterday I can see the constant low-level pain I’ve been in for over half my life, not seeing non-monogamous people on TV or in movies or in the lives of the strangers I meet. Perhaps I never saw it before because my gender dysphoria and my sexuality strangeness has always superseded it? I think about whether I could sit in a bar with two partners and hold their hands and be PDA with both of them, and I wonder what would happen. It’s something I would never do, but I feel sure that at the very least it would draw unwanted attention and make me feel self-conscious – pretty much the same as if I held hands with someone who appeared to be the same gender as me in public. A lifetime of my expressions of love being met with negativity means I am even reluctant to casually express my feelings with partners one-on-one, in private.
I try to remember that the first Pride was a riot, so I think about how the police and the legal system would feel about my non-monogamy, and I think about marriage equality, and I know that I am barred from marriage just as much with my non-monogamy as with my gender. I know that there are people out there who have problems with welfare and child-support payments and custody battles and hospital visiting rights because the system cannot accommodate us.
So to me it seems that if we are not allowed to be there when we’re otherwise cisgender and heterosexual then the criteria for Pride are narrower than I had hoped.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my very generous Patreons, including Martina, Lorelei, and David. Every pledge makes a difference for me. <3 (If you wanna join them and get a little bit of exclusive content, you can do so for only $1 per comic, and have a monthly cap if you like too.)
In terms of PDA, I think people are less likely to be judgemental on that for a couple of reasons:
1) People don’t pay as much attention to you as they think. People might notice and be judgemental of a same-sex kiss because they happen to be looking there at the time, but they probably aren’t remembering who you kissed 3 minutes ago vs who you kissed just now.
2) Alternate explanations for closeness: the three of you could just be holding hands because you’re weird, trendy millennials who are touchy-feely. Someone on /r/polyamory years ago had people assume he was gay because they saw him kiss both his girlfriends. Someone asked me once if my husband’s girlfriend was his *sister* because they were sitting close to each other and I think hugging/holding hands a lot (not big PDA people).
It’s good because it means I’m not worried about my safety, but it’s bad for representation/being out.
I agree with the rest of what you say, especially about marriage equality. I refer to it as same-sex marriage for that reason, but for some reason I feel pretty entitled whinging about not being able to marry both my partners. Like I’m raining on someone else’s parade, especially when we only got same sex marriage in Australia this year.
That said, I was thrilled to find out that in Australia I get to have de facto relationships with as many people as I want, because the laws for such relationships specifically state that you can have more than one. It does mean that when I phoned the tax department to ask them how to fill in the online tax form (which only has space for one spouse), they told me there’s nothing in the system to handle my special circumstances so I have to fill out a “special circumstances form” where they give me a personal ruling on what I should do. So that’ll be fun; I’ve been putting it off because I didn’t get a second de facto spouse until this past tax year. I guess I should fill out the damn form…
Thanks as always for your comic, it’s such a beautiful little moment of zen / polyam positivity / cute pictures. I really enjoy it and it’s always such a wonderful surprise to see updates!
I am also polyamorous by orientation. So you’re definitely not alone in that.
Yay, new comic! 🙂 i keep on checking back for this! <3
I want to throw in my 2 cents on the “Who belongs at Pride?“ debate:
What i don't understand in the whole debate is the argument that if something is a choice, then it's not as valid as if it were something that “can't be helped“.
Fighting for equal rights and no discrimination by “getting xy recognized as something i'm born with“ isn't the outcome i want.
Because it plays into the same idea that enables all the gate keeping going on even in the pride scene, all the arguments about whether poly, asexual, bisexual people, or sex workers belong… it means that we have to have the whole discussion and judgement process over and over again to determine which condition is qualified.
Instead, I want to advocate for “whatever feels like the right thing FOR MY LIFE is what i get to do without judgement and discrimination“.
It omits the step of everyone needing to judge whether i really can't help but live this way.
And it empowers people – you're not just allowed to do [that norm-deviant thing] because you can't help it, but because you get the agency to decide what's best for you.
What's best for me is individual, and the choices i make are based on who i am (so maybe i “can't help“ some of the choices i make, but why would that be more important than the freedom to MAKE choices itself?!)
The rest of society also isn't based on the way we are born…
People are born to develop body odor, and then make the CHOICE to take showers… and so on.
And on the other hand, there are people advocating that “men just are that way to harrass women, they can't help it“… i just really, really don't think that's a useful argument ever.
My argument is Pro Choice – any choice that concerns my own life and does not intersect another person's rights to choices about their lives.
And everyone who doesn't yet get the right to live by all their choices without discrimination and stigma should have a place in pride.
then only a few have reached us