Faerie Fire

“fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faërie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being.” JRR Tolkien

We are taught somewhere that people have a “sexual orientation” and a “gender.” We are taught that some people are “gay” and others “straight.” We are told these are facts. And endless arguments come about from these supposed facts. But that’s not in fact the truth.

Everyone’s gender and sexuality are bundles of different traits, and these traits, while they represent the possible, and feed desires, are always filter through the social needs to have heuristic boxes. We learn if we desire something, let us say a stable sexual relationship with a member of the opposite sex, then we have to behave like so, do this, wear that, present in some third way. This means that all identity is a negotiation between desire, possibility, and society. That last being society in many forms, as we have internalized it, as it exists in specific people we deal with, and as it exists in people we can’t avoid dealing with even if we want to.

In the week when the most populous state in the country has, let’s say it liberalized marriage laws, it’s time to realize that this whole debate is one that is already crumbled beneath our feet.

The recent California State Supreme Court decision to equalize and liberalize the marriage laws of that state was a step long overdue. Anyone who thinks about it, as opposed to merely pushing their biases about a bit to a more congenial order, will recognize that the argument that contemporary marriage needs to consist of a breeding pair of people in order to get the, well, litany of benefits we give to legally married couples, will realize that the whole proposition is absurd. Many marriages aren’t for the purpose of breeding, many marriages don’t end up having children, and many people grow up without married parents. The whole argument that XX + XY is required for marriage is not really based on physical facts, it’s a pseudo-fact, in that couples can adopt children, children can, and are, taken care of even when they come from previous marriages.

Marriage games are just that. Marriage games.

The same argument applies to orientation itself: there is no single physical fact which makes up a person’s orientation, nor is there a single bundle of traits that joins people of the same so-called sexual orientation. Being attracted to members of the same gender is less a fact that people think, in that most of us are far more open to both genders that the ordinary social myths present. Gay is what society offers people with certain bundles of traits. Those traits aren’t changeable in one sense, since many are physical or genetic. But the reason someone can’t be reassigned from “gay” to “straight” isn’t that what we call gay is a single immutable fact, it is that heterosexuality is as much a narrow reading of people’s bundles of traits as homosexuality, and people who want to be straight, and biologically are “supposed” to be straight have problems. The physical facts are multiplicitous.

Consider virtual reality. Not too long ago IBM Engineer David Levine was matched to his Second Life™, a virtual world run by Linden Lab™, avatar Zha Ewry. David is not blond, Zha is. David is a married male. Zha Ewry is female. David still works for IBM. So does Zha.

For those of you who don’t know it, Second Life is a virtual world that is used as a cynosure for business and politics. Virtually Speaking is the talk show of rl progressive media thinker Jay Akroyd. The show has featured Daily Kos front pagers mcJoan and DemCT, senate Candidate Larry LaRocco, author Jeffrey Feldman, among many others. Netroots Nation will be present in Second Life this year, for the second straight year. So Second Life is not a “game,” but a platform.

And it is a platform that offers both different possibilities and different desires. However, anything you can point at in Second life, from rezbianism to the endless Gor sex slave roleplay areas, existed before people got there. There are Greek and Celtic myths about gender changes, and even our term “hermaphrodite,” comes from the child of Hermes and Aphrodite who was both genders. Virtual reality, like alcohol doesn’t make people do anything they didn’t think about before.

This means that even the so-called “fact” of orientation isn’t a fact. It isn’t a choice, but it isn’t a carved in granite fact. Otherwise a straight male would be a straight male everywhere. There are many people who would never consider playing a different gender, or consider playing someone with a different sexual orientation. If orientation were a fact, then everyone would be the same in all their roles.

But once you’ve opened your eyes to the difference between the bundle of traits, many of which are physical, and can be seen by examination or experiment. But orientation is the box that society presents people with those traits, not the traits themselves. Just like marriage is the box that society presents couples that want to have a long term public pair bond. Pair bonding has physical elements, but there is no “marriage gene.” That the boxes that people are presented with don’t fit is why people are often unhappy, that they aren’t completely natural is why people have to learn and change to “fit” into their roles. Just because people aren’t born “gay” doesn’t mean that they can fit into the “straight” jacket, it means that what we call “gay” and “straight” are particular results.

The limitations of the gay/straight dichotomy led to the creation of other identities. One of the most important is “queer,” which is applied in all sorts of ways, but most often to people who are actively bisexual, or do not see the way that we as a society practice same sex relationships as being satisfactory. There is also trans-sexuality, which is when a person’s brain and their body don’t match. They feel themselves as trapped in the body of the other gender. Someday GBLT is going to be expanded to one orientation for every letter of the alphabet.

Or we can unbundle. Unbundling is the process of realizing that the boxes that are offered are many traits put together, that they are the end point of the negotiation of desire, possibility, and society, and as boxes must be, they are not going to fit. Once this is realized, that desire and possibility are starting points, and subject to change, what sexual orientation means changes irrevocably.

Do a simple thought experiment. Imagine that people could change genders, or even create a gender, with nano-surgery, such that it is not much more difficult than a nose job or other simple plastic surgery is today. This is probably no more than 150 years in the future, and may be less. Do the categories of “gay” and “straight” have any meaning at that point? Does the category of gender as being immutable in identity. There may still be physical facts that can’t be changed, but it won’t be possible to draw a neat line from trait to social result. So if the categories are meaningless with a small amount of technology, then they are really meaningless now, merely we we have the legacy of physical facts that are harder to change. This is like copying of CDs. Copying was hard once, as altering certain physical facts are hard now, but as it gets easier, more and more draconian, and futile, attempts have to be made to fit people in it. Copying isn’t really a physical fact, in that the information can be stored more easily. How hard it is to copy, and copyright, is really about the state of present possibility, not immutable reality.

The old gender constructs, all of them, are rooted in such pseudo-physical arguments, or they are rooted in teleological arguments about what “ought” to be based on some presumed super fact, and by this I mean the superstitious assumption that there is a diety, that we know exactly what he wants, and that he will be very angry if we don’t do it. Both argue from results. Both impose anxiety and pain on people who won’t conform to those results, and present people with a huge set of barriers. In the end people often try and jump several. But for many people, none of them stick.

And they shouldn’t. And can’t be.

This is because the parts of sexual attraction are spread out all over. They include the ability to be personally intimate, engage in erotic touch, and have powerful altruistic attachment. Where would we be if a heterosexual woman could only have altruistic attachment to her daughters and not her sons? Every male sports team relies on powerful homoerotic bonds to function. People who can only have emotionally intimate friendships with the same sex are considered abnormal. If “gay” and “straight” were such overwhelming physical facts, not only would there not be so many exceptions, but people would be “gay” or “straight” everywhere. But they are not, and we could not function as a society if they are. And yet because of the categories, people go through needless anxiety over little things like hugging their children.

If end point, results oriented, sexual orientation is not what it says it is, that is there is no physical fact that forces the particular outcomes that we have right now, then it is time to make sexual identity based not on the outcome, but on the journey. Your sexual orientation, mine, and everyones, is more about how the multiplicity of selves negotiates the many many many different situations. As our realm of possibility has grown larger, from economic and technical changes, from social and political changes, then so too have the number of negotiations we have to go through.

It also means that we have to accept more and more different negotiations. People who can’t deal with the fact that many straight women have only homoerotic bonds in virtual reality, or can’t deal with other negotiations are going to have more and more problems. And I know from personal experience that they do. Many life long lesbians get enraged that some young women choose to be lesbian only during their college years, and not afterwards. This doesn’t even touch the pervasive phobia of male on male erotic bonding which screams at us from virtually every television set, even as the anchors of the most conservative network are clearly coifed by male barbers who took affectionate care on every snip.

Why can I say that the journey, and not the result is the orientation? Well consider the last century, when sexual gratification between members of the same sex went from being “the love that dare not speak its name,” to a love that has a name … love. There was no gay identity at the start, creating that identity, or negotiating identities that would work in that context, was the identity itself. The quest to be a woman married to a woman, or a man married to a man, was more important than the marriage itself. The journey was what people lived. We never really get to the box of gay or straight, but are constantly changing it.

This long struggle for acceptance spawned other struggles and journeys for acceptance. Now, in this moment, the struggle for acceptance is for people who want the right to choose different kinds of result based on different circumstances. That it is alright to have a monogamous attachment to one gender, but want and need casual attachments to the other. That it is alright to be one gender in one place, and another when possibility is different, and still be integrated, that it is alright to be heterosexual in one context, and homosexual in another. That the possibilities of this one time and place should not be dictated by the possibilities of other times and places.

The Types of Tale

We call that other world the faerie world. A faerie tale rests on characters who are types, who are transformed by magic in a setting that is without time and place, to overcome some implicit or explicit prohibition. These are from scholarship into märchen or tales.

If we look at these carefully, we see that a faerie tale is then, a tale of the journey from “the desire,” to marry a prince, against a “possible” that seems to prohibit it, to social acceptance because of a leap that changes the negotiation between these points. Cinderella is a fairy tale. She is kept from attending the ball by her clothes, which are pseudo-physical facts, and easily transformed by “magic.” So transformed she renegotiates, but must leave. However, the result of the transformation leaves behind an unmistakable, and unequivocal, connection.

It is this connection that we truly seek, and which is the real root of our sexual identity. To be fae is to have a sexual identity which is rooted in an otherworldly state, and the search for the power of transforming unsatisfactory possibilities and social bonds into ones which lead to a satisfactory outcome. One of he simplest and most common is people whose married lives are unsatisfactory, and who retreat into pornography, hobby, or work. They are searching for that transformative magic.

Tolkien describes the three functions of a faerie tale as Recovery, Escape, and Consolation. But to these we must add the very functions he had in mind when he wrote his own works. One is Sub-creation, the ability to create a whole world which is subsidiary or subordinate, but which demands entry as a whole. We accept Middle Earth on its own terms. The other is Transformation. Tolkien detested allegory, and he wanted to liberate fairy tales from their allegorical state of types rather than characters.

It is these two rights that we are going to seek over the next half century, as much as the right of recognition is slowly happening in the society as a whole for bonds between men who want to marry and women who want to marry.

The right of Sub-creation is the recognition that all of our identities deserve to be treated as wholes. Whether the blog identity, the work identity, the play identity or some other. And that all of these identities need to be able to earn a living within their own context and do all those other things that will keep alive the physical fulcrum that carries them out, but which is not any of them.

The right of Transformation is the right to dramatically alter the possible. If you think about it, the first right of transformation is the right of recognition. Being recognized as married changes the social acceptance of a relationship, whether between members of the same or different genders.

Our present procrustean bed of identities is not immutable, Roman and Japanese cultures had very different senses of what marriage was, and what fidelity was about. Indian society recognizes many kinds of gender and sexual identities that are not fixed by gender of birth, or even gender of choice. This fluidity has existed before, and will again. Theatre is often the place where people who had some kind of fluidity went to, being able to live large parts of their lives in the identity that they could construct from their roles.

Fae is the sexual identity then, that comes from the otherworldly transformation, and the demand that this playing out be unique, as every performance of a play is different from others, even if almost all the lines are the same. What is different now is that once upon a time we could only consumer drawings or stories or engage in a secret life alone of these things, or hide them around the edges, or negotiate furtive trysts in them. That’s coming to an end, and technology will only accelerate the kinds of sub-creation we can engage in, and expand the number of possibilities.

I am fae, and so, likely, are many of you. For me the journey, and not the particular result, is my identity. It’s true for millions of other people, ordinary people who work for IBM or do other ordinary things. And if the decision by the California Supreme Court is a long over due liberalization for some kinds of identity, it is really part of the beginning of realizing that boxes: marriage, gay, straight, or queer, are just that, boxes.

And you know, boxes are what we put in closets.