Welcome To Queer Day

Welcome to day two of my week here at Fleshbot.com! I decided that since I am known quite a bit for my queer porn work, I would dedicate an entire day to all things queer and sexy. As a bit of an introduction, I am reposting a piece of my writing from a few years back, my first attempt to explain what it meant to be queer and in porn, an attempt to put words to my identity. It's been awhile since I wrote this and a bit has changed; I have talked a lot more about being queer so fewer and people ask for me to talk about it, I'm less in the place of figuring out what it means and more just being, I'm also no longer a graduate student, I have graduated. Also, some things haven't changed: I think I'm probably even more queer now than when I wrote this. So here you are, welcome to Queer Day by Dylan here on Fleshbot.

Hi, I'm Dylan, I am a 29 year-old porn performer and graduate student and today I want to write about being queer. The small pieces that have compounded to create a topic big enough to talk about are all the separate times that I get asked about what it means to be queer, what it means for me that I am.

Tens of different ways the question was asked, many different people in many different contexts… So many individual curious brains, many of them belonging to the two disparate parts of my life; the porn business and the academic business. Each inquiry was a process and each question stuck to me like glue, fusing each latter answer with the one before it. After a while I found myself feeling like a greater discussion was necessary, if not only so that I had something to say but so that I had something that felt like it made sense so the rest of the world could grasp it and together we could move forward. I feel that questions are like medicines this way; the parts work together to change the whole and in the whole changing so are the pieces themselves changed and the outcome is something new altogether.

As a queer identified person, I often feel like the change is the most important piece, the piece that I cleave to with great effort. In wanting the world to understand me, so too do I strive to communicate in a way that is understandable. Such is the beauty and the pain that is felt by anyone who belongs to a "non-normative" community, we want to be who we are but we don't want to be not normal forever so we conform in an attempt to educate, to promote, to belong, if not in a conventional in way, in a way so that we stretch convention so someday we won't have to stretch it anymore. So I am writing this post to change you. Your mind, your ideas, your preconceived notions. And in doing so, I will change too. Synergy.

So, queer! I have identified as such for about 6 years now. When I first "came out", I didn't know what fit, more accurately I only knew what didn't. I didn't feel like a lesbian, I thought that gay was only for male-identified people and I felt that the word dyke had a history of rebellion and strength that I couldn't just appropriate because I got brave enough to tell my parents I was in love with a woman. Queer, queer felt different.

As a young woman who had never, ever fit in, I had always felt left of center, off-kilter, weird. It took the early part of my twenties to not only come to grips with that weirdness but to begin to embrace it as a positive and see the wonder in uniqueness. So when I was provided with the option of "queer," it just sounded right in my mouth and felt round inside my rib cage. It didn't bounce around or make me feel uneasy or like a three-year-old wearing her mom's high heels. It felt new but it felt good. Surely I am certainly queer as queer means just not regular.

Now I recognize that for many others, queer has political implications, has just as much history as "dyke" and is controversial and linked with sex and gender. I do not shirk those connotations in any way, I simply reify the part that is not about any of those things. The part that for me, means that I am this regardless of who I am hanging out with, having sex with, being connected to.

And that is the part that really seems to throw people for a curve. Thing is, I shoot porn. Often. And I make it with everyone, not just female-idenitifed people. I won't list all the different gender identifiers and various forms of genitals, suffice it so say that if there is a human in porn, I think we have the possibility of making great work together. So people ask, as would make sense, given that I got my start in queer porn, "I thought you were queer but, ummm, you have sex with men. Is that real?" I smile, I always smile at the question, the inquiry never makes me weary because regardless of tone, I see the desire in the person to know more than they do and for that I am grateful. I begin by reassuring them, that yes, it is real, as real as those things can be anyway (that's another post altogether) and that yes, I am enjoying myself, I am present in the sex and that it was my choice to be there. Because, you see, I am sexual, period. My queerness has more to do with who I think I am than it has to do with whom I choose to get down. I am queer in a big room all by myself.

I am queer with clothes on when as a heterosexual-appearing woman I become invisible in my queerness. I am queer when I have a boyfriend, when I have a girlfriend, I am queer when my partner is trans and masculine of center. I am queer when I focus my professional energy on doing mainstream porn and I am no more queer when I am shooting in San Francisco for a queer porn company. It's a constant and it's also an ebb and flow. Most importantly it is, at this point an adjective for me the way that "kind," "funny," "smart" are.

Queer is a descriptor and in my world it is not describing just my sex, it is describing my Me. Now, don't get me wrong, I know semantically, terms such as these don't occur in a vacuum and must be measured against something, in relation to something. In this world, a person is less smart when they can no longer spell, can't read, can't add. I am not pretending that this is not the reality of life. I am simply arguing that a person can still feel smart if one day they wake up and have lost the ability to show it, prove it, perform it. And a person can still be smart when they fail a test, a person can still be nice when they hurt someone's feelings. I can still be queer when as a woman, I have sex with a cis-gendered man. And so can anyone else.
There came a point some years ago when I realized I would never be "straight" again. It happened while I was talking to my mom about what all the different terms meant and she was expressing various concerns. As I reassured her that I would always consider and plan for my safety, it dawned on me that regardless of who I was dating, I would always see life this way, talk about life this way. A doorway had been opened in front of me and after entering the hallway of a new way of understanding myself, the door behind me was shut. Never to re-narrow.

So here we are. During this writing I have taken all the stuck-together questions and fashioned for you an answer. And in answering I have created a "me" never before articulated, your first official introduction to both me and a new way of understanding "queer." In cleaving to my desire for change, I chuck this ball of answer pieces your way for you to catch and in catching think of something new. I can't wait to hear your thoughts. And your questions.

[This post is a part of Fleshbot's Dylan Ryan Week.]