DYSAETHESIA AETHIOPICA

invisiblelad:

violetwoolf:

Ok, so Frank Ocean admits (via his Tumblr account) that he fell in love with a guy and the difficulties with which he struggled in order to acknowledge and respect his own feelings. It’s a wonderful and beautiful thing that he did, particularly with all of the bravado, machismo, and homophobia within the Black and Hip-Hop/Rap community. My comments are not angled toward him or his choices in any way. What I fail to understand is why and how everyone feels so comfortable to freely call him gay, saying that he has come out of the proverbial closet. He made it perfectly clear that he had been in relationships with women, and he also never even used the word gay himself in the actual text of his post. It’s not all or nothin’, folks. This is one of the infinite reasons why I despise labeling, and I try myself to steer as clear from them as humanly possible. Still pushing toward the day when heterosexuality is not assumed and matters of the heart are not publicly criticized, mocked, and gossiped about.

Its an excellent point. Our culture tends to be so obsessed with the binary perceptions of sexual orientation that its assumed one must at all times conform to these expectations at all points in time or nothing about one’s professed sexual orientation or identity is true. We are more than who we’re attracted to, and who we seek in relationships and who we love, but the stigmas associated with homosexuality and the invisibility of the bisexual areas of the continuum make anyone speaking to this aspect of their relationship history or experiences automatically read as “gay and lying about the rest of it” to the overall society. sexual orientation isn’t a binary, but the tendency for our culture to oversimplify things to make ourselves feel better bludgeons it into these categories at the expense of people like Mr. Ocean.

(via modernistwitchery-deactivated20)