Hetronormative
“…denoting or relating to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation.” - Wikipedia
I’ve just returned from my eldest Daughters wedding in Margaret River, Western Australia. Beautiful part of the world.
It’s well known my opinion on marriage but more importantly to their credit my Daughter and her husband’s assertion that the law in Western Australia needs changing - that being from marriage being a man and woman joined to the exclusion of all others as being so archaic and to change it to that of where two people who love each other being able to join is a state of holy matrimony, so help me god.
Christ. Two people become one supposedly.
Thats about as much as I can cope with such notions from a institution steeped in corrupt, debauch and depravity only fitting the hell that Christians profess we all need to repent and be saved from.
In short, religion has no place in life. It is a human suppression agent and a falsity.
I’m sensing that things have become more fluid for want of a better term in a contemporaneous society and that a heteronormative existence is under assault, fast evolving.
I then sat today on the beach at Cottesloe, Western Australia and discussed with my second eldest Daughter the concept of compersion, the manner in which people can choose not to have locked-in relationships and how to grow by compassion, empathy and trust. So that brings me back to interrogate that existence of the heteronormative.
The fact is I have lived a life of thirty years led by the heteronormative expectation of family and friends, who have of late shifted markedly in my life or have left entirely. Lets face it, I have been married three times and had as many children. It took a great deal of courage I am told to step out and declare to the world that I disagree with simply living a life so that it fits with the convenience of a heteronormative state.
An iconoclast no less. Nothing they told me worked. It was all false and hollow and full of promise but no real reality worth living. So I grew and stepped away from that crap.
Then, out of the blue whilst at Perth Airport I receive a phone call from Craig who has read my profile in Grindr, an app that you can add to your phone giving access to gay and bisexual men across the world. He stated that the link to my #realstory book as being life changing, cathartic, inspiring. He asked if I was able to meet and I gracefully declined as I’m about to board a plane and fly back to Canberra.
So, that paragraph above is enough to floor most of the hetro’s I’m forced to engage with at times in my life. Why?
Because the first question is “….and why have you got such an app on your phone? Does you partner know abut it?” My answer is each time “….I have many apps on my phone and each and every one of them serve different functions as do the apps on your phone….but do I ask you as to why you have those apps on your phone yet you feel compelled to make a statement that I’m acting out, being dishonest, non trustful?”
The fact is that no matter what I am, no matter how I identify sexually, no matter who I am connected to professionally, socially or for that matter politically, the whole heteronormative cycle of returning people back to a feed loving, cow creating, nuclear family fairytale seems far removed from a social reality. More and more people I speak to have given up on the “forever more till death do us part” love lock and are exercising their individual and collective freedoms.
No matter what a heteronormative professes to protect and maintain I am of the opinion that it creates, suppresses and forces those who find themselves attracted to things out of its constraints into being dishonest and truly disconnected from a reality. I returned from my Daughters wedding inspired by that one assertion said at the union of vows but I congratulate myself on not physically assaulting a crowd of heteronormative, vipers, charlatans and looking-goods who all at one stage in their life did their best to intern me, crucify and lock down pansexual me.
Who is anyone to question our identity then profess to know how to return us to a straight jacket norm better suiting a collective moral servitude.?
Well….fuck you if thats what is needed to wake you up out of your readership malaise, you too need wake up and look around at what you are doing in life and if toeing the societal norm of a hetronoromative is the way you are living your life and smashing other people with your moral yardstick then get the hell out of mine.
Pansexual is the way to go and if that doesn’t suit then choose your own label because if you don’t then society will sure to tag you with something that conveniences only its heteronormative self.
