Does Your Love Need A Label?

Lesbian, gay, bisexual...in an era when celebrities and everyday people are proudly declaring their sexual fluidity, do we still need orientation labels? Author and poet Michelle Tea explores how we got to this new frontier of sexual identity and where we go from here.

- Owen Gildersleeve 

In my early 20s, in the candlelight of a Back Bay apartment [in Boston, USA], I kissed a girl. It was immediately my favourite thing to do. I wanted my boyfriend to go away forever. Oh my God, I am a lesbian! I thought. As Jessica became my first girl, my boyfriend became, for quite some time, my last boy. Sex with him had always felt blatant and pre-configured. The sex I entered into with Jessica was a dark forest, a fairy tale you get lost in. I realised that with men, a part of my heart was on high-alert, always. With my boyfriend, some essential part of myself was not at play in the sex we'd had. Yet within moments, Jessica, this stranger, had access to it all. I was whole.

I wanted to build my life around this experience, and I did. Revising my hetero history, I decided the eyeliner- wearing goth boys I pursued in high school were simply the closest I could come at the time to a girl. I got rid of my thrift-store lace dresses and popped on a baseball cap with dyke emblazoned above the brim. I shaved my head. There I was a dyke, I had always been a dyke, and I would always be a dyke. Now, buzz off!

Coming out in the early '90s, at a time when the fight for gay rights was gaining ground, a solid, even confrontational sexual identity was demanded (we were born this way, dammit!). Anything less was seen as wishy-washy, smacking of internalised homophobia. For gay women, an interest in men marked one as a traitor to queerness and feminism. People who identified as bisexual were schemers looking to keep one foot in the world of heterosexual privilege. As for those who opted out of a sexual identity, well, they were quite possibly insane.