In the Minority
Nikita - the woman I mentioned last post - said something last Tuesdays that's had me thinking lately. (Man I hate it when people make me think). She and I had a discussion about the LGBT community, the Polyamorous community, and the "sexual minority". The what?
I'm a white male. I've never been in the minority. And as Nikita said, "the next best thing to being a white male is being a white female". No one needs to know that she's gay. I've always had a bit of an advantage, despite me apparently loathing all things woman [link removed]. However, the more I become comfortable with identifying myself as something other than the traditional "one-woman-for-every-man" man, I begin to see the disdain certain people have for anything other than the norm. Slowly, I've begun to see that I really am part of a minority.
What I had never really thought about, though, was the idea of being part of a "sexual minority". Mostly I'd never thought of it as that because I've never really categorized being gay or bisexual or trans-gendered as being entirely a sexual thing. Yeah, the orientation part is in there, but that doesn't mean that 'sexualness' is the key factor. I suppose it's kind of a matter of semantics, but that's a mute point. I understand the logic underlying Nikita's argument, but it really made me think about my place in the community. Nyla and Elle and I have increasingly become more a part of the community where we can. We've been approached by a few different people to discuss poly, and personally it makes me feel very self-aware in a good way. I like being comfortable about the way I live my life and having people comfortable enough with it to discuss it intelligently.
The other discussion Nikita and I had was about the strangeness of the LGBT community making outcasts of the Poly community (not to mention the bisexuals who are a part of their own community). All our lives we struggle against something or someone, and it baffles me sometimes that people in the same boat would struggle with one another over who should be Captain. It's the true definition of counter-productivity. Perhaps that'll be another lengthy post next time.
