THIS!!!!!! Okay, so I'm going to say something here that I don't hear people saying enough. The way our culture has attempted to reduce gayness to affected effeminacy is part of how patriarchy has worked throughout recorded human history to suppress the feminine and glorify the masculine - or rather, what patriarchy has decided is feminine and masculine.

Patriarchy says that strength and rage are masculine; THEY ARE NOT. Strength and rage are universal. And so are frailty and sadness, softness and joy. Having a lisp is the result of particular arrangement of the teeth and tongue, not a reflection of a human being's sexuality. Gesturing with a limp wrist is merely an affectation deployed by certain personality types; no one is born with that behavior. None of the stereotypes of masculine or feminine, gayness or straightness, hold any water when held up against the vastness and diversity of humanity. I'm not even sure there is such a thing as "masculine" or "feminine" if you get rid of the manmade - emphasis on "man" - constructs of gender.

I take this further: I also don't think it's true that most people are straight, as we've been led to believe thanks to statistics that tell us around 5% of people identify as gay or bisexual. "Identify as" are the key words there. In a culture that makes it shameful and embarrassing to be anything but straight, it takes an enormous amount of courage and a willingness to be subversive - which are rare traits in an animal as social and socially interdependent as humans - to "identify" as anything other than the accepted "norm." My theory is that if shame were completely removed from queer sexualities - and I mean, COMPLETELY removed - we would discover that most humans are sexually fluid to at least some degree.

Wonderful piece, as usual, Jamie! Bravo!