The Beautiful Rainbow of Sexual Fluidity
Greg anxiously waited in his car right outside the local college’s baseball fields on a warm spring night around midnight. His palms sweaty and shaking. This was the norm for him in a typical hook-up situation. Another car slowly pulled into the parking lot, the headlights beaming brightly onto Greg’s face revealing his coveted Greek letters on the back of the car. He wore them like a badge of honor. The headlights flashed twice, as if the car were speaking in a cryptic Morse code. Greg knew this was the signal and stepped out of his vehicle with anticipatory hesitation. The occupant’s car door swung open. They stepped out in what appeared to be brand new penny loafers, slacks that had recently been pressed and a polyester Masters Polo that Greg could only assume his capitalist savvy father had bought out of feeling guilty for not spending enough time with his son.
“You aren’t going to tell anyone about this right?” accused the ever so nervous young man.
“Um…No,” Greg murmured back.
“Okay cool. But just like I said before, I’m not gay. This is my first time and I have never done this before. Just keep this between us.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Greg thought to himself.
While sexual activity between college students isn’t a new uncovered discovery, the increased amount of people identifying as sexually fluid, defined as the change in one’s own sexual orientation or attraction, has vastly grown. With the popularity of apps such as Grindr, adverting itself as “The world’s largest gay social network app”, and Tinder, which even now includes the ability to be matched up with both men and women, this has taken new meaning to causal hookups between students, no matter what sexual alignment they may fall under.
Greg, a sexually fluid, English major and current member of one of the seven Interfraternity Organizations offered on Georgia College’s campus, believes that there’s a negative stigma attached to being a male exploring his own sexuality through Fraternity life and in the South
“Fraternities overall create this notice that you have to be masculine or you have to be a man’s mans,” Greg explained. “I would say one in every four men I meet on Grindr are Fraternity members. The first question you usually get asked is if you are in a Fraternity. It’s like a fetish for them. You would think with how many Fraternities you have in The South and constantly preaching this idea of brotherhood and being accepting of one another, there would be more diversity.
To further discuss the idea of sexuality on college campuses, through Greek Life and how this effects the LGBTQ community, I turned to former President of Pride at Georgia College, Charles Morgan.
“I think being in the South is a large factor,” commented Charles “As previously seen with racism, the South tends to stand on the side of tradition and strong religion. With that you have the views of being LGBTQ or exploring sexuality considered wrong because it’s against God, or the people around you think it’s disgusting.”
Charles, who is also a member of a Fraternity on campus, had a much different outlook on how the student body viewed sexuality compared to most traditional Southern Universities.
“I would say Georgia College here actually do the contrary. Being a liberal arts school, I feel like we are progressive enough that people’s view on sexuality isn’t as solid as the views of the South. Of course people aren’t going around being sexually fluid, but they are okay with other people being that way and tend to support them more than what the South would portray,” said Charles.
In my own personal previous knowledge of the sexual spectrum, I had learned of a test called The Kinsey Scale, an assessment developed by Dr. Alfred Kinsey in 1948 to determine one’s sexual preference through a series of short questions. After finishing the questionnaire, the subject would then be place on a scale of 0 to 6. The higher the number, the more likely the subject is to participate in homosexual activities. When I asked Charles if he thought this was a viable way to determine ones sexual preference, his answer shed new light on issues I had not yet considered.
“Well I don’t think it’s consistent with males because they specifically are targeted by the concept of masculinity, and are ingrained to never think of ideas that are contrary to that. With that said, they may not be honest to themselves when taking the test,” said Charles. “It’s definitely hard to place yourself in a category, and we should move away from that, but people like to categorize everything. It’s part of everything in our life, so I think we all always have categories that define sexuality and I would even consider being sexually fluid as a category. I think being sexually fluid is a safe haven for this shift, but categories will remain important.”
With all of these new dynamics in mind, the only way to truly understand the sexually fluid perspective was to talk to someone who lived it every day. Luke Travis, or as her preferred stage name Katrina Prowess, is a local drag queen who has lived a life performing and understanding this blurred line between sexuality and the categories that entailed it.
“I am 100% sure I’m attracted to men, so you would classify me as homosexual right? But that doesn’t mean I’m never attracted to women. I can easily form romantic relationships with women, and sometimes I’m even sexually attracted to them, and this is when it gets into the demisexual area towards women. So what would you call me? Hetero-romantic? Demisexual? Homosexual? There’s just so many factors that play into it,” commented Luke.
Before I could even proceeded on with the next question, Luke had switched into his Katrina persona, and asked if for the rest of the interview I refer to her as Katrina.
“Makeup and the art of painting yourself to become a completely different person is astounding to me. It’s a form of art. And drag to me is also about blurring the lines between the masculine and the feminine, so it’s also a statement to society,” said Katrina.
Katrina was the perfect epithet of sexual fluidity. This wasn’t an issue of putting people into categories or judging based on scale, but rather understanding that sexuality simply can’t be branded based on singular phrases such as bisexual, homosexual or even heterosexual. It was more complicated. Katrina had also reminded me that artists such as Prince, David Bowie and Elton John had paved the way for this movement, exploring new forms of artistic medium by daring to question the norm that society had set as the standard.
“Gender identity, gender expression and sexuality isn’t black and white,” stated Katrina. “It’s a beautiful rainbow, filled with lively and effervescent colors.”
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