Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

In our culture, there's a default assumption of heterosexuality. In the absence of clues to the contrary, most of us expect a random person we meet or hear about to be het, if we think about their orientation at all. When a clue or solid information is introduced indicating that the person is gay or bi, there's a moment of mental readjustment as this information is processed, even if we hadn't been consciously thinking of the person's orientation until then. To a large extent this actualy makes sense, since hets make up a pretty darned large majority. But it does have some unfortunate side effects, starting with the phenomenon of bi-invisibility, and to a lesser but significant extent, absence of consciousness of gay people in the minds of sheltered hets. (Similarly, there's an assumption that people are cisgendered in the absence of contrary clues, but this is a weaker statement because of the near-tautological nature of the observation that someone who passes for male is assumed to be bio-male. It's a tautology if you focus on the meaning of the word "passing", but slightly more interesting if you focus on the what makes the concept of passing meaningful and so often desirable.)

But when I read the assertion that "young people overwhelmingly support marriage equality because they have had the chance to grow up knowing that gay people are not some alien 'others,' not a threat, but their fellow Americans", I started wondering what a society would be like where there was not that default assumption of heterosexuality. I'm not envisioning the opposite, a society where homosexuality is assumed, but rather one where bisexuality is the default assumption, or where not knowing is the default so that discovering someone's orientation is never surprising, never requires readjusting one's assumptions, because there was no assumption.

I suppose what I'm imagining starts with a generation raised not to have to remind itself that all orientations are natural, but having grown up never having known any other way of looking at it.

Would some basic level of bisexuality, or at least bi-experimentation, be expected, with Kinsey 0 and Kinsey 6 folks considered freaks but everyone else just having a "type" that includes gender as a component? (Note: I don't actually like the Kinsey scale, but use it here for the convenience of being able to assume most of my audience is familier with it. When I think of orientation, I usually think of a two-dimensional system with attraction-to-men on one axis and attraction-to-women on the other and a warning label floating over one of the quadrants reminding us that it's still a simplification for convenience, not a complete model of reality.) "Oh, Janet likes blondes, and Audrey likes male brunets. Stan is a bit odd though; he takes it to an extreme. He won't even consider dating someone unless they're female. He's as weird as Judy, who only dates people who play mandolin. What a curious duck."

Or would every orientation, and every history of orientation shifts as one discovers oneself, since some people do get surprised by a previously unexpected attraction along the way, be considered equally cool, with the only real difference being somewhat more visibility for homosexuals, vastly increased visibility for bisexuals, and no assumptions made and awkwardly apologized for when discovered to be wrong?

Or would frequent use of the labels "gay" and "het" (and especially "straight") fall by the wayside as the importance of the labels diminished? The phenomena would still exist, of course, but when the label is less important, using a phrase such as "attracted to chicks" or "attracted to dudes" doesn't seem so long that it needs to be replaced with one word. Would the words, and the concept of identifying oneself on the basis of them, continue from inertia, or would orientation cease to be a matter of self-identity and just become another background fact about oneself? (Hmm ... shades of the discussion in vvalkyri's journal about what aspects of oneself it feels okay to "be nouned for" and which it's okay to "be verbed or adjectived for".)

What other subtle and unsubtle effects would there, or might there, be? What do the rest of you imagine having grown up in such a culture to be like?

Hmm. Too bad my books are all still in boxes in the basement. I think it's time to re-read Shadow Man by Melissa Scott. (What else should I be reading?)