I have a whirlwind of thoughts now. How to start putting them down? My first impulse is to poke a bit of fun at the many ways I’m one of The Others. It’s how I usually present myself in new environments so people know I’m not going to bite their heads off if they fail to tiptoe around me. I’m not going to enforce any PC crap on them, I don’t want people to be condescending with me. But I won’t stand down if they get all racist or discriminating, because I’m well aware of all the assumptions that went through their minds the instant they saw me. I usually name those assumptions by introducing myself as being one of them jumping-bean, wetback dykes who crossed the border to steal your jobs and marry your white daughters and spray your clean walls with graffiti. And I’ll do all that with a smile on my face. After the obligatory burst of nervous laughter comes relief and an open door to conversation. This may not be the best approach, but it’s the one that’s worked for me—a Mexican who laughs at death and violence and hardship as part of her inherited cultural defense mechanism.

One of the things that worries me most is how touchy we’ve become as Others. How the pain of our experience has left us so raw we go for the jugular at the slightest provocation. Last month, there was a big war triggered when Dick Pound—a high-profile 2010 Olympics figure—used a false cognate of the French word sauvage and came off as saying “Canada was a land of savages.” Aboriginal groups were offended and called for his head. Then the “white team” started making uninformed and racist comments. It has only been getting worse. This makes me sad.

How can we even get to know each other if we remain entrenched? As long as we engage in conversation, we are bound to make mistakes and ask stupid question and sometimes offend each other. Could we at least acknowledge and allow for leeway when we encounter someone who genuinely wants to understand us better? I keep an IKEA postcard up on the fridge. It says, “Only when sleeping do we make no mistakes.” It also has a quote by Ingvar Kamprad: “Mistakes are the privilege of the active person, who can start over and put things right.” I’m grateful for those individuals who are willing to take the risk of making mistakes and even take a few punches from offended parties if that is what is required to build a bridge for communication and understanding of diversity.

Discrimination is inherent to every group, be it a minority or the mainstream. My most recent experience with this is how the aboriginal community is somewhat suspicious of its white members, those who are the offspring of races and cultures coming together. “White Indians” are usually very socially responsible, educated in aboriginal issues, and are very active in the fight for native rights. They have to. They try so hard to earn the trust and be validated by their own family members. Their vocal identification with aboriginal issues also makes the a target for scorn from those in the mainstream, who say, “They aren’t even brown, what discrimination can they be experiencing if they look just as blond as we do?” It must be brutal. My mom saw how this double-sided form of rejection made one of her sisters miserable. My grandmother was a green-eyed red head and my grandfather was indigenous to the Nayar. So one of my mom’s sisters is green-eyed and blond, while the rest were dark. She cried constantly because she wanted to be brown, like her brothers and sisters and extended family. She felt rejected, a second class member. If these White Indians take advantage of their privileged skin color in the mainstream culture, they feel like traitors to their own families. They just can’t win.

I think bisexuals are viewed in much the same way as White Indians. The entertainment industry may portray us as “hip,” but the reality is that the mainstream will more readily slap the “slut” label on us than invite us to their Christmas dinner. And this is no different within the gay and lesbian spheres. Only recently has the GLBT acronym been coined to describe our community in a more inclusive way. For a long time, bisexuals remained in limbo. I’ve identified myself in different ways as time goes by. Initially, I went with “lesbian” because there were no out lesbians in my high school and it seemed important to say, “Women who love women exist. I’m here. It’s okay for you to be here, too.” Having witnessed the constant ostracism of bisexuals in our community for the past decade, I decided to show my support by going back to the Bi label. If we want to get technical, I’m only about 20-30% straight. I’ve had sex with men and enjoyed it, but only one out of every five crushes I get these days will involve a member of the opposite sex. I’d say that still qualifies me as Bi, though. Does it make me hip? Hardly! If anything, it does the opposite. It makes my lesbian friends look at me suspiciously. It makes my very-lesbian wife make constant mocking remarks about how disgusting she finds it. It makes me have to explain men that get enthusiastic about it how I have a wife and being bisexual doesn’t mean I can have sex with them right then and there because “men are different and don’t count as cheating.” I think Kelley has experience much of this dread around the Bi label. Which is why she probably thinks back to that time when she was younger and must write the word “hip” down with a hint of self-deprecating irony. I suspect Kelley knows just how off her early assessment of the label was and how much un-hip the reality of identifying as bisexual actually turned out to be. That’s my reading of it, at least. This karina holds no absolute truths and tends to make too many mistakes because she loves getting to know others—so much that the fear of offending someone isn’t enough to prevent her from putting her foot in her mouth every so often, a risk she assumes as necessary to keeping a conversation going.

Whew… What a riff, huh? *wink*

And I’m still figuring stuff out (grin). That part never seems to stop.

It read more as if you were poking (gentle) fun of your younger self by using that phrase, which I thought was a lovely and delicate way of describing a young, vulnerable, still-figuring-stuff-out person.

One thing I’ve seen when writers start talking about these issues is that some people get frustrated and defensive, and take the position that the “only thing that will make people happy” is if the writer sanitizes her work — gets all PC on its ass — so that no one will ever be offended again. And then the writers bring out the Big Gun of Freedom of Expression (You can’t tell a writer what to write about, that’s censorship!) and anyway it’s only ?fiction! (Spot the conflict in those two statements).

But I don’t think writers should focus on sanitizing our work (and just to be clear, I know that’s not what you are suggesting at all — I’m riffing off your comment). I think writers should focus on good writing — which includes trying as hard as we can not to be careless or superficial. Good writing is harder work than bad writing in great part because of the imaginative heavy lifting required to “realize” (in all senses of the word) everything in the story. To start from the inside of a character, no matter how “secondary,” and work out. Stereotyping is almost always a result of starting from the outside, and either working in insufficiently or not at all.

I have never forgotten her. By my carelessness or innocence I had caused harm.

I think this is the point (or one of the points) Kelley is trying to make. How crucial it is as writers when we write about others different from ourselves not to be careless, not to hang out on the surface. Everyone knows loneliness or humiliation, struggle, dangers of love, or not loving. We all know what it feels like. No matter the race, sexual orientation, homeland of the character. We can always start from there.

But the signals are there, in the surrounding content and context, and in the larger context of the author’s work. Any reader with an attentive internal ear would recognize that.

In writing, I’d much rather run the risk of maybe just possibly leaving open the potential for offending a literal-minded reader than hamstring the style of someone who clearly knows a bit about what she’s doing when she puts words on a page.

Yes, this is true. I’ll be thinking about how to express myself more clearly.

I’m not commenting about what you thought and did twenty years ago. I’m commenting about the words you use to write about them now – here in this article, and in the larger piece that’s about to be published in what appears to be a college textbook.

In Samuel Delany’s autobiographical work, he recalls how, in the sixties, he described his life as a gay man to his straight friends and acquaintances in terms of shame and degradation – not because of any internalized homophobia (he didn’t in fact feel ashamed or degraded) but because that was the existing discourse of gayness at that time, and he had fallen into it as easily as a car slips into the ruts in a road. In trying to tell his own story, he had inadvertently reinforced a larger homophobic paradigm.

Nicola Griffith has written elsewhere about phrases like “admitted homosexual” – in which a word like “admitted”, which would be neutral in another context, implies a larger frame of reference, a certain set of values and assumptions. I wouldn’t equate one sexual orientation with another, or “hip” with “admitted”, but I would say that “hip” and its synonyms have a long history of being used to dismiss bisexuality. These specific words are part of a larger discourse, in which bisexuality is characterized as a shallow, fashion-following choice.

I appreciate your concern for my feelings, but I don’t think my feelings are important. What I think is important is that larger discourse, and the ways that this quote – whatever its intent – seems to reinforce it. (In addition to the word choice, I think there’s some ambiguity in the words immediately following. Is the antecedent of “revealed as fatuous” “bisexuality”, or “I”? By “may have been some of those things as a person”, do you mean “even though I was some of those things”, or “I may not have actually been some of those things”? While I might guess that you mean the former in both cases, I could imagine a reader who’s accepted that dominant discourse to assume the latter.)

To your larger point in the article itself – the importance of examining our received ideas about other people – I would add another: even when we’re writing about our own selves and our own experiences, our words are read by people who think that they already know something about people like us. If we don’t consciously challenge those assumptions, if we write the usual words without signaling that they shouldn’t be read in the usual way, we run the risk of strengthening the very things we could be challenging.