Bend Over Boyfriend Archetype. Bend Over Boyfriend is the name of a video series that
teaches women how to anally penetrate their male lovers, but it's also become a tagline to describe heterosexual men who aren't afraid to put their asses in the air for some good old-fashioned butt fucking. And who do you think is teaching straight women how to wield a strap-on dick like they own it and reassuring men that they can be macho and still take it up the ass? Queers, of course.
Once staunch separatists, queer people are flaunting our fluidity when it comes to gender and identity. Whereas in the late '80s and early '90s, the dominant LGBT narrative was a coming-out story, today it's more like "I'm a lesbian in a relationship with a gay-identified bi guy, so what does that make me?" Plus, the evolution of an out, proud, vocal, and visible transgender community has turned everything on its head, making the term "opposite sex" practically meaningless, or at best confusing. What's the opposite sex of a male-to-female transsexual? Is the lesbian lover of a male-to-female transgender person bisexual or something else entirely?
All these advances have led to greater dialogue and diversity within LGBT communities. But they have also ushered in a new identity: the Queer Heterosexual. How does one spot a QH? In some cases, it's based on either one or both partners having non-traditional gender expressions, like she's tough-as-nails butch (yes, straight women can be butch—have you been to Montana?) and he's girlish and lets her take charge (which may or may not include bending over), or they actively work against their assigned gender roles. Some queer heterosexuals are strongly aligned with queer community, culture, politics, and activism but happen to love and lust after people of a different gender. I also consider folks who embrace alternative models of sexuality and relationships (polyamory, non-monogamy, BDSM, cross-dressing) to be queer, since labeling them "straight," considering their lifestyle choices, seems inappropriate. Then there are those folks who may be straight-looking and straight-acting, but you can't in good conscience call them straight.
Being queer to me has always been about my community, my culture, and my way of looking at the world, not just who I love and who I fuck. So I gladly welcome the queer heterosexuals into the fold. It's the religious right's worst nightmare: We've infiltrated the ranks! Our men have taught your men how to dress better, and our women have sold your women devices to replace your men! And now that we're in your most private and sacred of spaces—the bedroom—you're having sex like queers and you don't even know it!
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In the end, I will sit on the wide, flat top of my wall, legs dangling over those big, uncrackable stones, weathered smooth and clean.
Sit with butch women, femme dykes, nellie men, studly fags, radical faeries, drag queens and kings, transsexual people who want nothing more than to be women and men, intersexed people, hermaphrodites with attitudes, transgendered, pangendered, bigendered, polygendered, ungendered, androgynous people of many varieties and trade stories long into the night. Laugh and cry and tell stories. Sad stories about our bodies stolen, bodies no longer here. Enraging stories about false images. Bold brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world.
Excerpt from Eli Clare, “Exile and Pride”