The Queer Heterosexual: By Tristan Taormino
"I have known few homosexuals who did not practice their tendencies. Such people are sinning against God and will lead to the ultimate destruction of the family and our nation. I am unalterably opposed to such things, and will do everything I can to restrict the freedom of these people to spread their contagious infection to the youth of our nation."
That's an oldie but goody from right-wing zealot Pat Robertson in the '90s, and unfortunately for him, the sinners have made some serious progress. There've been enormous strides in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) civil rights movement since activism raised an angry fist at Stonewall in 1969. Today, young queer people can enjoy the fruits of the movement's labor, and I'm not just talking about the syndication of Will & Grace or the Gay Network coming soon from Showtime. We have more legal protections than ever before. We have strong, diverse communities, organizations, and media, and even a place at the table in Washington, D.C. The LGBT movement has also had broad, significant effects on sexuality—not just queer sexuality, but the sex lives of everyone.
My first bit of evidence: the Sex and the Girl Next Door Revolution, or the expansion of clean, well-lit places to buy sex toys. Dildos and butt plugs are no longer relegated to behind-the-counter purchases at sleazy peep-show storefronts and wrong-side-of-town shops. Sex-positive, women-friendly stores like San Francisco's Good Vibrations, Seattle and New York's Toys in Babeland, and Boston's Grand Opening have created spaces where sex is openly displayed (tastefully, of course!), examined, explored, and enjoyed. Similar stores have appeared in dozens of other cities, from Los Angeles and Chicago to Madison and Iowa City. When customers leave these establishments, they don't just have shiny new dildos and tubes of lube; they are armed with erotic information, inspiration, and confidence. But while the founders, owners, and workers of these businesses overwhelmingly identify as queer, the majority of their customers reflect the majority of the population—they're straight. When a dyke counsels a husband who asks, "What's the best kind of toy for stimulating my wife's clitoris during penetration?" she gives him advice from experience. A lesbian sex tip is transmitted to a straight man, and lines begin to blur.
Speaking of blurring rigid boundaries, queers investigate and interrogate gender constructs like nobody's business, and in some cases, we've even reinvented gender. From gay male bears, faeries, drag queens, and twinkies to lesbian butches, femmes, girlfags, and bois-with-an-i-not-with-a-y, we are at the forefront of the gender revolution thanks to our ability to self-identify and to create our own permutations of masculinity, femininity, androgyny, and beyond. See, when we get between the sheets, we don't have the man-fucks-woman model to rely on, so we have to make up our own. There is no equivalent penis-in-vagina intercourse, no dominant queer model of what sex should be. So we do, we get done, we get off, and we answer the question "Who's the top?" with a million different responses. All this gender fucking has definitely rubbed off on heteros, who are ditching the script in favor of writing their own. The roles of active initiator and penetrator are no longer solely the domain of men, nor are the qualities of receptivity and passivity for girls only. Nowhere is this more apparent than in what I identify as the