Three Two One: Flags

I had a discussion not so very long ago about the idea of being "non-binary"-- NB or "enbee". A friend told me that she was beginning to regard herself as non-binary, and was considering coming out to her friends and family. I of course will fully support my friend in whatever she does about this, but I, as an aging roué, am very much out of the loop on just what NB is and what one does as a non-binary person.

My understanding is that NB is a gender identity, that it's an identity where someone doesn't identify as either "male" or "female". Well, fine. But what exactly does that mean? Is being NB a way of saying that you're able to move back and forth between social identities as M or F, or that you identify as something that's neither? Functionally, how does it differ from being bisexual or pansexual?

I spent a great deal of my academic life studying nationalism and the idea of nationality--- how nationalities are created and how they define themselves. How do "imagined communities" (Benedict Anderson's famous phrase about nationalities) define themselves? So, yes, any view I have of non-binary / NB people is going to be based on nationality studies, and I have no idea if that'll be a valid sort of comparison.

Any community that forms needs its markers. It needs criteria for who's inside and who's excluded. Any community needs a Secret Handshake or its own On Thursdays We Wear Pink rituals. It needs ways for members to find one another, and it needs ways to separate itself from outsiders. The rituals, the common symbols, help build and cement identity as well. It's more complicated that just thinking that any group creates its own uniforms, though of course they do. And the group's markers need to be recognized as identity markers by the outside world. There's that, too. 

Social identity requires social presentation. That's clear. If you want people to see you as a Serb, you use Cyrillic lettering and you go to an Orthodox church. Believing yourself to be something (anything!) doesn't give you any social position-- other Serbs and the rest of society have to see you as that as well.

Of course the markers are likely to be arbitrary and often trivial. A left ear piercing versus a right ear piercing. Handkerchief colors in hip pockets. Lapel pins. An in-group argot (see, e.g., Polari). Sleeve buttons on a blazer that actually unbutton. Saying zed instead of zee. The markers are arbitrary and often trivial, but all they have to do is mark out some kind of distinction. They give a new community a way of saying we do this, not that. It's a way of saying we're this, not that...and this is how you tell.  Class, nationality, ethnicity, sexual orientation, sexual interest/kink-- the point is to have a distinction.

So...what are the NB markers? What's the checklist for new NB community members? I know that there's an NB flag that can be flown on Pride days, but a community needs more than that. What do you do-- socially, as presentation --to let others know you belong to this group? I asked my friend that question and she was perplexed. Does everyone else need to know? she asked. Can't I just tell the people who need to know?

My first response was that of course you need public, social markers. If you want to have political and social leverage-- a key reason for having  a community --then you need to find ways to make members feel like they have things in common and that they have ways to let each other (and outsiders!) know that here's a community whose interests need to be addressed. A flag is a place to start, but a community will always end up creating a checklist. 

Which brings up the idea of an NB Checklist. What does a potential NB person do, wear, sound like in order to create a distinction. Social distinctions are by definition socially constructed-- arbitrary, often trivial, but often of key importance. 

We're talking about creating stereotypes, yes. But that's part of community building as well. Humans create uniforms for themselves. 

So I will ask anyone out over the aether who reads this... What are the Official NB Identity Markers? This is a web age, and some website, some listicle, some Reddit  board has created checklists for this: clothing styles, bands, slang, accessories and accoutrements.  There's the equivalent of the Official Preppy Handbook out there somewhere on the web. 

We'll get to the other discussion here-- what being NB means in terms of what one does as NB --later. I'll need to discuss with my friend how taking up a new identity affects her sex life or her styles of romance. Does it make any difference at all? She's always been bi as long as I've known her-- will being NB make any functional difference? What's the connection here between gender identity and sex life? 

Well, I'll get to that discussion later. Right now I'll see about what's on the Official NB Checklist. 

Three Two Zero: Night Drive

 A tall lovely girl in North Carolina told me once about a story from the spring when she graduated high school. The story is simple enough. She was driving home one night to her parents' house in the countryside and she decided to do something transgressive, something daring and wicked. I thought I knew where the story was going, that either she masturbated while driving or else picked up a stranger and had sex in her battered old SUV. I might have raised a wary eyebrow at the latter possibility-- too trite, really, and really not her. I would've doubted that story. Masturbating while driving would have been seriously sexy, but of course that's been done in lots of late-night "erotic thrillers" on cable.  Twenty or thirty years ago, Joan Severance would've done that while driving some Italian sports car in a Cinemax late-night film or a Red Shoe Diaries episode.  She didn't do either, though.

She did something else. She was in a long sundress, she said, and she just stopped by the roadside and got out of the dress. She was braless, and she'd been experimenting with being panty-free in spring and summer. She settled into the car seat and drove home naked the last couple of  miles. Late at night, country road, tree-lined. Very much a fun image-- she's a beautiful girl now, and at seventeen she'd have had a deliciously coltish beauty. I did have to admire her courage and her defiance. It felt good, she said-- a spring night, her window halfway down, the feel of the wind and the upholstery, the rush of doing something risky. 

Unlike my NZ friend and her posh Wellington set, my NC friend hadn't spent her teens as a party girl with an array of older lovers. She told me that she always felt very sexual, but that for her sex was less about having a lover than it was about finding out about her own body and her own dreams. Yes, she's another bookish girl in my circle--- a lovely girl who (like me, too) lived inside her head and inside books. Being naked driving home down some dark road would've been just the sort of thing she'd do, just the sort of thing she'd have recalled from some novel. It's an amazing image, though, and one I've treasured since ever she told me about it. 

I'll offer her up one other compliment here, one other thing she did that's always meant the world to me. Once upon a time, one long-ago November-- my birthday --she called me late at night and sang Neko Case's "Hold On, Hold On" to me. An unexpected gift, and one that left me breathless and near tears. "Hold On, Hold On" is a favourite song, one that's meant a lot to me down the years. She had-- has --a lovely voice. Lots of years singing in school and church choirs. So...she sang for me and I felt for once that I did matter, that someone lovely and clever thought I was valuable. That night, that call, has been in my memories ever since-- one the best birthday moments in my life.

She offered me one other lovely comment a couple of years after she sang for me, and it's something I want to keep. She was trying to use sugar baby websites to help support herself as an art student, and she kept a blog about it for a while:

Sugaring is dangerous for obvious reasons. I was going to a top secret meeting with a person who, for all I knew, would turn out to be someone who collects human female hides and would force hydration upon me. So I texted a good friend--- the only friend to whom I could ever reveal this sort of information ---to be concerned if I didn't give him an update by morning. Coincidentally, the friend I texted was my first Older Man, but more of a mentor and certainly not a Sugar Daddy. If he had been such a thing, I hardly think we could've considered it sugaring. He says I'd have been his mistress, a sort of extended affair between compatible souls. We are very much alike, my first Older Man and I, and because of that, I do wish it were him instead.

Well, that is a compliment. I'm glad that I she trusted me and that she saw me as someone who cared about her. And, yes...she would've been a perfect mistress in the eighteenth-century usage. In a better world, I'd have been able to take her into keeping: a flat near university, an allowance, having her as my companion at small dinners or at concerts, long conversations over good wines. I'll note that she loved "demimondaine" and "demi-rep" as terms. Wrote them down in her Moleskine. And..."compatible souls"... That does mean a lot. 

These are all memories I want to keep. She was (and is) very much a girl I treasure. I still do dream of finding a gallery opening of her paintings one day and walking in to congratulate her.