the sex interviews

talking through LGBT issues

throughout september i interviewed 10 people to get their thoughts on sex and gender discourse. being skeptical of social science, i always thought that this would be a more effective method of gathering meaningful perspectives and insights for my research. quantitative analysis can only tell you what, not how or why or what else?

when we seek to discuss and explore the nature of our subjective experiences, qualitative information is key. it is the stories we tell ourselves that make us who we are, not a series of facts and figures that are extracted and abstracted into disparate data points. in order to have productive, persuasive conversations, both fact and feeling are necessary, and the interplay between the two is stronger than most social “scientists” would like us to believe. our beliefs influence our perceptions, our perceptions shape our realities, and our realities determine our beliefs. this process of mutual construction is the source of great resilience and also great vulnerability. our minds conjure an imperfect representation of the world and try to situate our selves inside of it. and as always, beliefs beget outcomes.

i have always been interested in LGBT issues because i have always been interested in sex. in my adolescence i fantasized about conducting the sort of statistical analysis that Aella is doing, and i’m very happy someone is doing it. but while well-gathered statistics provide a useful hook for our analytical hat, they should not be mistook for the hat itself. relationships are not explanations. facts are not feelings. and when you examine effect without capturing cause, you only have half the story.

the problem, of course, with seeking narratives over numbers is that every flicker of experience contains a thousand words. the fire within our souls that moves us towards whatever ends call our name cannot easily be reduced or contained. the “true” motives to our actions are unknowable, even to ourselves. the mind is like a prism of glass and refracted light compounding to produce flame; the outcome that emerges cannot be attributed to any part in particular.

however, when you start layering these prisms over one another, a pattern starts to emerge. a pattern that could contain infinite exceptions, but a pattern nonetheless. like faces or snowflakes, our idiosyncrasies make us unique, but they do not render us unknowable. every complex system is governed by simple rules which interact to produce unique outcomes. it is the task of the retroductive thinker to discover what these principles are and how they work. analyzing any particular manifestation in isolation is fruitless, for we can only learn to recognize rules by their relative absence. function and form go hand in hand, making difference the precursor to meaningful understanding. attending to exception is how we can come to better know ourselves.

negligence of this foundational truth has produced the dire state of queer discourse among both progressives and conservatives. the former focuses entirely on exception, and in doing so forsakes the rules it must learn to accept. while the latter insists that deviance is defiance rather than an indication that our schemas need nuance. if atypical behaviour was unnatural then it wouldn’t exist, but the survival of any species depends upon diversity. difference is enriching, contrast is illuminating, and deviance is the most normal thing in the world.

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all this being said, i have spent the past month speaking with some of the most intelligent and introspective queer, cis, and trans people i know in order to develop a better sense of these patterns that move within us and how they might work. enclosed are some of my discoveries and hypotheses, available for early appraisal for the exceptional people who support my work. for everyone else, there’s more to come soon.

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