On Queering Heterosexuality

Inspired by an essay called "queering heterosexuality," written by dr. sandra jeppesen. I speak to the challenges of escaping the cage of cisheteronormativity in pursuit of new ways of relating.

I keep hoping that if I say, “I don’t believe in relationship hierarchies” enough times, I will actually start to believe it. 

In theory, I am wholeheartedly drawn to the notion of all of my relationships existing on an equal plane. But that’s not entirely true.

My wife, Kellie (Kelz), and I have been together for nearly 19 years, and married for 9. 

We share bank accounts.

Both our names are on the mortgage.

And she is the sole beneficiary of my life insurance policy. 

So what am I trying to communicate when I say that I don’t believe in relationship hierarchies? This essay is an honest attempt at clarifying what I mean, and what I desire.

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Kellie and I were once strangers. We built a world filled with care and fun and safety and vulnerability and wholeness, through commitment and intention. Our relationship is not a testament to the possibilities of romantic love, nor the institution of marriage. It is a testament to the possibilities of us.

And I’m not talking about us, singularly.

I’m talking about what’s possible for all of us. 

Kellie and I didn’t catch lightning in a bottle.

We created it with our own hands.

And if it’s possible for two strangers to spin hope and desire into a safe and loving relationship (a new world in fact), a question that Kelz and I often ask ourselves now is, “Why can’t we extend the same intention and commitment to our friends?”

Before Kellie and I took on a queer politic and began to subvert our relationship to heteronormativity, Kellie’s and my shared values expanded beyond the borders of romance - with its prescriptive “relationship escalator” that says you meet someone, who becomes The One, a primary partner, the center of your universe, expected to be,  and do everything with, for, and because of you. (No pressure.)

(Full disclosure: I believe that across time/space/cultures, healthy relationships can look all types of ways, including cisheteronormative romantic partnership. But it does not align with our values. And it leaves little room for negotiation, i.e., what is this? and what do we want?)

Kelz and I are committed to queering our relationship to the dominant scripts that were imposed upon us (word to Dean Spade). But what does that mean?

As activist and writer sandra jeppesen so eloquently states in her essay “queering heterosexuality”:

“We have found alternative positions, actions and relationships that are more profoundly meaningful to us … while at the same time we acknowledge that, as people who might have partnerships that appear “straight,” we can pass as heterosexual, and accrue the privelege that our society accords this category. nonetheless as non-straight-identified heteros, we take on anarchaqueer issues by living as queerly as possible. in other words, queer practices and theories are important for the liberation of heterosexuals from normative standards of intimate relationships from friendships to sexualities.” (Queering Anarchism, AK Press, 2012).

For Kelz and myself, committing to a queer politic includes but is not limited to co-creating and maintaining deep intimate friendships that are negotiated rather than prescribed; disaggregating our needs across an entire community rather than relying on and providing for one primary partner; communal living with folk outside of our nuclear family; collective childrearing; and non-normative desire(s). We want to share in the labor of living with our friends, which means we are willing to orient our lives around them in ways that would typically be reserved for traditional romantic partnership. 

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An old friend once told me that I must allow people to consent to the depth of friendship that I am willing to give, for two reasons:

1. To protect myself so that I don’t end up in unbalanced relationships.

2. To honor people’s agency, allowing them to consent to this level of depth and work of co-creating a relationship that is non-normative. 

What this old friend was communicating to me was that it is neither safe nor reasonable, to assume that everyone wants “non-hierarchical,” queer friendships no matter how transformative and powerful I may find them. 

See, I firmly believe that we will survive the proverbial “end of the world” through the power of our friendships. I know this to be true at a nervous system level because my friendship with Kellie has buoyed us both through some of the toughest, most uncertain times of our lives: death, sickness, transition, etc. Our friendship has also enabled us both to grow and expand in ways we didn’t even know were possible.

But even more than that, when COVID hit in 2020, Kelz, myself, and two of our friends spontaneously made a pact to care for one another and keep one another safe as we navigated the scary and unprecedented landscape of an airborne pandemic that brought the entire world to a halt.

Together, we agreed to mask in public for one another, to test if we were symptomatic or suspected of being exposed, to get the vaccine as soon as it became available, all of which allowed us to reduce the harm of meeting up every single Friday to vent, to be held and heard emotionally, to break bread together, to laugh, cry, dance, sing, or just sit in silence. The four of us figured out how to navigate COVID together, and it literally saved my life I think. Further, it instilled in me agency and power even in the midst of chaos and collapse - a lesson I think we could all benefit from right now. We already have all we need to be free in each other. 

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Our little COVID pod turned me and Kelz both into full-blown relationship anarchists. We stood shoulder to shoulder with our pals and built a little “world within a world” together; subsequently, I fell head over heels in love with my friends. 

Kelz and I have a rolling conversation about what we are willing to do and give for the folks in our ecosystem. And for me that includes the big, dramatic offerings like, I don’t know, donate a kidney? But it also includes the radical, quiet stuff like share housing, or a bank account, active listening, extending forgiveness, navigating traumas and triggers, dreaming together. 

We’ve spoken about how we no longer believe in the institution of marriage like we once did as 20-something newlyweds. Hell, that container could barely hold us then. But I am not a man anymore and neither of us are straight, so it for damn sure can’t hold us now. Relationships are everything. And we have become who we are relative to our bond with others. 

Since 2020, I have continued to meet people and build some beautiful connections. And I have taken my old pal’s advice to be forthcoming about the type of friendships that I desire. (That Kelz and I both desire.) I am doing the work of protecting myself. 

But something feels missing, off. 

Kelz and I love one another beyond the borders of the English language. Words fail us. And we hope to build bonds with friends who we can love as deeply. But this level of commitment feels like a huge ask to make of people who may not have landed where we have through our shared experiences (e.g., the COVID pod of pals, the evolution of our relationship), reading and wrestling aloud to develop our relational framework. We are not unique in our desires by any means but sometimes I have to remind myself that relationship anarchy is not common.

What I’m discovering is that I’m not quite sure folks are ready to commit to the idea of friendship anarchy in the same way that I am willing to commit to it (read: agency!) My Granny always taught me to move through life with an open hand and not a closed fist and I try to approach my relationships with that level of intention. Once shared values have been established, then the floodgates of my love are open. It doesn’t have to be earned. It cannot be rescinded. It just is. I want to move freely in all of my relationships, with immense commitment and intention. 

But what I’ve noticed, even in queer spaces, is that folks feel drawn to primary partnership as prerequisite to fully consenting to friendship anarchy. And I’m not mad at that. Again, agency is the name of the game here. But I long for enthusiastic consent from folks who share my values. And that can be a bit hard to find.

What are some of the barriers?

Often in response to traditional romance I am left wondering, “What do folks get from a monogamous romantic partnership that they cannot get from an ecosystem of deep friendships? Is it touch? Emotional support? Fun and play? Romance? Safety?” Romance is reinforced all around us. And it can be challenging for folk to be open to the idea that we can get our needs met outside of a traditional monogamous or monogamous-adjacent arrangements.

I will always, always honor folks’ agency to choose whatever path works for them because there is no right or wrong choice here, only the choices that best meet our needs in any given moment. But I have noticed that I feel values misalignment when queer folks try to squeeze lemonade out of the lemon (IMO) that is monogamous romance. This is where my agency and safety come into play. 

Sometimes I feel like Kelz and I are trapped in folks’ normative projections/desires. When someone tells us, “I wish I had what you two have,” I feel a pang of sadness knowing that what we have is not some esoteric, unattainable thing. Beautiful friendships abound, if we could just open our eyes to them. I question what they see in us. And I worry that we are being placed atop a straight cis pedestal.

People who know we’re queer still treat us like a cishet pair, rather than two individuals with autonomy. 

People assume that in order to be close to me, they have to get consent from Kelz first. People assume that they automatically get to connect with Kelz because they’re friends with me, or they assume that I would want to meet their partner, because that’s just how romance functions. These assumptions stem from the fact that she and I are stuck in cisheternormativity’s gaze - the two “queer” people in a longstanding hierarchical partnership telling everyone “romance and marriage isn’t the end all be all.” I feel…stuck.  

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When I say I don’t believe in hierarchies, what I am attempting to say is that I treat strangers with a baseline level of dignity and intention and care that I extend to my lover-friends because we are all interdependent.

But the truth is, if I’m being honest about where I am in this current moment in time, I think hierarchies emerge based on alignment of values, shared interests, energies, desires, proximity, life experiences, and the fact that there are only but so many hours in a day. 

Kelz occupies the top of  my hierarchy

because of time,

and history, 

and experiences.

Our friendship was the very first radical world I experienced, and took part in building. But the boundaries of our ecosystem are permeable. I used to say that I wanted to “flatten relational hierarchies,” but I no longer think that’s possible. What I actually want to do is expand the hierarchy, to invite others across the borders of it into the standard of love and care that i know I am capable of giving to my friends, that I have experienced, and that I dream of. 

At some point the labels don’t matter. In a gender/sexuality “galaxy,” with infinite possibilities—the only thing I’m really concerned with is are folks willing to queer their relationship to the “norms” or not? What worlds can we create together, bound by nothing more than our imagination, and beyond the one we were scripted into?

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Editors Note (Not even a full 8 hours later):

In this post I note that hierarchies emerge “based on alignment of values, shared interests, energies, desires, proximity, life experiences, and the fact that there are only but so many hours in a day.” And while that feels true, it is incomplete and uncritical.
Hierarchies also emerge through systems of dominance like white supremacy, anti-Blackness/anti-fatness, Desire/desirability, ableism, colorism, classism, transphobia, xenophobia, queerphobia and the like. One thing me and Kelz firmly agree on is that we cannot exist in relationships uncritically, lest we end up reinforcing colonial systems of dominance. I’ve heard hierarchies be refashioned into “prioritization” and that feels like wordsmithery. Kellie’s and my hierarchical relationship structure predates our radicalization, and regardless of what we or what other’s call it, we don’t cling to it. We are both committed to dismantling it, or “pulling folks across its permeable border” in pursuit of new worlds. Peace.