Anti-Fauxmo

Fauxmos. Let’s Huddle. Yes bois and grrls, it’s Team Talk Time. High fives all round! Go Fauxmos! And relax.

Remember when we first started talking on twitter, me, Billy, Anwen and Jenny? How we got so excited about sharing our feeling of isolation from ‘normal’ hetero/homo/bi society? We drink pints. Yay! We like football. yay! We wear nail varnish. Yay! We haven’t kissed enough pretty girls. Boo! But yay for admitting it! We said we felt like we were ‘home’. When we found ourselves a word: Fauxmos, the world suddenly seemed like a friendlier, more accepting place. We have even made some new friends.

Fauxmos is all about rejecting fixed sexual and gender identity. It is something I have been doing, and you probably have too, for a very long time. But the problem with any ‘anti…’ identity is it can end up as a fixed identity itself. Just look at the Gays.

I used to think it was worthwhile arguing and campaigning along identity lines, just to support the minority in question, get them some exposure and rights. We could sort out all the complicated stuff later. I did it with Lesbian and Gay rights. I did it with Feminism. I did it with Transgender politics. But now I have had enough. It doesn’t work. As soon as someone starts to identify as part of a distinct group, as opposed to the dominant group, they are on a fast track course to being fucked up the ass. And fucking others up the ass. And not in a good way.

One of my ultimate Fauxmo heroes is James Baldwin. He wrote:

‘People invent categories to feel safe. White folk invented niggers to give white folk identity… Straight cats invented faggots so they could sleep with them without becoming faggots themselves’.

I don’t want to feel safe. Well, not at the expense of someone else.

The beautifully ironic thing about fauxmos is that though there are only a handful of us using this blog, there are fucking millions of us out there. We are the biggest ‘minority’ since ‘women’. For every raging queen at Heaven, there are ten men sat at home wishing they had the guts to talk about their sexuality. For every perfect Nigella type working mum, there are a hundred harassed, unconfident inadequate women, struggling to fit the mould. For every super-sexy trans woman, strutting her stuff, there are many many people confused about their gender and how they fit in the world. We are everyone and no-one. I want to keep it that way. It is what makes us special.

I love the line in our manifesto: ‘We are not a community’.  I am tired of ‘communities’. I don’t want to be part of a community. I just want to be ‘myself’, whoever that is.

So, as a teenager who loved Morrissey but was too aware of the implications to tell anyone, as a woman whose main relationship to date was with a queer man, as a lover of Christian Bluegrass and Stella Artois. As a writer of feminist pornography. As a quiet riot girl. I declare myself an anti-fauxmo.

Fauxmos is dead. Long live the fauxmos!

With much indebtedness and sincere apologies to Mark ‘Anti-Gay’ Simpson.