Welcome back to the Queer Friendly Nonprofit. I hope you are enjoying this spring weather; one of my favorite flowers, the Lily of the Valley, are growing in my garden so I have a beautiful place to work outdoors while writing this newsletter!
This week, I want to write about terminology around the LGBTQIA+ community. Often, especially in this blog, we use a lot of terms but what do they mean? This list won’t be a complete list, but allows us as professionals to think about the diversity within the LGBTQIA+ community. Specifically, I want to focus on terms that I get asked about or I find are lesser-understood. Much of this comes from my open-access article, Queer Up Your Work, which you can access here.
Terminology
Sexual Orientation: This is a catch-all term which connects a person’s identity, behavior, and actions. Often identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, and asexual (the latter two we will talk about later in this newsletter), this can be fluid.
Sexual Identity: This is how an individual identifies themselves. This can be different from actions. For example, a man can identify as heterosexual but still engage in homosexual sexual activities to varying degrees. This can include experimenting with same-sex sexual activity to “being on the DL” and having same-sex intercourse on a regular occurrence.
Sexual Behavior: This is what people actually do. Sexual behavior can include sexual experimentation or engaging in same-sex intercourse while identifying as heterosexual. As discussed in the previous paragraph, this does not necessarily connect to sexual identity and, therefore, if you are trying to understand a person as a whole, you may want to ask about both.
Gender Identity and Expression: This is the gender in which an individual identifies as and the way an individual wishes to express that gender. Gender itself is both fluid and specifically of time and place. What that means is that there is a cultural aspect to the gender identities we have (such as Two Spirit in Native American cultures) and the way gender is expressed (e.g. clothes which are considered masculine, feminine, and neutral).
Pansexual: Pansexuality is being attracted to all genders. Pansexuality recognizes the complexities of gender being beyond just a binary of male/female. There are many reasons why a person may identify as pansexual instead of bisexual; bisexuality sometimes (though not always) assumes a dichotomy of gender by the use of (bi), bisexuals sometimes have a gender preference where as pansexual individuals tend to not have a preference. Others may identify as both, seeing pansexual and bisexual as interchangeable labels.
Asexuality: I explore asexuality in more depth here. At its base, asexuality is a spectrum of identities with a lack of interest or lowered interest in sexual relationships. For some people, asexuality is their sexual orientation while, for others, their sexual orientation is gay/straight/bisexual/pansexual/queer while still identifying as asexuality.
Aromantic: This is a person who does not experience romantic attraction to other people.
Demisexual: A demisexual is a person who requires an intimate bond before they can have any sort of sexual attraction with a person.
Graysexual: Graysexual refers to a person who rarely has interest in sex.
Overall, this is just a quick introduction to many of the definitions in the LGBTQIA+ community. I wanted to focus on a few terms as I try to keep the newsletters concise. If there are terms which you hear about and want more information on, leave a comment or feel free to reach out to me; learning about what you want to know about the queer community helps me formulate these newsletters. And, of course, don’t forget to subscribe and share!
Thanks for this, clarifies a few terms I’ve found confusing.