Chamblee54

There was a discussion group in a Buckhead home, and a young lady with spiked shoes spoke. (She does not play soccer in those shoes.) After a word about the monagamish relationship with her bf, she described herself as heteroflexible.
There are words that cause brain damage when you first encounter them. Heteronormative comes to mind. After the group, PG asked Mr. Google about heteroflexible. It turns out Salon has a dandy feature on this word. It might surprise you that this piece was written in 2000. The tide of heteroflexibility has been slowly creeping in for twelve years.
There is nothing like teaching college students to make a person feel hopelessly out-of-date. This fact first hit me at the tender age of 30. I was teaching what I thought was the hippest version of sociology imaginable. As part of my haute hipness, I had included readings on Elvis Presley. None of the students, however, had the faintest idea who Elvis Presley was. One thought that he might have been an actor. Another said she thought he had invented a diet because he had always been fat.
The generation gap between the students and me was bad enough, but then my teaching assistant, a nice man who was neither as young as they nor as old as I, decided to help me communicate more effectively the King’s cultural significance. “Elvis Presley,” he explained to the students, “was someone our parents used to listen to. He sang this stuff called rock ‘n’ roll. It came before rap music.” The students nodded their heads, as if they had just remembered that rap music did not always exist. I shook mine, having realized for the first time that Elvis really was dead. …
But now it’s not just popular culture that divides us. It’s sexuality as well. Oh I don’t mean straight, gay or bi. I don’t even mean queer. What I’m talking about here is heteroflexibility. If you don’t know what that is, it’s time to admit that you’re as out of it as I am. Heteroflexibility is the newest permutation of sexual identity. According to my students, a person uses heteroflexibility in the first person, as in “I’m heteroflexible.” This means that the person has or intends to have a primarily heterosexual lifestyle, with a primary sexual and emotional attachment to someone of the opposite sex. But that person remains open to sexual encounters and even relationships with persons of the same sex. ….
My reaction was predictable. I was ashamed of my own inability to stay current, and I was also deeply pissed. How could these kids go and invent yet another identity when “we” solved that problem for them in the 1980s and ’90s? The word they were looking for was “queer” or even “bisexual,” damnit. I was angry that they would throw out the politics and the struggles of naming that had come before them. And what did they throw it out for? A monstrosity of a word, a mix of sexology and yoga practices.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This was written like William Gibson.