Gay, Straight, Whatever
Bryn Mawr students resist the impulse to label their sexuality
By Margaret Ernst
Natalie Armentrout, 20, and Sarah Capasso, 21, share a cigarette. Their hands hang outside the window of Capasso’s dorm room at Bryn Mawr College. They’ve reached an agreement.
Capasso, who has long, brown hair and wears shimmering tights, has identified as a lesbian since summer. But Armentrout has found every reason to avoid putting a name on her sexual orientation, even since she started dating a girl last fall.
“Labels are supposed to help you define yourself within a larger community,” says Armentrout. “But they shouldn’t limit you.”
Capasso nods. Though she has begun to find empowerment in calling herself a lesbian, Capasso says a label shouldn’t put an end to “fluidity” in her sexuality.
Call Armentrout a non-labeler, or a lesbian who’s not really a lesbian. Or better yet, don’t call her anything.
There’s an increasing constituency of women at Bryn Mawr who are dating people of the same sex, but who don’t want to choose a label for themselves. Like at other “Seven Sister” schools, the LGBTQ community has grown larger and more visible at Bryn Mawr since the 1980s. Now, fewer eyebrows raise when students date fellow women even when neither identify as gay. The lines between the gay community and the straight community are blurring-at least on campus.
‘Just me’
Sarah Sheplock, 21, is a senior who is dating another woman for the first time. She says she doesn’t really know if there are words for her sexuality.
She does have two words: “Just me.”
Anisha Chirmule, 21, and Crystal Fraser, 20, laugh when they find out they identify the same way. They’re dating, but they’ve never really talked about labels before.
“I’m attracted to whom I’m attracted to,” says Fraser.
“I kind of just like who I like,” says Chirmule.
The fluidity is a sea change from their parents’ generation, when identification with a label-lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, trans-gender, or queer-was the foundation of gay liberation.
For Armentrout, the “label of not labeling” was confusing if not devastating to her parents.
“For my dad, the gay rights movement was people who absolutely appropriated these labels,” says Armentrout, who wears a silver ring from her girlfriend on her right hand. “This fluidity thing is a whole new concept.”
Bisexual is out
Even though she still is attracted to guys, “bisexual” is the term Armentrout dislikes most. Bisexuality is “really loaded from both sides,” she says.
According to Capasso, who for five years said she liked “people” instead of calling herself bisexual, bisexuality has always been associated with promiscuity. She says that for a long time, being bisexual meant you just “slept with everyone”. The stigma hasn’t faded.
“I think a lot of people think it’s not very legitimate,” says Turner.
Sheplock and Turner, both English majors, cry out the word “binaries” at the same time-they joke that they talk about binaries in class all the time.
“It’s harder to classify someone who wants to exist on a middle ground,” she says.
Then if bisexuality is out, why is not identifying in?
Capasso thinks that like taking a label, not taking one is just as personal. She calls this a “new era” because how people identify themselves “goes deeper” than gay or straight-they want to incorporate all the parts of themselves into one term. But sometimes, terms don’t fit.
The idealism pervades Bryn Mawr’s culture, even among straight students. Abby Olsen, 21, has only dated men, but hesitates about calling herself straight. She’s a sociology major, and thinks putting people into categories is “always problematic”.
“Why can’t our own perceptions of the world have authority?” asks Olsen.
For many women at Bryn Mawr, however, labeling still feels right. For Julia Fahl, 19, identifying as a gay woman “lifted a weight off” her back.
Since coming out as gay Fahl has felt closer to the LBGTQ community at Bryn Mawr because there are no questions about her sexuality. In the outside world, however, her comfort level has deteriorated.
Looking Gayer
This summer, Fahl cut 11 inches off her hair, stopped wearing make-up, and started donning mostly T-shirts and jeans. Her voice is self-assured, full of laughter.
“I just look gayer,” she says, rustling her short hair.
Fahl noticed “a lot of negative things” began happening in public because of the change. She started getting cold looks. One time, a Philadelphia bus driver simply wouldn’t let her get on the bus.
Outside Bryn Mawr’s gates, perceptions about not labeling aren’t always accepted easily either.
Capasso says her mother actually worried more about her sexuality before she found a label for it. She called her mom on a street corner in Philadelphia this summer, after a “self-check” to see whether she could feel sexually attracted to men.
“I said, ‘Mom, I’m gay. I had sex with a guy this weekend, and it just wasn’t there for me.”
Since then, Capasso’s mother has “done a 180″ when it comes to her support for her daughter’s future. The Capassos live in Maine, where the state recently passed a referendum revoking gay marriage, but her mother made phone-calls and canvassed against the ban for months.
To other parents, fluidity is simply not an option.
Arielle Simoncelli,19, a junior, has never dated a girl. If she did, Simoncelli says she knows what her mom would say: “No you’re not. We’ll go to church.”
December 02 2009 06:42 am | Uncategorized
Pam Capasso on 24 Aug 2010 at 8:05 am #
The ideas and feelings of these incredible young women depicted in this article convey to me that they, like the rest of humanity, strive to love and be loved. For some it can be about labels, but really it’s about authentic love and where that leads.