Norman represents to me the biggest explorations of sex and sexuality that I've had, which is unsurprising because Norman is where I lived for seven years while I sought my bachelor's and master's degrees. College and sex do seem to go together.
The first time I kissed a girl was in elementary school. I'm not sure we were doing much more than messing around, experimenting with this thing we had seen on television and in the movies, but she was my first kiss.
I don't remember ever having an epiphany that I was bisexual. I do remember experiences with both boys and girls from my school, but I thought of myself as gay and then as straight, and then as gay again, never as bisexual—I'm not even sure I knew the word "bisexual" at all, or if I did, I didn't know what it meant to be bisexual or see it as a potential identity. I had two halves, one closeted and one public, fighting for dominion, and I did not know which one I really was. I had no idea that I was neither.
These halves, to me, seemed to be separated by literal space. I lived in Oklahoma City, and my "home" friends were from there. They knew me as a lesbian. I flirted only with the girls in Oklahoma City, and some of them even flirted back. In Yukon, where I went to school, I was straight. Yukon was more rural, more conservative, more traditional, so in Yukon, I had boyfriends, I went to school dances with boys, and never once did I mention the girls from the city.
"We embrace and fail to embrace the excess of such a queer[ed/ing] knowing" (Alexander and Rhodes 177, brackets in original). The fear of queerness, of the other, in our society results in a repression. Sure, Foucault did address this—sex is everywhere, but there was still a very real failure to say the word "bisexual" to teenagers in Oklahoma that didn't help me get a grasp on my sexual identity at the time. But more important than sexual identity is the connection to this recognition of queer identity to everything else. Alexander and Rhodes continue, "if queerness is the excess of sexual identities, the part that exceeds easy and knowable encapsulation in identity, then it is also the excess of composition, of stories, narratives, arguments, and texts that are easily, knowingly 'composed'" (183).
It makes sense—queer composing, excess composing, composing through the body and beyond words—it is all composing. And Alexander and Rhodes too address, as I am interested in here, the connections between queerness and trauma, both of which are composed through a kind of excess.
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