resurrecting the dead

Tracya, your question prompted me to put into words some things that've been whirling around in my mind for a while now. Thanks for opening the thread.

I was on sabbatical last year. For the previous six years I'd been teaching full time at a community college. (Nassau Community College, Nassau County, New York. It's on my profile.) I love the job there, trying though it can be at times. But during my sabbatical I made some profound realizations that hit me in very deep ways. One of them was that I'd spent most of my time during the previous six years feeling pretty invisible.

Don't get me wrong. I am a fairly visible person on campus. I know lots of people in lots of departments, I speak up at meetings, I've taken leadership roles, and I am generally well respected. I wasn't invisible as a "faculty member." But I felt like I wasn't being seen completely.

For one thing, people tend to assume that I'm straight because I have a male partner to whom I am married. Our marriage is not monogamous, but polyamory so rarely comes up in committee meetings or hallway conversations. And, while we were not monogamous in theory, in practice neither of us had had any other partners during my first six years at the school. I'm also bisexual, but again because my primary partner is male and because prior to taking my sabbatical I didn't actively have a female partner, nobody had much reason to know that. 

But there is another reason that I was feeling invisible, and that was that I was actively presenting a fairly conventional picture of myself. I could have gone out of my way to begin conversations about bisexuality or polyamory and how they fit into my own life, but generally I would talk about those things in more "academic" terms rather than in personal terms. I was "out" to people but only to the degree that self-revelation seemed clearly appropriate to the conversation.

In any case, during my sabbatical I became very aware of how stifling that had been. By spending a year away from the college I found myself feeling more like myself, more free, and more willing to make visible the important ways that my sexuality is part of my life.

And so this is where I get to the part that relates to Tracya's question. During my sabbatical I had some pretty exhibitionistic urges that I allowed myself to explore. I wrote a lot about sex, and some of that was self-revelatory writing. I went to play parties. I went to gatherings of the Perverts' Saloon where I met lots of amazing people who also work at keeping sexuality a public matter. I started this web site with one of them! I started putting my interest in sex in a more public space and didn't restrict it to only academic discussions. I explored my exhibitionism in some other ways, too.

Were these stronger-than-usual exhibitionist urges coincidence? I doubt it. I think they were a pretty predictable (in hindsight) product of having kept myself pretty locked down for so long.

Now the challenge will be how to keep that more visible/whole/integrated me "out" as I return to classroom teaching and college work! Will I retreat into the "academic sex only" closet or will I keep compartmentalize less and find ways to blend my personal and professional selves?

...because public space really matters!

Elizabeth