The mystery of "Himmmm"

I read a lot of advice columns. It's the best way I know to keep track of what people think of as normal. Not what's actually normal, mind you -- that is, what most of the people do most of the time. Just what people think should be normal, which is a different thing.

One where I make a habit of lurking is the r/relationships subreddit. It has a decent mix of ordinary, mostly-functional folk, batshit crazy people with good intentions, and the usual appallingly sexist internet scum. The posts tend to get repetitive, what with everybody having to learn their life lessons the hard way, but as of late I've seen a new sort of post crop up. The question is something to the effect of, "My partner has announced they're non-binary, and as they've started presenting less masculine/feminine, I'm less attracted to them. Am I the asshole for wanting to break up?"

Surprisingly (for the internet), the answer is usually no. They get the same sorts of responses that people get when asking the same question of a partner who is transitioning from male to female, or vice versa: You were attracted to a partner of [gender], and since that's changed it's reasonable to reassess whether this is the partner for you. Which is interesting to me partly because I hang out in left-leaning spaces where the out-of-band fanatical response is likely to be that you are an asshole for not interrogating your own sexual orientation, and partly because this is the first I've seen of a forum treating a shift to non-binary as a wholesale shift of gender, rather than "merely" a drastic alteration in presentation.

I've been asking other people for years if I qualify as queer. (tl;dr version: A lot of the people I crush on turn out to be AMAB non-binary. There is a lot of terminological ambiguity here, and frankly also a lot of gatekeeping. I respect my queer friends and their need for a social space of their own, so am afraid of charging in where I'm not wanted.) Literally nobody will answer the question I'm actually asking ("What is the accepted definition of 'queer' in this community, and do I fit this pattern?") and their answer to the question they want me to be asking ("Can anyone ban me from self-identifying however I choose?") is basically 'you do you, babe', which is a complete cop-out no matter how you look at it.

This shift towards treating assuming a non-binary identity as a full gender transition is a new one, and introduces an interesting contrast between being heterosexual (being attracted only to people whose gender is different from one's own) and being straight (being a man attracted only to women, or a woman attracted only to men). From this perspective, my taste in partners makes me arguably heterosexual, but definitely not straight.

For what it's worth, I've always thought "not straight" was probably the best fit, based on the original usage of the word "straight," dating back to the Jazz Age, to mean not just heterosexual, but also into monogamy (or serial monogamy, at least) with partners of the same race and socioeconomic class, and not being into drugs, communes, experimental nightclubs, weird new non Judeo-Christian religions, or anything else that wasn't part of respectable mainstream society. "Queer", at that point, was a catchall term for anyone who would make your average upright citizen clutch their pearls in horror.

An excellent case in point would be Cary Grant. Long rumored to be gay, his daughter says he wasn't, and by the modern definition in play when she wrote her book of memoirs, he wouldn't be considered such. (One of his female partners infamously replied to the question, "I don't know, we were too busy fucking for me to ask.") On the other hand, she notes that she has no idea what Dad got up to before he was Dad -- she never asked him about his movies, either -- and remarks that if any amount of 'experimentation' made one gay, then 'maybe everybody is'. It's not a particularly common opinion to have even now, and suggests that she grew up in an environment where a discreet same-sex affair wouldn't have been out of the question, just that she legitimately doesn't know if her father ever felt like giving it a whirl.

[I will also point out that Grant was not necessarily discreet. It was not well-known during his film career that in his youth he lived in the gayest possible neighborhood of gay New York, with a roommate that I would be honestly surprised to hear wasn't gay. That could be played off as a struggling young man taking a room wherever he could afford. It was well-known that for 12 years he shared a house with a man named Randall Scott, well after they both had plenty of work and Grant could have afforded to live by himself on the moon if he'd really wanted to. I could not say definitively whether or not they were knocking boots, but they were so well-known as a household that Grant's PR agency arranged for a pictorial magazine spread, presumably to document what a totally swingin' completely heterosexual bachelor pad the two of them ran. Together. With Grant puttering around in the kitchen making them both breakfast. You know, like conventional single men of the time stereotypically did.

Grant was way less interested in being part of 'straight' society than his PR people were, is what I'm saying here. And this was before he retired from movies and decided to drop acid before his therapy sessions. By all accounts he thought being called gay was more amusing than anything. The only time he ever publicly objected was when Chevy Chase did it, and I get the impression this was more because Chase was indulging in his time-honored hobby of being a complete asshole than anything else.]

I don't really care about who I should crush on, I'm just noting a consistent pattern in who I have crushed on in the past. I moreover don't especially care about monogamy, marriage, or hanging onto any specific person forever. I'm actively opposed to having any children, and my career goals don't really include huge amounts of fame, recognition, or money. I'm frankly pretty fucking grateful to the internet and Bitcoin for giving me access to a shitton of fun and useful drugs. I don't want a lot of what mainstream society says I'm supposed to want. I even kinda like jazz. By the original definition of 'making normal people afraid I will personally be the downfall of their entire society',  I am definitely 'not straight', and if the world keeps turning in the same general direction it has been, I'll probably be definitely 'queer' any day now.