My Panifesto

THIS IS MY PANIFESTO

So here I am, at 53, finally coming out of the attic. Cuz I’m old like that and my closets are too full.

Anyway, I’m proud to open the door here on this very public stage. 

That's the way it is with me- either deep and secret in the whirlpool of my heart, or dancing out loud on the heaving trampoline of the human web. 

Truth be told, I was never able to art-ic-u-late my sexual identity until recently. Never found the right term for the kind of creature I am. 

As a youth, I was privileged enough to be simultaneously accepted and ignored by my family. 

On the one hand, my father used the complimentary colors of redheads and afros to paint orgies. So my takeaway from that subtext was that: Everything goes.

On the other hand, my mother's family was so intensely private that it took his death to get my grandfather out of the closet, and so I read between those subtextual lines that: Everything goes…under the rug s´il vous plaît.

So, on the rare occasions when I happened to be regarded by my self-absorbed progenitors, my sexuality was hard for them to focus on, and for the sake of efficiency they, and all those concerned with my existence, simply stored me in the box marked “weird.”

The thing about weirdness though is that it doesn't stay put in any corner. 

It oozes and condenses, it flits and sinks, it is more intangible than a smell from the past, and more changeable than a lava lamp.

Slowly, and quickly, my weirding way developed.

The “weirding way,” in the science-fiction classic Dune, requires exceptional mastery of both mind and body. Blinding speeds are achieved in ”the weirding way” by using quick movements spurred on by an individual's shifting of their perception of space-time.

On my world, I call it: qweirding. It is the way of the escape artist, the mage and the shapeshifter. 

This is how to qweird: 

1. Lift your vision to see beyond the horizon of human expectation. 

2. Expand your insight to encompass the timelines of all those present. 

3. Smile at the growing excitation of atoms where those lines cross 

and spark!

4. Settle into the eternally shiny and shifting moment. 

Faultlines trembling with ecstatic tension.

Now we are truly qweirding out.

By following this instinctive technique, we can shift faster than the normies' perception of us.

As I move qweirdly thru my life, in the moment of my desire I bounce between timelines. Fall through and surrender to the timeless. Smiling from tit to twat. Settling into the poly-facetic core of my existential crystal mirror, reflections riffing upon the disco ball of my third eye.

Only letting in what makes me feel alive and letting out what makes me feel free. 

I’ve been Vita-sexual from the get go. Revved up by anything that lives and breathes. O yea! Life is such a turn-on!! 

One moment it’s the feel of a smooth gnarl of a tree. The next it’s the hearty odours of the mare’s wet velvet flank after a hard run. Sometimes it’s the pearl polish of rocks that have been licked smooth by eons of raindrops. And on especially magic days, my eyes behold and spin with all the spinning dandelion pods, with the gyrating murmurations of estornells - those estornudos of starlings, with the inspiring spiralling galaxies overhead, expanding and contracting with every breath of eternity. Oh, and the steaming oily flying saucers, panpipes, flutes and nymphs a go-go. Come! Come!

Let’s play! I’ve been a child who played tree house with other little monkeys, sharing our bits in innocent exploration, yodelling like Jane and Tarzan, giggling like childish cheetahs. 

Don’t ignore me! I’ve been a teenager who pushed and prodded at the flimsy boundaries set up by the fragile illusion called society. 

Can you smell me yet? I’ve been in uni running up and down the institute hallways at night in nothing but a bra and strap-on, in hot pursuit of fellow mutants of the new reality. 

Taste me! I got out into the “real” trying to understand our adult roles, still programmed for prince charming, and boy was she charming! 

Forgive me! I was making babies for the state, France bribed us to keep their language alive. But English won. Je suis désolé. So sorry. 

Just kidding though, my baby is a being I have been blessed to care for. His natural coming out paved the way for my rebirth.

Pinch me! My baby is all grown, and I am ready to get qweird again. So love me! Love all of me, as beautiful and slippery and strange and caring and terrible and attracted as I want to be. And I do!

Thanks to the millennials who craft and query, I finally have a definition that I can wear proudly.  

I am coming out at 53, loud and proud and pan as can be!

Gonna bang my pan!!

Cuz there is a Panorama of Pangs in my Pants, 

Sometimes for Pandora with a Pantyhose leaking Pandemonium, or a Pangolin cooking Pansy Pancakes, 

or even a whole Pantheon of Pandas playing Panpipes.

Standing on Pangea with a Panspermia and Panty Panini, 

I am happy to Pander to Pantsuited Panthers drinking Panaches,

while others Pantomime a Panic thru the Pandemic.

Just take me to the woods to Panhandle Pan in his Pantaloons leaving me panting out a Panegyric Pangram

Cause Pansexual is a Panacea for the Polymorphously Pangenetic.

Sí, es gracioso encontrar finalmente una identidad sexual a mi edad, cuando el sexo ya no pone en vuelo mis alas vulvares. Más que pansexual, tal vez sea más cierto para mi identificarme como panorámica en el sentido del deseo de abrazar cada detalle de la vida. Hongos que gotean, melones rana, cascadas de lluvia pura.

Recuerdo una sensación de gran excitación y satisfacción al trepar a la copa de un árbol y vibrar allí con la savia de nuestros esfuerzos pegada a mis manos. 

Mis excitaciones raras me mantuvieron alejada de sentirme parte del colectivo arcoíris, porque sentía que no tenía un lugar allí. La vieja pregunta: ¿soy lo suficientemente gay como para reclamar mi sexualidad alternativa?

Sabes, cuando era joven, disfrutaba mucho de los modales firmes y las conversaciones suaves de los hombres. También disfrutaba de los modales suaves y las conversaciones firmes con las mujeres. Pero nunca me sentí cómoda siendo identificada como heterosexual, ni bi. Gracias a Diosa por Juli, que me dijo que todos estamos en un espectro que va de zero a todo. 

Cada una de nosotras es una receta única de deseo.

Yes, thanks dog for JP, who showed me that we are all on a sexual spectrum from zero to everything.

Each one of us is a unique recipe of desire.

I’m sure there’s a term for someone who gets off on clouds. 

Oh yeah, a poet. Or maybe we are Logosexual. I would fuck the word salacious if it suddenly up and embodied.

And the elements…ooo, if only they could incarnate. Whhat!

I mean who here has not felt turned on by the gentle cresting of the sea? 

Or fallen in love with the tender caress of a cool breeze on a hot day? 

Or secretly opened their feelers to the humming of a motor-vehicle, the chucking of a train, the gush of a pool jet. 

Maybe I should identify as Motusexual - turned on by motion, the motion of emotion moving through my ocean, never getting stuck, thrilling through in tempo with the pulsing of my temple.

I’m good with the Panoramic Pansexual term. 

Pan-Pan does it for me. 

Because, as far as I can see, the more we open ourselves up to love and to self-love, the more apt we are to defend life from those who would put it all in a box and microwave it into submission. N.O.P.E! 

We must evolve as a collective to keep them from imposing their purityrannical agenda. 

Remember the qweirding way. 

Our collective is made up of shape-shifters, faster than the speed of perception, more powerful than a tongue-twister, able to leap over normative structures in a single bound. 

We are here: your mother. Sister next. Now a shaman. Now your plumber, sometimes a shamanic plumber too! 

We are the Village people, the Cougar clan, instagrannies, and the polymorphously perfect projections of the biodiversity of nature. 

A proud pack of wild things. 

HERE is where the wild things are, claiming and owning our freedom, to be vibrant in our truths. 

Let me hear you growl, wild things! 

Let me hear you howwwl!!

SOME RESEARCH:

On nearly every continent, and for all of recorded history, thriving cultures have recognized, revered, and integrated more than two genders. Terms such as transgender and gay are strictly new constructs that assume three things: that there are only two sexes (male/female), as many as two sexualities (gay/straight), and only two genders (man/woman).

Yet hundreds of distinct societies around the globe have their own long-established traditions for third, fourth, fifth, or more genders. The subject of Two Spirits, Fred Martinez, for example, was not a boy who wanted to be a girl, but both a boy and a girl — an identity his Navajo culture recognized and revered as nádleehí. Meanwhile, Hina of Kumu Hina is part of a native Hawaiian culture that has traditionally revered and respected mahu, those who embody both male and female spirit.

Most Western societies have no direct correlation for this tradition, nor for the many other communities without strict either/or conceptions of sex, sexuality, and gender. Worldwide, the sheer variety of gender expression is almost limitless.

-PBS

The Public Universal Friend was a nonbinary and nonconforming preacher in colonial New England during the First Great Awakening - A religious revival that took place in the English colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. The Public Universal Friend was born in Rhode Island on November 29, 1752. They were identified as female at birth and named Jemima Wilkinson. 

in 1776, the Friend fell ill with a contagious and deadly fever that spread throughout their community. The Friend survived, but they were transformed by the experience. They told their family that they had died and the Spirit of God had brought them back to life as a new person who was neither male nor female. This new person was called the Public Universal Friend and lived only to serve God. The Friend refused to respond to the name Jemima Wilkinson. They dressed in a combination of male and female clothing, including vests, neckties, and skirts. They kept their hair short on top of their head, with ringlets in the back.

Almost immediately after their rebirth, the Friend began to preach publicly about their spiritual awakening. Their family’s Quaker Meeting did not believe their story and dismissed them from the community. But the Friend was not deterred. They traveled throughout the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions and continued to preach, slowly building their own community of followers, who became known as the Universal Friends.

The hybrid words pansexual and pansexualism were first attested in 1914 (spelled pan-sexualism), coined by opponents of Sigmund Freud to denote the idea "that the sex instinct plays the primary part in all human activity, mental and physical”.

Yet it took 40yrs for the world to catch up to us older pan folks.

pansexuality (defined by GLAAD as “being attracted to all gender identities, or attracted to people regardless of gender”) vs. bisexuality (“being attracted to more than one gender”)

+++Research on pan in other cultures, esp native cultures.