Reason #1: The Gender Spectrum
Television host Sarah Haines of ABC’s “The View” (July 24, 2017) tells us that over seventy terms now define our gender identity and sexual orientation; labels like “pansexual”, “omnisexual”, and “heteroflexible”. She talks with “Younger” star Nico Tortorella who has been discussing sexual fluidity on his podcast “The Love Bomb.” Together, Sarah and Nico interview six young adults at the LGBTQ Center in New York City. They discuss the pressures that exist in relationships when gender labels are used. These young men and women want others to allow them to be seen as human beings without the prejudice of labels. Labels pigeon-hole and polarize us.
Author Mary V. Dearborn talks about her new biography Ernest Hemingway at Edith Wharton’s The Mount in Lenox, MA (August 22, 2017). She mentions Hemingway’s fascination with the blurring of the sexes which he wrote about in The Garden of Eden (a book that he never expected to be published in his lifetime.) Even one of the macho symbols of our time has given thought to the gender spectrum.
Ever since I saw the closeted androgynous being in Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander (Sweden, 1982), he/she haunted me and I too became fascinated by the blending of the sexual boundaries. In my new novel, main characters Lisa and Rachel discover their past lives in the private library of a famous bookstore in Paris. They relive the lives of two famous artists of the 1920’s (Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks), by exploring their gender identity through sexual fantasy. Their love life is a continuum of hidden masculine and feminine hetero and homosexual fantasies that urge them “to unlock their images and sensations, to live them freely and share them with each other.”
Reason number one for writing The Purple Bowtie is to invite a dialogue on sexual fluidity and the blurring of the lines in gender identity. What if we were to suspend the gender labels for a moment and instead, take the time to focus on our present and past reincarnations in sexual fantasy? Rather than stereotyping a person in one sexual identity, why not allow them to think about and share their past lives in fantasy? Imagine what new and more honest worlds we could explore. We might discover new reasons why we are attracted to or love a person. We might learn a lot about ourselves.
Tweet Lisabeth Reynolds your thoughts on the gender spectrum and gender labels at #purplebowtiebook1. Or post them at: https://www.facebook.com/ThePurpleBowtieBook/
