Bent

Sometimes we talk about how we are glad that when we flip over what I want, we find what You want and that when we look for what You want, we find that what I want is at the opposite pole of your desire. This makes us a perfect antipode -- one system that consists of two opposite (notice, I don’t say opposing) forces. We sometimes say that we are happy that we are bent in the same way. How many ways are we bent? I wonder.

As an adjective, "bent" means deviating from the normal or straight, as a bent twig. So used, bent threatens to create a division by shading the substance of the noun it modifies with shame and imperfection. The use of the word “bent” in this way did not spring from us. It came from others -- those who experience a world where the possibilities are limited to a direct reflection of themselves and who cannot tolerate the thought that it might be otherwise. They shut out the possibility that others can set their own course and know their own truth. From them comes the notion that what we do is “bent.”

Sometimes You say to me, "Oh, Baby, you are so deliciously bent." Then, it is as an adjective employed in the articulation of an identity powerful enough to reclaim our own queer autonomy and diminish the influence of would-be persecutors – those who tell us that what we do is a distorted rendition, a mockery of what, for them, is the norm, ie. heterosexuality. We do nothing in imitation of or in relation to heterosexuality. Imitating heterosexuality would involve the incorporation of a male entity and there are no men in bed with us -- unlike so many heterosexual women, not even our fathers occupy headspace in our bed.

As a noun “bent” means an interest. One of the things we mean when we say, “We have the same bent,” is that we have the same strong inclinations, that our appetites are best satisfied in a complimentary way. This meaning implies unity within a system, in our case, an erotic system, and when I look in your eyes, I know that this is the primary meaning for us. We use it as a noun, a statement of essence, the substance of our joining.

When You are moving over me, my ankles in your grip, there is nothing bent, nothing misaligned. You are ramrod straight up, rooted like a tree to the fertile ground of my open heart. You draw the force of life from your connection with my red earth, seeking out the nutrients of love with your tender roots – probing here and then there. Like a magic beanstalk, You rise tall and proud before me, bowing only in reverence at the altar of our devotion. Not bent, ever.