Musician Morrissey explains that throughout his career, he’s kept the pronouns in his music gender-neutral.
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I’m not gonna lie. I love Morrissey. I always have, I probably always will. While at first it might have been his brooding good looks, and the way his eyebrows suggested that there was a long and interesting conversation to be had, his lyrics hooked me. They spoke to me. As if this guy could somehow know what it was like to be a young woman in her 20’s. (Wow, that was a long time ago.)
So it came as a wonderful surprise when I read, today, that he intentionally kept his music gender neutral. According to a 1986 interview with Rolling Stone, he said, “It was very important for me to try and write for everybody.” he was very tapped into the thing that would be such a theme for me, which is that human emotions are gender neutral, our needs are largely the same, as is our pain, even if we act on it differently.
But what really delighted me was reading that he has officially declared himself “humanasexual.” Ending decades of commentary about whether he was gay or straight. In his own words, “I am not homosexual. In technical fact, I am humasexual. I am attracted to humans. But, of course … not many.”
Love it. Although it is obviously true that some of us are at the far end or the “gay or straight” spectrum, many of us exist somewhere in the gray area. And I’m happy to see him give it a name that doesn’t force us to choose “one or the other.”
Someday, if you’re nice, I’ll tell the about the time I measured his inseam. He was quite the gentleman, even when I told him that we didn’t actually do alterations.
What do you think? (Not about the fact that I measured him for alterations, knowing full well that we didn’t do them. He asked me to, I worshiped him, I was 21……) What do you think about the term “humansexual” and Morrissey’s statement?