Kyeo is running his hand up and down Sarham's back, as though counting scars he can't feel, and then there is something, in the room, something enormous, and he sees his own face and Sarham's mirrored in an incoming oval and then -
- they aren't sitting on Kyeo's bed in Crane Mountain any more.
"We haven't actually known each other that long. I was on his planet for a few days and then - uh, left - and when we got here I'd been visiting him for the first time upon his arrival on Outer Sohaibek."
"They were a fairly intense few days and of course now we are the only normal people on this planet of magical ones so that's tending to push us closer together too but we would not have been at the moving in together stage anytime soon if we were still on Outer Sohaibek."
"I don't consider it super private, I actually wrote up an account of my time on Ibyabek and put it on the internet for anyone who wanted to read it, but I'm a little worried about - explaining things in the wrong order, leaving you with a weird impression due to context you don't have or something -"
". . . Maybe you should start with - hm.
Colley's twin is only attracted to people when they look like men. They're a performer too, and aren't committed to keeping their exact voice, so they play roles across most genders. One time at a party, they and a few other cast members were coming up with words for fun, and one of the categories was for people with strict parameters for attraction. They ended up deciding on something closer to what I would translate as 'androphilic', but - that's the only reason I had a definition to connect the word 'gay' to; I don't remember hearing it in any other context. It's a less common thing to care about than wanting your partners to be taller or shorter than you by at least an order of magnitude.
So I don't have an understanding of - why it would be a reason to punish someone, or what other preferences may be viewed as warranting that - "
"It's - not actually unusual in nonmagical, less-than-cosmopolitan societies, where people aren't magically changing sex all the time, for the general consensus to be that everybody should get heterosexually married and have kids. A lot of people want to do that anyway, when it's a live option, and it's a pretty stable social norm compared to polygamy or making everybody sex-segregate or dealing with a lot of single mothers and rootless men or other things you could try to have be standard. - men are somewhat more likely to be violent or criminally inclined in general in a large population, and also aren't by default on the hook for dealing with a baby if one occurs. Adding gay people - or accommodating the range of possible preferences of multisexual people - doesn't necessarily threaten this structure, but it notably isn't this structure, and structures like that are in large part sustained by soft coercion or sometimes stronger forms of insistence, applied without a lot of fine discrimination. Things loosen up with better technology like contraceptives and treatments for sexually transmitted diseases and enough wealth that the household isn't the basic economic unit of society - you guys aren't technologically advanced but you could in theory have only one person in every city eat or sleep at all, that frees up enormous amounts of time and resources, and you use some of them on making it convenient for more people to sleep and eat but you don't have to and nonmagical people absolutely have to or they will die, and when your household is organized into an interdependent unit and somebody leaving threatens that it's much more important to everyone involved to enforce the responsibilities the individuals have to the group. And I'm from a loosened up place, so everyone was always fine with it, that I'm gay. And Kyeo's planet is not loosened up. They have some of the technology but they're trying to do communism with it and it doesn't work very well and also separately for historical reasons Ibyabek is kind of maniacal about everybody having children."
"It seems partly cultural, how people - narrativize and then self-reinforce their various natural inclinations, so you hear different statistics even on different loosened-up planets. Like there are some people who seem like they would be able to go either way on being gay or being trans, say, or people who have a sort of limited multisexuality they might have ignored forever on Ibyabek. The Kularan numbers I've heard are eighty percent cis and straight and then the numbers on the remaining twenty change pretty frequently."
"Eighty, that's - if I turned someone down on the basis of gender alone that'd be - cheap and evasive of me regardless of direction, if I didn't also give a reason why I wanted to keep the preference - but I suppose it would have to be that high for such a system to exist at all, wouldn't it."
"In addition to having legally required personality traits do you also have social norms about having to disclose a legible reason for not having sex with somebody??"
"It's also fine to just say you don't want to; it would be cheap and evasive to bother to give a reason at all but have it be such a flimsy one. Like saying you didn't like the color of their shirt, perhaps? Fine if somewhat sharp for turning away a hookup, and callous to say to someone who'd been pining after you for months, with various intermediate positions of rudeness between those."
"If a woman hits on me I guess I'll claim to be monogamous or not make any claims at all instead of saying gay?"
"Thank you. I just, sometimes have trouble - thinking about - are the things you said about this culture just now really equivalent in your eyes?"
"About the needing justifications for refusing sex which we don't in fact do, and - "
"...and, what, not letting people be gay? No, no, one's basically just a matter of etiquette, it just would have been kind of startling."
"Alright.
- No, we should actually untangle this - 'in addition to having legally required personality traits do you also have social norms about having to disclose a legible reason for not having sex with somebody'. Is the thing I'd meant. I read you as fairly upset about both."
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