pomosexual

(poh.moh.SEK.shoo.ul)

n.

A person who shuns labels such as heterosexual and homosexual that define individuals by their sexual preferences. Also: PoMoSexual. — adj.

— pomosexuality n.

Example Citations:

With terms like "PoMoSexual," 'just gay enough" and "flaming heterosexuals," the word metrosexual is now gaining currency among American marketers who are fumbling for a term to describe this new type of feminized man.

— Warren St. John, "Metrosexuals Come Out," The New York Times, June 22, 2003

In a pomosexual world, sexual categories are no longer rigid.

People can move beyond labels — gay, lesbian, bisexual,

transexual — while acknowledging the importance those labels

played in the past.

— Mitchel Raphael, "Where gay goes after the mainstream," The Toronto Star, May 17, 1998

Earliest Citation:

This is why Garber is writing a book on bisexuality, and why she wrote a book on transvestism: She believes that these "in-between" experiences prove that human qualities like gender and sexuality are far more fluid and mercurial than we tend to think. "Bisexuality," she concludes after pondering Rock Hudson's marriage to Phyllis Gates, "is not a fixed point on a scale but an aspect of lived experience, seen in the context of particular relations... Like postmodernism itself, it resists a stable referentiality. It performs." Call it pomosexuality.

— Larissa MacFarquhar, "Vice Versa," The Nation, July 17, 1995

First Use:

PoMoSexual: The queer erotic reality beyond the boundaries of gender, separatism, and essentialist notions of sexual orientation.

— Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel, "PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality," Cleis Press, September, 1997

Notes:

This word combines pomo, shorthand for postmodern, with the suffix -sexual. Although she didn't invent the word, pomosexual was made famous (in certain circles, anyway) by editors Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel who used it in the title of a 1997 anthology of essays, PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality (Cleis Press). On the back cover of the book, PoMoSexual is described, unhelpfully, as the "erotic reality beyond the boundaries of gender, separatism, and essentialist notions of sexual orientation."

Related Words:

cisgender

datasexual

ecosexual

fauxmosexual

heteroflexible

metrosexual

post-gay

same-sex person

sapiosexual

straight supremacist

technosexual

ubersexual

Categories:

Gay and Lesbian

Men and Women