May as well try to “measure” music in order to say it’s one “thing” or the “other.”

Music, of course, has multiple layers/dimensions – four major ones: rhythm; melody (to one degree or another); timbre; and (in all but monophonic music) harmony. (Each of these in turn are multi-layered: melody can be contrapuntal to any degree of complexity, timbral possibilities are infinite, and so on.) We can’t simply take and reduce it as a phenomenon to just one of those, then reduce that to a choice of two dots.

Of course, that’s what Stalin’s cultural goons did, according, apparently, to Shostakovich: they at one point started counting the number of major and minor harmonies in a piece, and those whose ratio was too skewed to the minor got their composer condemned for insufficient revolutionary joy!

But of course even harmonies can’t be reduced to two. They exist within larger systems of key. And then, even major and minor keys are only two of seven traditional Western modes. The music of other cultures encompasses a great variety of modes also, including microtonal ones. And then of course there is modulation into other keys, and atonality too: neither major nor minor nor modal in any other way.

Sexuality, like music, is multi-dimensional. Immeasurable.

However, these days we have become so locked within an extraordinary – not to mention extraordinarily dogmatic – paradigm that it is almost impossible even to discuss “sexuality” in the true, vast meaning of the word. For various historical and cultural reasons, our vision has become utterly one-pointed, and grotesquely disfigured, in this regard.

And just how much pounding on square pegs to get them to fit into round holes thus has to go on can be demonstrated every single day with new material. Today, for example, there is this report on Andrew Sullivan’s blog, beginning: “We’re slowly getting a sense of how many TGBQLX people there are in America. I.e. how many homosexuals, lesbians and transgenders there are in the population.”

That “i.e.” is revealing. What comes after an “i.e.” of course is meant to be a definition or exemplification of its antecedent, so here Sullivan is saying the following: 1) transgender identity is practically speaking congruent with “sexual orientation,” like the “L” and “G” categories. He makes this clear by the next sentence: “When I was a newbie gay, the mantra was 10 percent.” But of course when he “was a newbie gay,” that meaningless 10 percent figure was meant to relate just to the categories of “L” and “G.” People weren’t talking about the other ones.

And 2) we can simply ignore the “B’s,” “Q’s,” and “X’s,” because they too are really the same basic “thing” as the “L’s and G’s” (and, of course, “T’s”).

So, all the usual problems apply. Firstly, those who identify as trans have innumerable “sexual orientations,” and these are not possible to map onto the ones we have: if one biological male becomes a woman and then invests her sexual life exclusively (for the sake of simplicity) with men, clearly she is in not the same but the very opposite category of “sexual orientation” as the biological male who becomes a woman and then invests her sexual life exclusively with women. One of those two categories has to be considered – according to the logic we have harnessed ourselves to – as precisely “straight.” In other words, transgender simply can’t be used to bolster figures of “sexual orientation.” At all.

Secondly, the categories “Q” (by which is usually meant “queer,” an explicit rejection of the system as a whole), and “X,” which I’ve never seen before in this context but which can only be referring to something like “none of the above,” actually have nothing logically to do with the idea of “G” and “L.” But if one wishes to think that they (along with “B” of course) are really just variants on “L” and “G,” then of course the former can, and practically speaking are, more or less always ignored.

They’re even mentioned at all, in that case, so that wishful thinking and a desire for hygienic, stable, absolute categories can feel as if it is being true to “diversity,” while at the same time resolutely closing its eyes to it at every turn.

For it is precisely those “B’s,” “Q’s,” and “X’s” – amongst many other phenomena internally contradictory within our constructs of “gay” and “straight” themselves – which reveal the instability of our contemporary regime of “sexuality.”

In a time when the category of race has finally come to be understood – by more and more at least – as ultimately incoherent, that of something we are calling “sexuality” gets more reified, reductionistic, and rigid every year.

And of course there are a number of cultural reasons for this, about which … much more over time!