Pomosexuality

Pomosexuality (or "pomosexual") is not, in the usual sense, a description of who a person is attracted to. It is a stance toward the labeling of orientation itself: a person who identifies as pomosexual declines to define their sexual orientation "in terms of conventional labels or classifications (e.g., gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual, etc.)" (Identiversity). English-language reference sources group the term alongside "unlabeled" sexuality, describing both as a rejection of preexisting or mainstream orientation categories rather than the adoption of a new one (Wikipedia). Because the identity is defined by what it refuses rather than what it specifies, a person who calls themself pomosexual may still experience attraction to one gender, several genders, or none at all: the label communicates only that they decline to file that attraction under an existing orientation heading.

The "pomo-" in pomosexual abbreviates postmodern. The coinage deliberately borrows postmodernism's suspicion of stable, essentialist categories and applies it to sexuality: rather than asking which gender(s) a person is attracted to, pomosexuality treats the entire taxonomy of orientation labels as a constructed, historically contingent system that need not be adopted at all. Commentary on the term has described it as less a label than a "labeln't" (a deliberate refusal of categorization), and notes that pomosexual people are typically uninterested in specifying exactly how or toward whom they experience attraction, since supplying that detail would undercut the point of declining a label in the first place (PinkNews).

Because it operates at the level of category rather than object of attraction, pomosexuality differs in kind from plurisexual identities such as pansexuality or polysexuality, which specify attraction to multiple or all genders while still working within a labeling framework. A pomosexual person may or may not experience attraction across genders; what distinguishes the identity is the refusal to file that attraction under any existing orientation heading (PinkNews).

Examples

Pomosexuality is a refusal rather than a description, which makes its coverage unusual: it says nothing about who anyone is attracted to.

What the term covers. Declining to describe one's orientation in conventional terms (gay, straight, bisexual, lesbian) on the grounds that the category system itself is a constructed and historically contingent thing one need not adopt. A pomosexual person may be attracted to one gender, several, or none; the label communicates only that they will not file it under an existing heading. Reference sources group it with "unlabelled" sexuality.

What the term does not cover. Pansexuality and polysexuality specify attraction across genders while still working inside the labelling framework, which is exactly what pomosexuality declines. Questioning describes uncertainty about which label fits, not a rejection of labelling. Queer is a broad reclaimed umbrella that people do adopt as an identity.

How the word is used. "Pomo" shortens "postmodern". Carol Queen and Lawrence Schimel coined it as the title of their 1997 Cleis Press anthology PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality, with a preface by Kate Bornstein; the book tied for the Transgender Literature prize at the 1998 Lambda Literary Awards. Commentary has called it less a label than a "labeln't". It never entered mainstream LGBTQ glossaries and survives mostly in queer-theory discussion.

History

The term originates in PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality (1997), an anthology of essays and fiction edited by sexologist and writer Carol Queen together with Lawrence Schimel, published by Cleis Press in San Francisco with a preface by Kate Bornstein (Simple English Wikipedia; Wikipedia: Carol Queen). The collection argued that the existing vocabulary of sexual orientation (built around fixed categories like gay, straight, and bisexual) could not adequately describe the range of ways contemporary readers experienced desire and identity, and proposed "pomosexual" as a term for people who found none of the available labels fully applicable to themselves.

At the 10th Annual Lambda Literary Awards (held July 14, 1998, and covering titles published in 1997), PoMoSexuals tied for the award in the Transgender Literature category with Daphne Scholinski and Jane Meredith Adams's memoir The Last Time I Wore a Dress, with Riki Anne Wilchins's Read My Lips and Pat Califia's Sex Changes also named as finalists in the same category (Lambda Literary Foundation). The award placed the anthology within the same mid-1990s wave of transgender- and queer-theory publishing that gave the term its initial audience.

Unlike bisexuality, pansexuality, or homosexuality, pomosexuality did not originate in clinical or medical literature and has not been adopted into the glossaries maintained by major LGBTQ+ advocacy or health organizations; its presence is largely confined to community-maintained LGBTQ+ reference wikis, queer-theory-adjacent commentary, and stub-length encyclopedia entries (Simple English Wikipedia). It remains a niche term nearly three decades after its coinage, more often discussed as a theoretical position within queer studies than used as a widely claimed personal identity label.

Terminology & related identities

Pomosexuality overlaps conceptually with queer, in its broadest reclaimed sense as a rejection of fixed hetero/homo/bi categorization, and with questioning, insofar as both resist settling on a single conventional label, though questioning implies an unresolved search for a fitting term, while pomosexuality asserts that no such term is needed. It is sometimes discussed alongside "unlabeled" sexuality on the same reference pages, since both describe declining to categorize rather than describing a specific attraction pattern (Wikipedia).

Pomosexuality is distinct from pansexuality, polysexuality, and omnisexuality, each of which names a pattern of attraction across multiple or all genders while still operating inside the label system; a pomosexual person rejects that system itself rather than selecting a term within it (PinkNews). Usage of the term is also contested in a narrower sense: some reference glossaries treat "pomosexual" as effectively interchangeable with "unlabeled," available to anyone who declines a category regardless of theoretical framing, while others tie it more specifically to the postmodern-theory lineage of the 1997 anthology, reserving it for a deliberate critique of the labeling system itself rather than simple indecision or fluidity (Identiversity).