And then my middle-aged rage mellowed enough to see the true genius behind this new term. Heteroflexibility -- not homosexuality or bisexuality -- would bring about an end to the hegemony of heterosexuality. Think about it. The opposite of heteroflexible is heterorigid. Imagine saying to anyone that you're heterorigid. Sounds awful, right? Like some very stiff politician in a suit and tie who is so busy being heterorigid that he can't relax his sphincter muscles enough to look natural. Heterorigidity has none of the promises of pleasure that heterosexuality has. There is no sexual potential in an identity rooted in denial of possibility.

Of course, it's not just heterosexuality that will wither away with the advent of heteroflexibility, but homosexuality as well. Being homorigid doesn't sound as appealing as homoflexible. Homorigidity brings to mind the lesbian who won't even have penetrative sex because she's afraid it might be too much like heterosexuality, a person so bent on identity that her sexual desires get bent into knots.

I can imagine a world where rigidity of any variety becomes as taboo as homosexuality used to be. In the post-rigid age, we will all identify as flexible (even if we're not). And sexual identity will become much less mired in the unimaginative binary of hetero and homo. The world will in fact start to look a lot more like that queer nation "we" envisioned when we were in school -- just like the queer nation we envisioned turns out to be not that different from the one envisioned by the gay liberationists before us, and the homophiles before them and so on and so forth.

And so my students will replace me and others like me with new imaginings of sexual desires. And I will become increasingly entrenched in my own generation's way of seeing the world and sexual desires and ourselves until one day it will not be my sexual rigidity that makes me old and them young, but my generational rigidity. Or more accurately, it is my generation's superiority that will make me old and them young, since anyone born before 1970 surely knows a lot more about sex than these heteroflexible punks ever will.

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