When Sarah Mann-O’Donnell was a teenager, she stopped speaking to her stepfather. The “very conservative” man had made a homophobic comment in passing, and Mann-O’Donnell decided that she wasn’t going to put up with it. But when her mother confronted her about the incident, Mann-O’Donnell was forced to consider a question she hadn’t before.

“She said, ‘What is all of this stuff suddenly about homophobia? I mean, are you gay?'” Mann-O’Donnell, now 29, recalls. “And I completely froze and I didn’t know what to say.”

The short answer to her mother’s question was no. The teenaged Mann-O’Donnell had slept with women before, but admits that she was also “sleeping with men at this point, and invariably enjoying it.”

“It had never occurred to me that I was gay,” she says. “It was really about experience, experimentation, sexuality.”

The long answer was somewhat more complicated, and was one that she wouldn’t truly begin to discover until college.

In 1948, biologist Alfred Kinsey released a scale on which individuals could rate their sexual orientations. A rating of one was “exclusively heterosexual,” while six was “exclusively homosexual.” But although this sexuality range has existed for more than 60 years, the LGBT community has been slow to adopt a similar range of labels.

“There used to be no language to kind of explain how I was,” says Doris Dirks, coordinator for the Student Organizations for Social Justice and the LGBT Resource Center at Northwestern University. “People used to assume that I was a lesbian, which I’m not.”

Dirks identifies as genderqueer, which is a rejection of the traditional male/female gender binary, and lives somewhere between the two terms.

“My voice is pretty low, kind of how I move, and the space that I occupy is not small,” says Dirks, who is biologically female. “When I started to do work in [the LGBT] area and I heard the term genderqueer … I was like ‘Oh, that’s me.'”

Still, Dirks says some people have difficulty understanding the relatively modern term – and even when people do understand its meaning, they can be slow to accept it as reality.

“I think genderqueer people can be as confusing as bisexuals” – who have traditionally been judged harshly by both heterosexuals and other members of the LGBT community – “like where do they fit in, like we can’t easily define you as being this or that, which is what people want to do.”

As an undergraduate at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mann-O’Donnell first became interested in people who, like Dirks, live outside of the gender binary. She was living polyamorously, dating both her pre-college girlfriend and a boy she met at school.

“It was sort of like the true bisexual experience, truly proving that I could be in love with and be sexually attracted to a man and a woman at the same time,” she says.

But when she began to learn about people with nonnormative gender identities – genderqueer as well as transsexual and transgender individuals – even the bisexual moniker ceased to sit well with her.

“I stopped using the word bisexual, simply reasoning that it was unfair,” she says. “Why use a word to describe myself that inherently limits who I might be attracted to? That seemed self-defeating.”

So she began to live without a label, entering a state of “in-betweenness” that she says is essential to her sexuality.

“The way I think about sexuality and gender, I try to obliterate … the A and the B, the male and the female,” she says. “It becomes a spectrum that is infinite on both sides.”

Traditionally, the A and the B that she refers to have been the terms “straight” and “gay,” with “bisexual” sitting somewhat accepted in between. But Mann-O’Donnell isn’t the only one who has found satisfaction in avoiding those traditional designations.

A report issued by the Centers for Disease Control in September 2005 stated that 3.9 percent of men aged 18-44 defined themselves as “something else” sexually, compared to the 2.3 percent who answered homosexual and 1.8 percent who said bisexual. Women answered similarly, with 1.3 percent homosexual, 2.8 percent bisexual and 3.8 percent “something else.”

That “something else” represents the dozens of new terms, from queer to pansexual, that people use to label themselves. For some, the decision to use a non-traditional term stems from the social ideas attached to long-defined words like “lesbian” and “gay.”

“I think a lot of people feel ‘lesbian’ is so tied to the 1970s, to the lesbian separatist movement, to a particular brand of feminism,” says Ardel Thomas, professor of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at the City College of San Francisco. Thomas, who came out in 1983, prefers the term “queer.”

“I’ve always identified as queer, even before I knew that was one of my word options,” Thomas says. “I definitely grew up in the lesbian community in Boulder [Col.], but I never quite fit in.”

This makes queer, which attempts to apply fluidity to traditionally rigid labels, a perfect fit for her. She uses it as a means to express her sexuality without forcing herself to fit into the lesbian stereotype.

“The queer community really does encompass everything,” she says. “It encompasses all religions, it includes all ethnicities, it includes all genders.”

Zach Wichter, a Medill sophomore, agrees. In his hometown, he had “never met someone who didn’t identify in the LGBT categories.” But within a year of arriving at Northwestern, Wichter became involved in Rainbow Alliance, which seeks to include undergraduates of all genders and sexual orientations. Now co-president of Rainbow Alliance, Wichter has since learned about a whole range of identities.

“You can be queer in so many different ways and it doesn’t necessarily say anything about your sexuality or your gender,” he says. “It seems like the more fluid identities are starting to gain more credibility … and I think that it’s a lot healthier.”

Fluidity, however, seems to be the factor that evokes the most backlash for those who choose to identify nontraditionally.

“People in general struggle with fluidity,” says Mann-O’Donnell, who adds that those who change or renounce their labels after coming out often face more repercussions than those who simply use a nontraditional label from the start.

“[There is] the accusation of illusion – that you’ve deluded people, that you’ve lied to them, because of this common idea that we all are who we are and what we are, and we’ve just got to figure out what the word for that is,” she says.

Another complicating factor is reclamation, the practice of using a formerly hurtful epithet as an empowering identifier. Because of this, Thomas says, much of the energy behind preserving traditional labels comes from the older generations of LGBT activists. When she pressed to change the name of her department to Queer Studies in the early 2000s, she immediately felt the backlash.

“People [were] writing in who were older who were saying, ‘I’m sorry, ‘queer’ still reminds me of every time I got my face put down in the mud and got the shit knocked out of me,'” she says.

However, at least at the college level, many LGBT groups are avoiding names that rigidly apply sexual labels in favor of reclaimed umbrella terms like queer. Northwestern’s one traditionally-labeled student group, Kellogg’s Gay and Lesbian Management Association, is far outweighed by OUTLaw at the School of Law, Queers & Allies (Q&A) at the Feinberg School of Medicine, the Northwestern University Queer Pride Graduate Student Association and the undergraduate Rainbow Alliance.

“I feel like our generation of LGBT people is just more accepting of the more in-between identities,” Wichter says. “If we find a way to overcome all of the different adjectives, it will result in the end in a stronger community.”

Today, Mann-O’Donnell is the president of Northwestern’s QPGSA.
She holds degrees in experimental art and feminism and gender studies, is currently a third-year PhD student in comparative literary studies and serves as a fellow at Jones Residential College. She also has a male partner.

“People look at me sideways,” she says. “They express discomfort and if I’m lucky they just express misunderstanding and they give me a space in which to speak with them about it.”

But after years of relationships with people all along her infinite spectrum, she is used to people being uncertain how to react to her choices. She views it as an opportunity, she says, to educate people about sexuality and identity. “There’s a lot of explication, a lot of reasoning,” she says. “I try to complicate things for them.”

She gives them examples, asking them what words they would use to identify a cisgender (or biological) male who dresses like a female but dates women and socializes within the lesbian community. Of course, this means that at some point, she has to pick words to define her own sexuality.

“For the kinds of practices that I engage in and the communities that I try to build, I use the word queer,” she says.

But Mann-O’Donnell stresses that the word is not as essential as her own understanding of her sexuality – which, she says, she likes to keep as open as possible.

“For me, saying that I identify as X is to label myself and to box myself in,” she says. “That doesn’t mean that I don’t use words to explain what I do [physically and sexually] … queer, for lots of different reasons, fits that, loosely. I just don’t use that actual verbiage.”

To her, as to many, the term is not nearly as important as the emotions and experiences it attempts to encompass. She believes that choosing a rigid label would mean choosing limitation, both in how she is expected to behave and in who she is expected to date.

“I have no idea what will hit me walking down the street,” she says. “Whatever it is that comes next, whatever person comes next, it’s my queer self that is attracted to them.”