(no subject)
When I was 11, I asked my mom what it meant when I thought about kissing my girl friends. I broached the subject again when I was 13. She told me that I wasn’t gay because I had a boyfriend and that I was going through a phase that all girls go through. I asked her, “But what if I like both?”
I didn’t know that the word “bisexual” existed. I only knew what I felt. I had never considered that I couldn’t like both boys and girls. It seemed natural to me, but it was also rather terrifying.
This “phase” just continued to intensify for me. When I was 14, and aware of the terminology (remember…this was the mid-90s and I lived in small-town Appalachia), I told my then-boyfriend that I thought I might be bisexual. At this point, it had gone far beyond thinking about kissing my female friends. I had developed sexual attraction to women that led me to ultimately experiment with masturbation. He told me that I was disgusting for even thinking I could be, that he wouldn’t date a bisexual, that he didn’t want to “compete” with both men and women, even though he wasn’t competing with anyone at all.
This pushed me back into the closet for two more years. If my religious upbringing and homo/biphobic family situation wasn’t enough to deter me from embracing myself, this really did it for me. Even once I finally moved out of that relationship and found myself in another, I felt conflicted for a time. At 16, I fought with these fears that people had instilled in me that I was going to go to hell for liking women (a notion I’d cast aside well before I inevitably realized my atheism). I was afraid of being cast aside by my friends and family. I was afraid of being treated differently, even though this is who I’d always been.
Bringing those things up to my mom when I was 11 wasn’t the first time I’d thought about women. I can remember being curious, mesmerized, even aroused by the female form before I’d ever hit double-digit age.
I think that in my 16th year, I finally faced those demons. I finally got to the point that I owned my identity. It was so liberating, but this was just the beginning. When I think of all of the confusion, fear and inner turmoil, when I think about how it was to come out at the time that I did, I find it difficult to understand how anyone can claim that I don’t exist.
At 30, I’ve dated, been in love with, lusted after, long-term committed and fucked both men and women, and that hasn’t changed. If anything, I’m more comfortable in my identity has a bisexual woman than I’ve ever been. My identity as such does not make me less faithful, confused or half-way in the closet. I try to be respectful to others when they don’t understand, but it is frustrating to be told to pick one or that being in a relationship with a man makes me straight or that being with a woman makes me gay. I am what I am - a strong, determined and confident bisexual lover, mother, friend, daughter and sister - and that will never change.