[so keep your love locked down]
Happy Coming Out Day, flist! :D
My sexuality, like the rest of me, is irritatingly vague and wishy-washy. I'm bisexual. I have known this since November of 2007, and been okay with this since... hm. I'd say March or April of this year.
I first came out to my mother a month after I'd started dating a girl for the first time. I was sixteen and a dumbass of the highest order. My immediate family has always been a bunch of hippie liberals who campaigned for organic food and local produce and religious freedom and women's rights. My mother had cried for joy the day they legalized gay marriage in California. I was so sure it wouldn't be a problem that I told her blithely, casually, instead of giving it the weight it was supposed to have.
See, I didn't understand. I was in the honeymoon stage of a relationship I hadn't even believed was possible; I had finally come to terms with myself after ten months of doubting, and it was the happiest period of my life up to that point. I was sixteen and I thought that the fact that I was joyously happy was enough. I didn't get that there are explanations you have to make for this. I didn't realize all the connotations that come with the word "bisexual." I didn't even know that, outside our little hippie bubble, I had a family of conservative midwest Catholics and old whitebread Germans who would possibly forbid me from coming near their children for life if they knew who I was, who would disown my mother for letting me date a girl. I came out selfishly that first time, and it fucked up my life for the next two years. I got to deal with all the consequences of my stupidity at once, and it's a miracle my relationship with my parents survived intact.
But it did. It got better. I grew the hell up and learned to think about what my choices do to other people; and in the end, I learned that sometimes, being true to who you are is worth causing some pain. The year I spent trying to force myself that I wasn't bisexual is as painful a memory as the time I spent loving without fear was beautiful. Now, I can be honest with my mother again; if I fall in love with a woman again, I won't be afraid to pursue the relationship, and my insecurities won't fuck it over again.
I feel confident in who I am now. I still have days where I wonder if my parents were right after all; it still hurts when my mother begs me to choose a gender and stick with it. But for some time now I've been through through denying who I am.
I'm not a slut. I'm not confused. I'm not seeking persecution. I'm not rebelling against anyone. I'm just bisexual.
To my friends of orientations many and varied: You're all beautiful and I love you every day of the week, every month of the year. But today I'm saying it louder than usual. <3
(Today the South Oval's lawn was covered in... forks. Somebody had stuck hundreds of plastic forks upright in the the quarter-mile long, twenty-five meter wide stretch of grass. No idea who or why but god I laughed.)