Today is National Coming Out Day. If Ray were still alive, it would also be the day we’d be celebrating the twenty-first anniversary of our commitment ceremony (he promised to stay with me for the rest of his life, and he did).
Since I am still occasionally surprised to learn that someone I know or work with hasn’t figured out that I’m gay: my husband (Michael) and I are both men, and we’re very much in love with each other and happy together.
I often quote the study completed by the Centers for Disease control in the early 90s whose conclusions included the line, “Americans would rather admit to being heroin addicts than being bisexual.” So I am hardly the first person to notice that bisexual visibility is fraught. As one friend said, “My orientation is bisexual, but my temperament is monogamous, then I fell in love with a man, and there’s just no natural moment to mention to your future in-laws, ‘oh, by the way, I’m bisexual.'” Later, when we were both members of the Seattle Lesbian & Gay Chorus, she said the chorus finally gave her a way bring it up with many people as she would try to sell tickets to the concerts. “No, you don’t have to be gay or lesbian to sing in the group, we’ve had a few straight members. But I’m not one of them.”
Most of the bi people I know (or I should say, most of the people I happen to know are bisexual) have wound up in long-term opposite-sex relationships. Just as a matter of statistics, there are more straight people, so the number of potential partners who happen to be opposite sex is much larger than the number who are same-sex. Some bi people, like my husband, end up in long-term relationships with same-sex partners. That same CDC study I mentioned earlier found that about one-third of people who self-identify as gay are actually bisexual, but keep quiet about it.
Because society—even folks who think of themselves as enlightened—assumes that people will settle down as part of a couple, when you do get into a long term relationship, colleagues and acquaintances assume they can infer your orientation. If you wind up with an opposite-sex partner and they are aware of any of your previous same-sex relationships, they assume it was an experimental phase. If you wind up with a same-sex partner and they are aware of any of your opposite-sex relationships, they assume you were in denial.
And gay people like me who actually did try to convince ourselves that maybe we weren’t really gay but actually bi don’t help your cause. Because there was a time when I described myself as bi, and because many gay people do that as part of their own coming out process, a lot of people assume that’s what everyone who describes themselves as bi is doing. For which I apologize.
I do know that the only way to decrease the stigma of being bisexual is to be out. Just as the only thing that has made people warm to the notion of gay and lesbian rights was for more and more of us to be out to our families, friends, neighbors, and colleagues, that’s what it’s going to take for bisexuals. Yes, it’s scary. But being open and honest is very liberating.
So, come out, come out, wherever you are!
I was 25 years old the first time I told another human being that I thought I might be gay. As I mentioned yesterday, I had tried many times to broach the subject with my best friend, but his reaction to the mere mention of the topic of gay or bi people was always so negative, I kept chickening out. And I had begged, pleaded, and sometimes angrily argued with god about it for at least a dozen years. But even when I was praying for god to take those feelings away, I couldn’t say the words out loud. What if someone else heard me?
The person I ended up telling was a new friend I had met when I transferred to a university in Seattle to finish my degree. And because the university was a Free Methodist school, being honest about my sexual orientation could have gotten me kicked out. At that time in my closeted perspective, revealing the truth to just about anyone I knew would lead to devastating consequences, so the university’s policy didn’t seem any worse than what I was already dealing with.
Anyway, eventually a number of mutual friends informed me that people were wondering why I hadn’t asked Julie out on a date… including Julie. And it was clear that some of that wondering was making people speculate about what my reasons could possibly be. Which, from past experience, meant the gay rumors were not going to be far behind. Continue reading The first time…
I’ve mentioned before a particularly close friend who didn’t take my coming out well. He insisted that it wasn’t because he had a problem with me being gay (even though he also insisted that it was a horribly sinful choice that I should repent of and do everything in my power to change). No, that wasn’t the reason we couldn’t be friends any longer. We couldn’t be friends because I hadn’t told him first. Specifically, his wife knew before he did.
I’ll unpack that parenthetical portion in a minute, but first I want to make it clear that I never told his wife… Continue reading Coming out is hard to do
Since I am still occasionally surprised to learn that someone I know or work with hasn’t figured out that I’m gay: my husband (Michael) and I are both men, and we’re very much in love with each other and happy together.
I attended a Methodist university that had rules calling for expulsion for, among other things, being an “unrepentant homosexual.” At the time I enrolled (back in the mid-1980s), I was still struggling with my sexual identity—I was trying to convince myself that I was bi, or if not, then maybe I could live my life as asexual.
Being in the closet was a survival necessity in my day-to-day life back then. Almost everyone that I knew, whether through school, church, or just in the community, thought that being gay was inherently wrong. The state-approved high school health class text had a whole chapter on abnormal sexuality, and it described kinky straight sex, homosexuality, pedophilia, and necrophilia as simply different stages of the same psychological disease, for goodness sake!
I’d seen high school classmates kicked out of school, then sent out of town by their shamed family after rumors circulated that they had been caught having gay sex, as well.
Whether one of the colleges I was applying to had harsher anti-gay rules than another didn’t seem like a significant issue.
So, yes, I have to confess that I applied to a university fully aware that not only were my religious beliefs not very closely aligned with theirs, but several things I believed were actually violations of their rules and code of conduct.
But that’s only the beginning of the story…
Font Folly 