Yesterday was National Coming Out Day. I’m a bad bi because I didn’t know, as I didn’t know that September 23rd was Celebrate Bisexuality Day. I don’t generally care about holidays, no matter if they relate to me or not*, so I don’t keep up on all these additional ones. The only reason I knew about today’s was because I saw some of my tweeples tweeting about it, including one particular obnoxious tweet. Not my tweeple, but he was commenting on said dumbass tweet. I was going to embed the tweet, but the original tweeter has deleted it. In essence, it said that I am: followed by straight, gay, bisexual, a person, with a check mark in front of ‘a person’. It was followed up with the statement, “Your sexuality is only a small part of who you are.’ The original tweeter, named DitchtheLabel, obviously got a lot of shit for it because s/he deleted the tweet. I do understand what DtL was trying to say–we are more than just the labels we give ourselves. We are whole human beings, yadda yadda yadda, but that’s not possible in a country in which there are still laws that oppress us, people who still hate us, and our queer youth still very vulnerable for being kicked out of their houses and/or being bullied.
I would imagine that most queers would be elated if our queerness was not a point of contention or a reason for people wanting to kill us. If we could just go about our lives without having to worry about losing our jobs or being attacked. As I tweeted back, we queers know we are people, but there are others who refuse to accept that. Until they do, we’ll keep reminding them. Loudly. In other words, it’s not us who are putting the emphasis on our sexuality, but the people who hate or fear us. They’re the ones who only see us in terms of who we fuck, even though THAT is just a small part of our sexuality. Well, I should only speak for myself. I love sex more than is probably seemly, but whether I’m fucking a man or a woman is such a small portion of that sex.
I’ll get back to that in a second.
The thing is, sexuality is a large part of who anyone is as a person. It’s a big part of our society, even if we don’t acknowledge it. Look at the fact that we are purportedly big on family** in this country. If you are heterosexual and get married and have kids, that’s part of your sexuality. You may not think it is because we’ve reduced sexuality to genitals interacting, but it is. It’s the practical outcome of heterosexual sexuality, which I consider to be under the umbrella of sexuality. So, when straight people wonder why queers talk about our sexuality all the time, they’re being disingenuous, even if they don’t realize it. When they have pictures of their loved ones on their desk, they’re displaying evidence of their sexuality. When they talk about going to their in-laws for Thanksgiving, they’re doing the same. It’s just because it’s considered normal that they don’t realize what they’re doing.
It’s minority life 101. Any time you’re a minority, you’re bound to stand out. If you talk about your experiences, which are, by necessity, different than the norm, you’ll be considered an outlier at best, a threat to society at worst. You’ll have to keep explaining why you feel/think the way you do, and that gets tiring after two minutes.
It’s strange to be writing about this because I don’t think about being bisexual very often. It’s partly because I’m not dating anyone now, so it’s not particularly relevant. In addition, I don’t know many people who would have a problem with me being bi. Thirdly, it’s been a part of me for so long, I’ve had plenty of time to work it out for myself. Lastly, I can pass for straight if I wish, so the question of whether or not to come out is completely in my control. For example, in taiji class a couple weeks ago, my classmate and I were talking about dating. I said something about being single, and he said something along the lines of I hadn’t met the right guy yet. I had a choice to make. I could have just nodded and agreed, but that would not have sit well with me. Instead, I added, “Or the right chick.” He said, “Oh, you like women, too?” I nodded and that was it. I knew it was very low risk because he’s an open-minded and nonjudgmental kind of guy, but I still had to make the choice. Any time someone assumes that I’m straight, I have to make that choice.
Once again, I ask the majority, in this case, straight people, to imagine a world in which something that is totally natural to you–being attracted to people of the opposite gender–is frowned upon. Let’s say you’re a woman and you are attracted to men. Imagine that every time you mentioned it, you were met with stares of disgust, bewilderment, or anger. Imagine being repeatedly told that you would go to hell for your desires unless you remained celibate and never had sex with anyone of the opposite gender for the rest of your life. Imagine that the vast majority of the relationships depicted in the popular culture around you were same-sex, and that all your coworkers had pictures of their same-gender partners. You’d probably feel as if you had to hide who you truly were, and in extreme cases, you might even find yourself in a romantic relationship with someone of your gender in order to fit in. Or you might despair of ever living life as your authentic self and try to kill yourself. You might even be encouraged to do so by cruel people around you. You’d fear losing your job if you lived in a state without protection, and you might find yourself estranged from your entire family. This is what many queer people have to face, which is why National Coming Out Day is still important.
As I said, it’s easy for me to be almost blase about being bi because I live in a liberal neighborhood, hang out with liberal people, and I work for myself so I don’t have to worry about being fired. I’ve dealt with more racism and sexism in my life than I have queerphobia, and most of the latter is just annoying stereotypes that people, both gay and straight, have about being bi. It’s also more about being invisible in a society that sees things in black and white, gay and straight. If I feel invisible as an Asian American, I feel like it even more as a bi person. There are still people who doubt we even exist (we do), and we are never talked about in polite society. I realize it’s partly because we complicate an already messy issue even further, but it’s disheartening how little visibility we have in 2016.
It’s strange because there are more out bis than there have been in any time in our history. There are several celebrities who are comfortable being out as bi. I haven’t had to explain to someone that, yes, it’s possible to attracted to both men and women in some time. In fact, that seems almost quaint to me now. I think because I’m more comfortable with it now, I feel less like I need to defend it. When I first came out, I would talk about it almost all the time. By the way, when I came out, I did it in a performance piece I wrote for a class I was taking when i was in my twenties. I can’t quite remember what it was, but it had something to do with Asian women. As I did the piece, the two teachers looked at each other and said, “Did she just come out?” I don’t do things halfway, and there’s no stifling the performance artist in me.
I have to say that I had a fairly easy time coming out. The only person who reacted negatively was my mother,*** which surprised me because she’s a psychologist. She had been very supportive of my cousin when he came out as gay, so I naively thought she would be OK with me being bi. Unfortunately, the fact that I’m her daughter meant she felt differently about me being queer. In addition, she couldn’t understand how I could be attracted to both men and women at the same time. She said, “You’ve always been so crazy about boys.” I paused and replied, “I still am. I’m just crazy about girls, too.” She didn’t like it, and she recently said something that meant she thought I was over it. I said something about it, and she said, “Oh, you still like girls?” in a surprised voice. She’s the only person in my life who’s had any problem with it, though. I realize I’m incredibly lucky in that manner, and I’m grateful that I’ve never had a real problem with it.
Still. I know others aren’t nearly as lucky, which is why National Coming Out Day is still important. If you’re queer in an area which is hostile towards you, you can feel as if you’re alone. Even with the internet. Even with the giant strides we’ve made in the past few years. When Anderson Cooper came out, my first reaction was, “Who didn’t know that?” But I quickly realized that not everyone did and that to have someone of his stature come out so eloquently matters. He’s a respected journalist who’s on national TV on a daily basis. If someone like him can be comfortable being gay, then maybe that bullied teen in Omaha, Nebraska can one day aspire to be like him, too. I go back and forth on the It Gets Better campaign because it doesn’t always get better, but I do remember being a lonely teenager, feeling as if life would always suck. One of the ray of lights in my life was an English teacher I had in high school who saw that I was sinking, and she threw me a lifeline. She allowed me to withdraw from an Advanced Writing Class with a horrible teacher and sit in her room and read instead. Technically, it was an independent study class, but in reality, it was me reading books I wanted to read and discussing them with her. I don’t know if I would have made it through high school without her.
I approve of queer-friendly teachers, ones who make it explicitly known that they are allies to queer kids. There have been much debate about safe spaces, but I think we can all agree that it can make life so much better for kids if they have a place where they can just be themselves. School is fucking hard, and kids are incredibly cruel. I can attest to both of these things. Anything that makes it easier is aces in my book.
The last thing I want to say is that I’m amazed at how far we’ve progressed as a society in attitude towards queer people in a fairly short amount of time. Just two or three years ago, I was saying to Ian that I didn’t think we’d have marriage equality in my lifetime. He disagreed, saying he thought it would happen within ten years. Neither of us expected how quickly it would become the law of the land. It’s because of decades of tireless work by activists who didn’t always get the credit they deserved, and in a more personal way, it’s because voting matters, damn it. When marriage equality became legal in Minnesota, all three branches of our government were Democratic. In addition, younger people have grown up knowing queer people, so they aren’t as squicked out about it as older people are. It’s enough to make me hope that one day, we queers won’t have to defend our sexuality to the population as a whole. One day.
*Except Halloween. I like Halloween. Except the giving out candy to kids part. That’s when I employ the turn out all the lights and pretend I’m not home strategy.
**We don’t really support that with our policies, but we like to give lip service to the notion.
***I never told my father. I didn’t think he needed to know.