Let’s Get One Thing Straight

I am thirteen years old, on a youth group retreat that my parents have made me go on. We’re at a new church, so I don’t know any of the girls I am with. We stop at a Wendy’s on the way to our cabins up north, and I sit with them, an awkward, patchy duckling amidst a pack of graceful swans. There’s one girl that’s older—only by a year or so, but at that age, that made a world of difference. She’s round faced, wavy hair hanging around her face in a curtain, not quick to laugh at the other so-so jokes being passed around, and when I offer up one of my own, the fact that she laughs feels like an accomplishment. She says she’s a musician, and I light up. I try to list off the coolest artists I listen to, but unfortunately, I haven’t grown past my Disney Channel phase yet. I feel like an idiot when she tells me Hilary Duff isn’t really “alternative,” but she doesn’t seem to shun me either.

I see her around the campsite the next few days. She plays guitar on a bench near our bunks, and I keep the windows open while I lay in bed, listening to her strum. I try to look impressive, too, taking my notebook outside and sitting in the crunchy grass, writing words that I think are deep and meaningful, not merely the desperate scrawling of a teenager with a two ton chip on her shoulder. As write, I look up to see if she notices me writing away like I notice her playing. Even if she does notice me, I never catch her watching.

The question hits me, as I sit out under the cloudy October sky: why do I care so much? She’s just one girl. There are a dozen other girls around here that I could care less about—twenty years later, I won’t remember their names or faces. But this girl will stick. And I don’t know why.

As we say our goodbyes at the end of the weekend and I see her walk away, guitar strapped to her back, I’ve already determine that that is a question for Future Me to answer.

*****

The thought that I might not be perfectly straight was one that didn’t come to me as naturally as it would others. Often, in queer stories, you hear the person knew as early as five years old. They can trace back their love of Disney princesses to their desires to marry them, not just emulate them, or perhaps it was vice versa. For me, I have very few instances of this. I had always thought that I liked boys, because…well, I have always liked boys. As a prepubescent teen, I plastered my walls with cut outs from magazines of the latest teen heartthrobs, dreamed of marrying my favorite boy band member, all of the normal “boy crazy” tropes you could list. There was no indication that I was anything but straight, even as I went into high school and college. If I liked boys, that was the end of that, right?

Of course, I knew what bisexuality was. I had a small percentage of friends who were gay, though they were always the focus of constant ridicule in our school. The western part of Michigan is often referred to as the “bible belt” of the state, so many of my peers were not very friendly to openly gay classmates. But at least “gay” was a graspable concept—the other option on the wedding reception menu. If you didn’t get the chicken, you got the fish. End of story. Being bisexual, however, was just puzzling. The bi girls were only doing it to be edgy or because they wanted their fathers to pay attention to them. Bi guys were just claiming bi because they didn’t want to be the new target for homophobic harassment. Gay wasn’t good, of course, but bi was just laughable. It was fake, almost like dyeing your hair pink. It was just something you did to seem unique.

I wish this was just high school stuff, of course, but it wasn’t. I have a clear recollection of huddling in my college theatre’s green room, the lead in our fall musical haughtily declaring that another one of our castmates (not present during this conversation) was obviously gay, not bisexual like he was claiming to be. “Bi is just a stop on the way to Gay Town, after all,” he said.

Religion was another factor entirely. I was raised in a Christian household, and while my parents were never ones to preach fire and brimstone, there were still certain things that were silently frowned upon. Sexuality, in general, wasn’t highly regarded, in the first place. When I got my first period, my mother took me on a weekend trip to a hotel, where she talked to me about the dangers of having sex before marriage, how “tainted” you would be if you lost your virginity to someone other than your husband. We put bullion cubes in a glass of water, a signifier that once you had sex, your purity was then clouded and muddy, unable to be cleaned again. The options presented to me were have sex with a man when you’re married, or put whatever you decided was so important to do on your dirty laundry list and expect to answer for it when you died. I stuck with that mentality longer than I should have. I couldn’t even begin to think about what I would be doing with a man later on in my life, much less anyone else.

The thought did creep up on me when I ended up not being really attracted to my first high school boyfriends. They were both merely relationships of convenience, opportunities to say I wasn’t single through my entire high school career. The first was just as scared as I was of physical intimacy. He was too scared to hold my hand, let alone anything else. The second was the exact opposite, hands on me as soon as I would let him. He ended up dumping me because it just wasn’t “working,” but I knew it was because I told him I didn’t feel comfortable making out with him. It was a terrifying thought, even when I found men at college I longed for from afar. Maybe I was just kidding myself. Perhaps the idea of being straight was okay, but when it actually came to practice, maybe I liked women.

That is, until I met my husband.

When you have your first serious relationship, that is when all the doors to self-discovery start to open. The two in high school lasted a few months, collectively. But as soon as I started dating my husband, I knew it was for the long haul. He made me laugh, left little notes outside my dorm when I was stressed, shared an umbrella with me as we walked through the rain, stayed up until three in the morning with me in the student center, talking about absolutely nothing and everything at the same time. It was love. And it still is.

Of course, when it’s your first major relationship, along with romance comes the physical. We were both from Christian households so “waiting” was always the option we would choose. That didn’t mean just about everything else wasn’t on the table. The more we started exploring that part of our relationship together, the more my thoughts would wander. Perhaps it would be to other men, but that’s normal enough, right? But when they would wander to women, that’s when the panic set in. We were already engaged when I really had the conversation with myself: I think some women are attractive. I would watch my friends drunkenly play spin the bottle at house parties, kissing whoever regardless of gender, and I found myself thinking, “Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”

But I couldn’t even approach that. Of course not. Why did it even matter? I loved someone—a man. There was no doubt my feelings for him were real. Besides, didn’t every straight woman have those feelings at some point? Women are beautiful. It isn’t gay to think that. I fed myself lie after lie, enough so that I believed them. When I walked down the aisle at my wedding, I believed myself perfectly straight. When my husband and I destroyed all the barriers of our physical relationship, it was invigorating and satisfying. That was proof enough, wasn’t it?

Of course, it wasn’t. At my retail jobs, a gorgeous woman would walk in the door, and I would think to myself, “If I liked women, that would be the kind of woman I’d date.” When we would watch a movie, I would sit in uncomfortable silence during scenes with women being intimate with other women. Everyone would recommend shows like Orange is the New Black to me, and I would say it was on my watch list, but I had no intention of watching it, knowing how many lesbian relationships there were on that show. Every time the thought would creep in, I’d hate myself. If I didn’t watch out, I was going to end up being one of those women that left their husband devastated and for another woman. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t want my family to talk. I didn’t want to go to Hell. I had no intention of leaving my husband. We were incredibly happy together, and despite some rough experiences, we only came out of them with a stronger relationship. So why was I so scared of this?

My sister came out to me in the car one day as we went to pick up food for our significant others. She was bisexual, she said, and I said that was great, and that was about the extent of the conversation. Of course, the rest of our family made it a much bigger deal than I did. My mother cried, and to this day, my dad refuses to acknowledge it. My sister ended up marrying a man, anyway. To them, it didn’t matter. They just treat it as if it’s some dirty little secret she has, not that it’s a vital part of her identity. Not a great incentive to express my thoughts about my own fluid sexuality, to be honest.

My sister coming out and the education of the internet were what really helped, however. She was a bi woman in a loving relationship with a man. As the years went on, so many of my friends also came out as queer, their spouses and partners all supportive of them. The online communities I was part of were populated with queer people of all orientations and walks of life, and I saw them flourish in their identities, despite how well or poor the people outside their online life reacted. This and the final disillusion of my Christian faith were the final ingredients needed for my conclusion. I was queer. At first, I thought bisexual. These days, I lean more toward pansexual as a specific label, but queer will do just fine. This identity was not something to be ashamed of and if the people in my life couldn’t accept it, so it goes.

Coming out to my husband was the one I was scared of the most. I took a page from my sister’s book, breaking it to him during a car ride to get food. He was surprised, but so supportive. Even now, I talk to him about the ongoing struggle of being queer in my particular lived experience, and he listens and offers his words of wisdom, as much as he can for a straight man. My friends have all been nothing but supportive, and of course, the people I meet online are wonderful confidants to reach out to in times of insecurity.

I wish I could say that finally opening that part of my life alleviated all of my anxieties around my identity. It hasn’t. My family is still unaware. I have joked for a long time that unless I somehow end up single again and start dating a woman, it’s really none of their business what I identify as. Still, there is part of me that is sad that I can’t share this with them. I know, though, it will only be frustrating—only another thing my mother thinks she’s done wrong, another aspect of life I can’t talk openly about with my father. Part of me wonders if I’m causing myself more or less grief by keeping this to myself. Part of me wonders if they will find this and confront me about it. At this point, though, let them find out. The way they have handled my sister, the microaggressions I see every day from them toward queer people—what evidence have I been given that coming out to them will cause me less suffering than keeping it to myself? I would never want this to be a fact to pity me over, of course. One day, they will know. And whatever way they find out and however they will react, I will need to make peace with it, just as all the queer people before me.

However strange and tangled the journey has been, however long it took me, I’m happy with where I am today. I know myself and more importantly, have accepted myself as not some sinful creature just trying to pass as something demure, but a human being that deals in variables, not absolutes. There are some who may be on either far end of the spectrum, of course, but I am not strange or maladapted or “other.” I have a loving relationship, one where I can be open and honest about every aspect of myself. All in all, that’s what thirteen year old me wanted—someone who cared for her, loved her. Whatever gender they happen to be is of no consequence.

And that’s what we all want in the end, isn’t it?

*****

I am twenty-seven years old, at my first pride celebration. The streets are packed with people of every shade, orientation, life experience I could imagine. My sister waves a rainbow flag in front of her face, perfectly positioned so as to not hide her blue, purple, and pink eyeshadow. I walk with my husband through the crowd, my pink top and blue leggings clinging to me as the sun gets higher in the sky. The yellow hat was probably too much for the weather, but I don’t mind. We gather together to watch drag queens perform on stage, throwing their discarded sashes and gowns into the crowd as they dance to Gloria Gaynor.

Everyone here has their community—their friends, lovers, secret keepers, family. They’re right where they need to be, with who they need to be with.

As I watch them celebrate and do some celebrating of my own, Present Me answers, “Because you think she’s beautiful.”