Textual Healing

A friend’s astute social media post reminded me today is National Coming Out Day. That prompted me to gather some of my own thoughts on the matter, which reflect my history and experience and no one else’s. Different people have their own distinct experiences and feelings about their own histories.

I feel compelled to start by sharing three things that have been floating in my head all day:

• I was visiting Adam’s Nest, a fantastic purveyor of political, sex-positive, LGBT, and queer apparel, art, and jewelry, a few days ago. I nearly always get into thought-provoking discussions with the owner, Adam Singer, a gay man I have a lot of affection for, who has been out for many decades, and he shared this desire with me: “At this point of my life, I’m trying to focus on what I want rather than what I’ve been taught I’m supposed to have.” 

• My friend Erin Kissane, a bisexual cisgender woman who is partnered with a man—and who, therefore, “has been coming out over and over and over since 1997 and I’m tired,” as she puts it—tweeted the following earlier today: “Instead of National Coming Out Day could we please do Stop Assuming Everyone Is Straight By Default day and it’s just every day?”

• One of my own frustrations with how we learn about and navigate sex and sexual identity, at least in this country, is that most of us are taught to identify based on what we’ve done and with whom—lived out experience—rather than who and what we desire.

I identify as bisexual, and use that term more or less synonymously with pansexual, now that ideas about gender identity have expanded beyond a binary-only conception. I’ve been aware of bisexuality as a big part of my sexual identity in a conscious way since I was around 11 or 12, though I think I had a subconscious awareness of it that lacked language for a number of years before that.

I have been partnered with my wife for a long time—together for over 22 years, living together for over 20, and married legally for over 10. My wife identifies as pansexual, as well as non-binary in terms of gender identity.

We can get into debates about what queer people, out or not, look and sound like, aesthetically, and as with everything else, the actuality is much more complex than the societal assumptions. In reality, being on any part of the LGBT spectrum—gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, trans, gender non-conforming, non-binary, gender queer, and all the rest—doesn’t look any one way anymore than any other forms of identity do. That said, the world has its own preconceived ideas about it. In practice, that means that my non-binary wife is almost always thought to be a lesbian—based on above-average height, short hair, a willowy body type, androgynous aesthetic choices, and the like. Myself, sometimes I femme it up, sometimes I don’t; my hair is never much shorter than shoulder length; I have a curvy, athletic body type; I’m of average height for a cisgender woman; and my default non-workplace aesthetic veers most often between sporty and utilitarian rock ‘n’ roll-ish. The end result for me? Unless my wife and I are in a situation in which we’re introduced together as a couple, I’m almost always presumed to be hetero until my couplehood status comes up. To most people, I don’t look gay anymore than I look Jewish. Whatever that means. Spoiler alert: I’m both.

If and when our marital status becomes clear, both my wife and I are presumed to be lesbians. We’re often called lesbians even by other LGBT folks who have known us for decades and know we’re both bisexual. We’ve also both been questioned by other people about how “sure” we are about it, even after reasserting “nope, still bisexual.” Sometimes I correct people, and come out, yet again, as bi, sometimes I don’t. The choice usually has to do with my energy level and mood on a given day.

Bisexuality has always had a tough rap and like any nuanced and fluid identity, it (along with pansexuality) probably always will. Our world and its labels tend to be more accepting of clear cut, definitive binary categories than of a larger spectrum of identities, many of which defy presumptions and expectations. That discomfort with fluidity makes coming out as bi or pan the same as and markedly different from other versions of coming out.

So: When and how did I come out?

Was it the time I got mistaken for a boy at age six, when I went through a very brief period of having short hair? My face reddened at the time, and I felt angry and ashamed, and I didn’t know why.

Was it between the ages of four and six, when I heard my mother worrying to a friend about whether I’d turn out to be a lesbian? I never told my mom I overheard her. My silent conclusion at the time, having no idea what a lesbian was, was based solely on my mother’s foreboding tone and clear distress: Whatever “lesbian” meant, it was to be avoided. Some part of me took that confused, rejecting message to heart for many years. The catalyst for concern, mind you, was not an excessive interest I had in girls as a kid, but rather that I was a sporty tomboy. I refused to wear dresses, and I wanted to play baseball and tennis and ride my bike, not sit around indoors playing with dolls. I often said I wanted to be a boy; for me, that had nothing to do with anatomy and everything to do with what boys were allowed and encouraged to do and what girls weren’t. The 1970s feminism of adults never made it to the playground of my youth. Every girl out there who preferred jeans and sneakers to dresses styled like doilies and glossy patent-leather shoes, who picked kickball with the boys over hopscotch or jump rope with the girls—and the choices on my childhood playgrounds were that cut and dry—was either considered a tomboy, a dyke-in-the-making, or as in my case, both. I didn’t meet other “girls like me,” athletic girls who wanted to stay outdoors, climb trees, swim, and play rough-and-tumble, active sports and games, until I went to sleepaway camp as a pre-teen and then not again until college. A college roommate of mine had almost exactly the same experience I did growing up as an athletic tomboy. She’s hetero and married to a cisgender man. As it happens, I’m bi, and I ended up in a queer marriage. It just didn’t turn out that way for any of the reasons my mother feared. Poor Mom.

Was it the first time I got called a faggot? (And yes, that was the word used, “dyke” not yet being part of the vernacular of most seven-year-olds in 1979 and 1980.)

Was it in my early adolescence when I had my first girl crushes?

Was it the first time I felt full-on carnal desire for another girl or woman, whether or not I acted on it?

Was it in college, when a man I didn’t know well—he was either gay or bi himself, I can’t recall which—asked me outright if I considered myself bi? The gravity of this brief episode now seems overblown and quaint, but in the moment, I was taken aback at his directness, even as I answered him without hesitation: yes. Both the question and the answer felt radical at the time. That may sound silly or benign in retrospect, but I assure younger readers, in 1992, no matter how many people may have been leading bisexual sex lives behind closed doors, the pressure to “pick a side,” definitively, at least where I went to college, was high. Claiming bisexuality was regarded either as an act of shame and self-hate—not having the nerve or courage to embrace being gay or lesbian and fully come out as such—or as being synonymous with promiscuity, because everyone knew that bisexual was a polite term for slutty people who wanted a label that gave them free license to hit on and bed everyone in sight. Or it was seen as both. During my college years, when so many of my LGBT peers did come out, bisexuality was disdained by the hetero world and the queer world in about equal measure. Back then, unless one was using it as a seduction tactic, no version of bi was complimentary or respected much less considered legitimate. The overall message was clear: Indecisive, cowardly sluts didn’t deserve a parade or a formal coming out celebration.

Was it the first time I kissed another girl or woman?

Was it the first time I had sex with another girl or woman?

Was it in grad school when a hetero cisgender male friend who should have known better tried to argue with me about my own sexuality? The friend had accepted me as bi without question when I came out to him when we first met (at which point I’d been with the person I’d eventually marry for only a few months). Two years later, he interrupted me when I corrected him after he referred to me as a lesbian, with, “But you’ve been Jen for two years now. How are you not a lesbian?”

Why does any of this matter?

Before I try to answer that last question, let’s play a few rounds of a game called Sexuality Arithmetic.

Most of my sexual experiences have been with men, and only a few women.

My wife’s experience has been the reverse of mine—mostly women, fewer men.

Who is more bisexual? Who is the bigger lesbian?

Wait. Don’t answer. I have more data that may change your calculations:

For all the people I’ve slept with and shared sexual experiences with, during my life, I’ve only truly loved and been in love with four of them. Two of those loves were hetero relationships, two have been queer. With one of the men, the feelings were mutual, but the sexual desires were never acted upon, and I never even kissed him. I assure you, I didn’t love or desire him any less than the other three people.

My wife’s first love and first experience with sex was with a serious, longtime boyfriend. If they had met one another later in life, they might have married each other.

As noted earlier, my wife and I have been together a long time. Seeing as we have been having sex with one another for 22 years and counting, if we’re counting the number of collective sexual experiences we’ve each had, rather than the number of partners and their genders, most of the sex, for both of us, has been queer sex, as it were.

Who is the lezziest lez or the sluttiest bi now?

If a bisexual falls in the woods, and no one hears them because they haven’t lived out a queer love yet, does their queerness, which has yet to make a sound, count?

Welcome to coming out. It’s a reflection of becoming, not a mathematical proof. Like sexuality itself, it’s a process, not a destination. And an ongoing, fluid one.

The fact is, like my friend Erin, who tweeted her moment of exasperation with one Official Day for coming out, I have been coming out, over and over and over, to other people more or less since my teens.

For many of those early years I was neither closeted nor out in the fullest senses because I didn’t have to be. As a youth I lived a hetero life that was true to some parts of my sexuality, and for a long time I hid my bisexuality in plain sight by default—because almost no one asked what I was or who I wanted, and the world I knew wasn’t an especially safe or friendly place to be proactive about claiming any LGBT identity, especially if I wasn’t being asked.

For much of my young adulthood, my queerness was visible by virtue of my relationship with my partner, and while I didn’t conceal my bisexuality, I didn’t always place it at the center. To this day, I’m not sure how much of that choice—to let people assume my queerness meant I was a lesbian—was fear and how much was an awareness of the limits on how much complexity the larger world could handle, process, and accept when it came to defining the details of queerness. It was probably a bit of both. My own fear was, of course, about What People Would Think—being subject to the inevitable bi stereotypes of self-loathing, cowardice, indecision, promiscuity, infidelity, non-monogamy, and more. My tendency to claim more generic queerness over bisexual specificity was at that time also grounded in a belief that bi visibility, because of its complexity, including all the myths and stereotypes about it, needed to take a backseat to queerness and queer rights, including the fight for marriage equality, in more generally understood terms. At a time when basic human rights were denied to queer people for living queer lives, it felt presumptuous, narcissistic even, for me to insist that my bisexuality be centered and given attention. What for? Why should that nuance be important to anyone else?

As I’ve gotten older, my feelings about coming out as bisexual have evolved and changed. As an older adult, I usually come out twice, over and over again: I live an open, visible queer life that I reveal to people I encounter, and my bisexuality hides in plain sight by default until I insist on making it visible by coming out as bi the second time (or third, or fourth, or fifth…). Interestingly, in adulthood, I suppose my coming out happens more often because many people seem to view sexuality as some sort of identity cement that solidifies with age rather than a mutable state of being with hues and moods that shift, sometimes radically, sometimes imperceptibly even to ourselves, along with all the rest of our aspects of self.

Even so, to this day, when I do come out, again, and again, and again, as bisexual, I can see from some people’s facial reactions the mental rifling and fidgeting and gymnastics that they go through, the persistent stereotypes that they flip through like playing cards and the questions that pass through their minds as they try to reconcile Who I Am with What They Thought I Was:

• Is she ashamed of being a lesbian? How sad. 

• Is she going to hit on me?

• Oh! So she sleeps with everyone? Oh! 

• I thought she’d been married to a woman for decades. How is she bisexual?

• Wait—does that mean she’s in an open relationship/marriage?

• What does that say about me? 

Rarely do people voice any of these questions and comments out loud, though occasionally someone will ask or say something outlandish out of their own sense of discomfort.

My answers to those unspoken questions, for the record, in order:

• I’m not a lesbian. I’m not ashamed about my sexuality. I’m a proud bisexual, and if I were a lesbian, I’d be proud of that, too. I’m out, I’ve been in a visible, queer partnership for decades, and I have nothing to prove to you or anyone else. Next question.

• You should be so lucky. But: Not likely. I like the entire gender spectrum, but I’m discerning in my tastes. 

• No, I don’t have sex with anyone and everyone. Also, who I have or haven’t gone to bed with is no one else’s business. 

• I’m married, not dead. Like most married people, I continue to find other people who aren’t my partner attractive, whether or not those feelings get acted upon. The gender of those people varies. I do not feel I need to alternate between having sex with people of different genders over any particular timeframe in order to prove my bisexual credibility to anyone else. That’s all.

• Bisexuality and pansexuality are not synonymous with open relationships and marriages. Also, the terms of my marriage are none of your business. 

• As for your sexuality, only you can answer questions you have about that. My sexuality is my own and has no bearing on how others define sexuality and sexual identity for themselves. It’s a beautiful rainbow. I wish you luck and richness on your own journey of self-discovery, however that may evolve.

In truth, I don’t care that most people who know I’m in a committed queer relationship assume I’m a lesbian. Lesbians are fabulous. At the same time I continue to wave my bisexual flag when I feel the inclination. Loudly and proudly. Some of it is because it’s as much a part of who I am as anything else, and visibility matters. The only way we evolve into a more equitable world in which more people understand that LGBT in all its beautiful forms can look like anyone and everyone, including me, is by me and other LGBT people continuing to be open and visible about who we are.

The reasons that matters goes back to something I shared at the outset of this piece. When my friend Adam Singer said he wants to live by paying more attention to what he wants, not what he’s been taught he’s supposed to have, he wasn’t talking about sexual identity or coming out. He was talking about self-fulfillment in a broader way. I keep coming back to Adam’s observation today because so much about self-love, self-acceptance, and being at peace with one’s own identity begins with an alignment and integration between our inner and outer selves—the multifaceted identities we each house inside and the public selves we present to others. The pursuit of that alignment and integration is why coming out remains powerful.

Whether it’s about sexuality or anything else, the more distant the outer selves we live out are from who we are inside, the harder it is to lead that life every day in an authentic way. Something about disavowing who we know ourselves to be, whether it’s through our outright denial and secrets and lies or by our silence, is damaging: It splinters and in some cases hobbles and fractures the spirit. Loud dissonances and conflicts between how we live outside and how we live inside, and all the fears and anxieties that accompany those contradictions, cause tremendous self-harm, pain, and suffering—because at heart, no matter how protective those disavowals may intend to be, they are a rejection of self. That’s no way for a soul to flourish, and no one should have to live that way, at least not in any long-term, permanent way. We can’t help the situations we’re born into and how hospitable they are or aren’t to accepting us for who we are. Some of us remain hidden in youth out of self-protection because the dangers and threats we fear for our own safety and survival are real. But once we become old enough to have our own agency and seek out places and communities of acceptance and safety, at that point, matching our outside life with our internal one—or at least being in pursuit of a perpetual coming out that’s true to our authentic self—is a choice we all make every day.

That’s why coming out matters, even and perhaps especially in 2020, as we’ve discovered that many of the battles for inclusion, diversity, and equity that we thought were over are in fact cyclical, lifelong, and multigenerational.

I choose to come out for my own ongoing sense of happiness and fulfillment and authenticity. I choose to come out today, tomorrow, and the day after, and again, and again, because I want to put my wants, in all their paradoxes, at the center of what I reveal and what the world sees, rather than everyone, including me, defaulting to a two-dimensional portrait that’s a poor approximation of me based on what others believe my wants and haves should look like. I do it for the child version of me, who might have been been spared a lot of shame and anxiety and might have felt less alone much earlier if I had had an adult like the one I am today to show me what life could look like. I do it for the kid in the New England suburbs who gets misgendered every day. I do it for the kid in rural western Pennsylvania who’s been outed at the mall or at the local fast food restaurant everyone gathers at after school. I do it for the kid who gets bullied in the gym locker room despite having no idea what sexual identity fits or doesn’t. I do it for the kids, and even the adults, who think they can’t change their minds tomorrow about who they believe they are today. I do it for those who feel their queerness will always remain unseen and misunderstood. I do it in the hopes that it might help even one other person find a path to becoming who they are.

Coming out, to me, is like the painting that accompanies this essay. The painter who created it has been painting similar seascapes and landscapes—boats, barns, and houses, at either sunrise or sunset—for many decades. This sounds like the resulting art could be boring or repetitive. It’s neither. The painting here, like so much of his work, looks simple at first glance. Most people might see an orange boat and buoy on a peaceful blue sea, against a placid blue sky. The longer one stares at it, however, the more the layers of color emerge. The sky is rich blue and also more than the rich blue it seems: It’s purple. It’s brown. It’s indigo. It’s violet. It’s turquoise. It’s teal. The sea water reflects the sky and the boat and all the emergent hues reveal themselves in waves and pulses. Gaze at the view for long enough, and the sky and the sea merge, and the horizon between the two becomes harder to place. Were it not for the boat, who would know which is sky and which is sea? The only thing we’d know for sure is that whatever this seascape is, it is itself, no more, no less, and we’d sense that part of its beauty lies in its ability and willingness to display its hues, its changes, its mercurial slivers of light and shadow play—whether or not we know and recognize what it is we are seeing. The seascape asks nothing of you, the viewer, except to look, and then look again.