On coming out when it’s no longer relevant: The chapter of my life story I usually leave out, in 3000 words or less or your money back.
October 11th is here, and I don’t want to have another year come and go with a painful, awkward need to name my feelings to friends and family. And, if you know me, you know with certainty that I can’t do that without rambling well past the point of reasonableness. I’ve always been terrible at concise writing. My apologies. It took me a while to live it, so it’ll take me a while to write it down.
What’s the point in coming out as bisexual once you’re already settled down, married, and monogamous? It’s not like I need some potential romantic partner to know my orientation for availability reasons. I’m a big monogamy enthusiast, and I’m spoken for, so that’s the end of it, right? But in a way, I think that’s part of why it’s important to come out. I’m invisible. But I think bisexuals are nearly always invisible, because people love to identify other people by who they’re with and not who they are. Bi and with a same-sex partner? You sure look gay. Opposite-sex partner? Nobody is going to assume you’re anything other than straight. And I think visibility is needed to effect change, but more than that, I think visibility is needed to effect understanding. And I want to be understood. Being understood has gotten more important to me as I’ve gotten older.
Doing this probably won’t do me many favors. From my limited experiences of the one-on-one sort with this so far, most people will give a healthy if less than empathetic, “who cares?” and move on. Where the damage lies is how it affects my connections with those either more conservative or more liberal than I am. The folks to the right of me will likely think unsavory things about all this, and the liberal folks will assume I’m doing too little too late and too much for attention. After all, it’s 2018 when the risks are minimal and there’s no clear compulsion to speak up. But I think that two-sided argument is part of where invisibility comes in. And as the old joke goes, “In ‘LGBT Community’ the ‘B’ is silent,” and I think a lot of folks prefer it that way. Aside from the potential disinterest and two shades of disappointment, I hope that this bit of self-disclosure will help me connect with the people somewhere in the middle of the left/right fight. After all, “somewhere in the middle” is where I’ve always operated best.
I had always planned on just dealing with not being perceived as I am rather than dealing with speaking up, and I successfully toed that line for a long time. But I’ve reached an age where the people around me are having children, and I’m starting to realize that many of them will be raised in the same kinds of environments that I was. I want to be visible in hopes that it might help even one of the next generation escape the repression I’ve suffered. I’m from a generation that was largely robbed of opportunities for gay role models by disease and societal backlash to it, and I don’t want to pay that forward to those who come after me. I also look around at the current political climate, and see that apparently actual Nazis are back. If they get to wave their freak flag surely I get to wave mine.
I was raised in a religious environment that wasn’t friendly towards LGBTQ+ people or thinking. Not all religious groups are like this, but I came from a conservative branch of Christianity. Nearly everything I had contact with throughout my childhood reinforced this, from my parents, to the churches we went to, to the religious school I attended for all thirteen years of k-12 education. Growing up, before I was even able to form the question of whether it was weird that I liked boys, my parents were right there with an answer to the question I hadn’t given words to yet: “People are sometimes attracted to all kinds of things, but it’s important to only be attracted to people of the opposite sex because that’s what God requires.”
When I was about 5 years old, a book was published by an Episcopal bishop that gained some minor notoriety among the religious set arguing that the Biblical Apostle Paul might have been gay. The author claimed this was the simplest explanation for a number of common threads about Paul--his self-hatred, his complicated writings about women, his never marrying, (“I wish that all men could be as I am”--heh, me too sometimes, Paul), and his private “thorn in his flesh” that has been a subject of much debate among religious scholars. (I think Paul’s vagueness was deliberate and part of his popularity among Christians. You can simply project what you’re dealing with onto him and assume he’s just like you.) My parents shared this radical viewpoint about Paul’s potential orientation with me when I was a child, and I immediately latched onto it. Paul could want men, but he couldn’t be sexually impure because how could he be Paul if he were. That didn’t condemn him to eternity in Hell, so there’s a chance yet for ol’ Winston. Perfect. If there was a pathway for Paul there was a pathway for me. I’d just make better choices and ignore my baser instincts. No one I have ever shared this view about Paul with ever agreed with me beyond a kind statement of “That’s very interesting.” I assume they all saw what they needed to see in Paul the same way I did, and they probably saw something less outside mainstream.
Of course, that didn’t keep me from hating myself or keeping what I was going through to myself and never speaking up. After all, my Biblical pretend gay role model never outed himself and clearly thrived on self-hatred. It turns out it’s not healthy to model your worldview on unhealthy people. And certainly it’s not healthy to latch on to imagined feelings of ancient people and think that if you can hate yourself enough maybe our father who art in heaven might not cast you into a literal lake of fire. I know that I was raised in a conservative branch of Christianity, so this may not feel relatable to those of you from outside the evangelical branches, but hear me out. The bible directly mentions LGBT issues about enough to fill probably 5-10 pages. The last Bible I bought before I gave up and switched to e-books clocked in at a little over 1000 pages. So figure around 1% at most. But here’s the thing: when it’s you, that 1% feels like the biggest issue in the entire world because that’s the 1% that you feel powerless to do anything about. Please take this into consideration when you’re raising your kids. One percent may be a rounding error for you if you don’t feel affected by it, but it may feel like life and death for the young person who is struggling with all of this. It did for me.
When I got to college I began to realize that there was more to sexuality than being virginal until married and then putting out just enough that your kids don’t look like the mailman. Sexuality is as much a part of the lens through which you view the world as it is the lens through which you view your body. Sex is a biological compulsion that is a core part of the human experience, but sexuality includes everything involved in that down to your feelings about it. You can abstain from sex, but you can’t abstain from sexuality. Sex can be something you do or not do, but sexuality is part of how you feel as much as it is what you feel. That’s easy to ignore when you feel how the dominant paradigm feels, but it’s a persistent dull ache that becomes occasionally acute when you’re not.
The conflict between sexuality and religion is something every religious teenager confronts. The Church treats it like a rite of passage. But I’m not sure it’s the same for everyone. If you’re a straight conservative Evangelical, maybe you think that God is judging you for impure thought or deed, but maybe you give yourself a “we all fall short” pass on any specific thought or deed. When you’re a Southern Evangelical who grew up around folks who were using the Bible to justify homophobia and you find yourself liking men more often than not, I can assure you that trying to rationalize yourself with a “pass” the same way a straight kid does alternates between working splendidly and feeling like it’s tearing chunks out of your side.
I often try to figure out how I feel about things by trying to explain my thoughts to my friends. When I explained my super-nuanced yet completely unexamined views on the subject freshman year in college, a friend casually helped me come to terms with my feelings. He simply pointed out with no malice that the people who have to consciously choose to be straight probably aren’t. He said there’s a word for people who aren’t exclusively attracted to men or women--bisexual. Of course, this wasn’t really news to me, but I’d been raised to think that everyone was bisexual and just of varying skill at denying it to make God happy. He didn’t think everyone was like that, but he could understand that if that’s how I was then my views were consistent with my limited anecdotal evidence. I suddenly realized I’d been a bit more sheltered than I had considered and that a lot of my assumptions didn’t hold water and needed to be reexamined. That was the day that I went from my religion struggling with my orientation to my orientation struggling with my religion. It was also when I went from thinking of “bisexual” as a vague generalization of the human condition that we all struggle with, and instead saw it as a useful label. I started using that label for myself, even if at first it was just in my own head.
That was one of two days where hearing a sentence or two overhauled my thinking. The other was around that same time. I was reading online, and read a statement that the problem with religion is that it encourages you to believe something just because you want to (Pasteur would call this “the greatest derangement of the mind”). On hearing this I had an immediate “Oh, no!” reaction because I realized that I had been so wrapped up in assuming that my religion was true because of course it was that I hadn’t really put the energy in to decide if this thing that I was allowing to hold my life hostage was something that I could actually justify to myself. After an excessive amount of study, reading, and pondering, I decided I wasn’t able to reject the null hypothesis, and shrugged off my faith. Many, many good people out there can successfully hold a commitment to the truth and their religions and see no conflict between them, but I cannot. This is not a judgement of them but a statement about me. Like Dirty Harry says, a man’s got to know his limitations.
But nothing is ever all at once, is it? It wasn’t for me. Over the next few years I went on a journey of self-discovery, reading all sorts of things and trying to figure out what I believed, what I felt, what I needed, who I was. Along the way, something magical happened. At the end of 2007, Ellen joined me on this journey, and from then on, through years of my angsty, whiny self-examination, she has been by my side. My better half, my wife, my friend, my lover, my confessor, my great exception. I wouldn’t be who I am without her; I’d be someone else. Probably somebody shitty. She has supported me throughout this process. When I say I’m a monogamy enthusiast, I think it’s worth contextualizing how easy it is to love someone so wonderful. In the way that plants require water, I’ve always required an awful lot of love and patience, and she’s always been there for me with it. We’ve been married for eight years, and if we get another eighty it won’t be enough.
It’s National Coming Out Day, which means Pride is this weekend in Atlanta. Pride is a concept I struggle with. I haven’t ever managed to feel pride about my orientation. I don’t know if I was born this way or if this developed in childhood, but I literally can’t remember a time before I liked both men and women after I was aware of liking anyone. Given that this is something that’s been with me my entire life, I can’t feel any more proud of my orientation than I can of my eye color. But here’s the thing: nobody’s ever tried to make me feel ashamed of my eye color. So I plan on enjoying ATL Pride this weekend. And maybe what I feel won’t be pride, but I’m damn sure done letting it be shame.
I thank you all for listening to my ramblings. For all of you who have heard all this before, thank you from the bottom of my heart for being there for me and loving and understanding me, often in spite of myself. For those of you who knew before I did, thank you for your patience and guiding me towards answers gently. And for those of you who are finding out today, I hope that this helps you know me a little more and it deepens our friendship. And I hope that you can remember that this is a part of who I am, but it’s not the only part. I still identify by the same labels as before--American, husband, scientist, lover, fighter, minutiae enthusiast, sports fan, etc. I hope that bringing you in on another label won’t come between us. If you feel like you want to discuss this over junk food or beverages, hit me up--You know where I’ll be this weekend.
-w
