Make You Feel Proud: Part Three

This week in the “Make You Feel Proud” series,  yours truly, BiRobot, tells a bit about why it’s important not just to be bi, but to say it:

Whenever someone asks me what I do, I tell them that I am a student and that I work at a church.  When they ask me what I do at the church, I may or may not give them a long, drawn out answer about my responsibilities, but two words always come out of my mouth: I teach.  Teaching has proven rewarding, allowing me to learn about the minds of the young people at the church, to see how amazing they are and the potential they hold, to help mold them into people who can take the information given in class and use it to think for themselves.  Every class, every lesson, every time we are together, I hope to make a difference in some way.  What scares me, or used to scare me, however, was being honest with them about myself.  It took my coworker to convince me that coming out to my kids could be worth the risk because, after all, it could do a lot of good for them, and it would do a lot of good for me.  Why put so much effort into hiding?  So, slowly but surely, I began to clue some of the kids in.  I made jokes.  I made underhanded comments.  Some of them I flat-out told.  Still, I never told them the whole story.  I would basically say that I liked girls and leave it at that.  It took a coworker to convince me to be honest about that.  It took a student to convince me to be specific.

I am bisexual.  I am proud of this, and I will correct you if you call me gay.  I am not gay.  I am not a lesbian.  I am bisexual.

I won’t say much about that student (for obvious reasons), but s/he knew about me, not because I said anything, but because it was on the internet.  It meant something.  To that one kid, it meant something that I was honest AND specific about who I was.  Something snapped in my mind after that happened, and I am so glad that it did.  That was one of the proudest days in recent memory for me.  Now, whenever I tell someone, I say I’m bi.  Not that I’m gay, not that I like girls, that I’m bi.  Even when I talk about girls for hours on end, I’m bi.  Even when I sleep under my Anyone But Me poster and look at my rainbow flag before watching The L Word, I’m bi.  These do not make me gay, just like commenting on Taylor Lautner and Eric Dane doesn’t make me straight.  I’m different, I’m the same, and I’m not going to stay in the closet about it.  It was bad enough being in the one.

Why is it important that Bisexuals be honest about who they are?  Well, people don’t believe we’re real.  We’re confused.  We’re straight, but we want to experiment (thanks, Katy Perry, for giving us this reputation with your stupid cherry chapstick.  I’m so mad about that that I’m not going to link it).  We’re on our way to being gay.  We’re not actually bi, we’re just greedy.  I want to punch people in the face.  I’m greedy?  I am single and I know a lot of single Bis.  Plus, coming out as bi means that both the gay and straight communities will not understand you and fear you will leave them for the other allegiance.  This is, of course, assuming that what you feel is real, which both sides tell you is not.  Bis are like a spooky ghost: they’re feared, but they also aren’t considered real.  Pardon my sentiment, but screw you.

At my core, I’m a fairly simple person.  I like sleep, I like food, fun makes me happy, work doesn’t make me happy (unless work is fun, and if that’s the case, it isn’t work).  I want to date and get married and have kids.  Why the hell would I (or anyone else) complicate my life by making up some sexual orientation that most people don’t understand?  Why would I make my life harder?  Oh, wait, I do that because that’s what my brain and body say to do.  I don’t have a choice.  Know what?  I don’t want one.  I have the potential to love people in a way others can’t.  I have the ability to look beyond the anatomy and fall for a person without getting too wrapped up in what’s in their pants or shirt.  That makes it worth dealing with all the complicated when I could just sit back in simplicity.  You wanna fight?  Bring it.

I remember a time when I was ashamed of who I was.  It was never a sense that I liked girls and therefore something was wrong with me; I knew something was wrong with me, and realizing that I was attracted to women was the solution.  What I felt bad about is the idea that of being so open and personal.  Everything I did, everything I knew in the world regarding relationships, revolved around a binary.  I could be in a relationship with a man and it would appear straight.  I could be in a relationship with a woman and it would appear gay.  To actually be truthful, I had to out myself.  My actions couldn’t do that for me.  I had to tell people I didn’t even know that well about myself or feel like a hypocrite.  Even worse, I couldn’t say the word.  It was just too much to wrap my head around.  Gay sounds happy and lesbian sounds like a possible disease, but bisexual just sounded whorish or clinical.  It had the word sex in it, for goodness’ sake.  I didn’t want to announce to everyone I knew that I was a sexual being, I just wanted to be me and maybe date a little.  I didn’t want the responsibility of a damned label, but I also didn’t want anyone to be confused about who I was, since I had worked so hard not to be confused anymore.  I stayed silent and felt embarrassed that I couldn’t own up, I told people and couldn’t even look them in the eye when I used the word, if I made it past the “bi” part.  It wasn’t dramatically painful or anything like that, but it was difficult.  Nobody wants to be misunderstood.

I’m not confused anymore.  I’m not ashamed anymore.  I like men and I like women, and one day I will meet someone and we will fall in love and we will get married.  I know who will marry us, because I’ve wanted the same person to officiate my wedding for several years now, and it doesn’t matter what the sex is of the person who wants to make me their wife.  It isn’t complicated, it isn’t wrong, and I’m not lying to myself (or anyone else, for that matter) for saying that I like both.  I do.  I like both sexes.  I am bisexual.  I am different from those who are gay and those who are straight.  My parents know that.  My boss knows that.  My student knows that, and I am grateful for that particular student for both being an amazing person (as all my students are) and for also being an inspiration.  I exist and I am proud of that, and if I teach you nothing else through my writing, I hope to teach you that you don’t have to fall into the norm, whatever that norm may be.  Your love and your life can be bigger and encompassing and still be real.  It can be both.