I just realized, at the close of the day, that today is National Coming Out Day. I had some vague notion months ago that I would write a long, detailed post about coming out etc etc . . . like I don’t already talk about my queerness at every available opening.
In case you missed it, I’m bisexual. Using queer as an inclusive umbrella identity works for me too.
I don’t even really have a coming-out moment. For myself, when I press on it, I remember staring at my best friend while we sat on her dorm room floor drinking our respective bottles of wine and wanting to kiss her like real bad. (If you’re invested, we didn’t, she’s marrying my other best friend next year, I’m officiating, life is a fucking wild rollercoaster and very beautiful.)
Coming out to my friends, I have no idea. I think I started using bisexual by senior year of college to describe my identity (because of said above epiphany . . . though it explained a lot about me chasing boys and girls alike around and trying to kiss them in elementary school).
I came out to my mom in a literal closet. Completely by accident. I slipped into my queerness without much internal drama or wrestling. It was something that I wasn’t paying attention to and then, when I did, it was there and I loved it about myself more than I’ve loved a lot of other parts of me. That part of me has never factored into my self-loathing. Thank god for being raised without any major internalized homophobia. But I threw out the term ‘bisexual’ while my mom and I were sorting clothes to donate, a few months after I got married, and I could tell it was more of a moment than I meant it to be. I honestly thought everyone just knew. Like it was obvious to the world once it was obvious to me. It never occurred to me at that time I’d have to actually tell my family about it in any intentional way.
My mom, in her thoughtful, loving way, revisited it the next day — which let me know, oops, I had accidentally dropped a bomb — and I found myself explaining bisexuality and what it meant to me. I have open-minded, accepting parents and there was never any doubt that they would love me. What a goddamn blessing and privilege. But I set about normalizing my sexuality when I sensed that initial confusion and hesitation in my typical aggressive fashion: by never letting anyone fucking forget it.
Some people wear their sexuality quietly. Their queerness quietly. And it’s just as much of a part of them but also not all of them just like no one’s sexuality is all of them. We are multitudes and layers and so much scrambled up that makes us perfectly human.
I guess, like most of myself, I just didn’t want to do this quiet-like. Although I remember now, I did, for a spell. I didn’t really get loud about my sexuality until after I divorced. My ex-husband knew I was bisexual but was quietly disproving or loudly disproving if we were in the midst of an argument. And I admit that it just didn’t seem to matter that much while I was in a marriage with a man. (To be clear, it still matters.)
But when I got divorced and had to separate all these parts of myself into who I was and who “we” were I found that my bisexual identity was important to me. Something that belonged to me wholly. And even though I don’t date right now and this part of myself doesn’t play out in any physical way in my day-to-day, it is still part of me. It shapes how I see the world and how I move through it.
So yeah, bi-fucking-pride baby. Happy National Coming Out Day.
With Love,
Natalie