I'm still kind of debating whether to vote bi or pan. I fit the definition of pan, but in real life, I usually just say bi (to the handful of people that I'm out to) because it's easier than having to explain a new word to them (though it could be argued that that might be easier than addressing the misconceptions some of them already have about bisexuality).
I've always liked girls. I had a crush when I was in daycare. And a lot of the girls I've liked were pretty and feminine with long blonde hair, but I also always had a thing for tomboys. And I liked some "girl stuff"... when I could avoid being self-conscious about it. When McDonald's had Hot Wheels and Barbies, I got the Barbie so that my Pocahontas (doll? action figure? other McDonald's toy from when the movie came out) would have a friend. I still remember her now -- she was a traditional Mexican dancer (I forget the name of the dance, and would probably sound offensive if I tried to come up with the word) with a big white dress with roses all over it.
I thought Polly Pocket was the coolest thing ever (old-school Polly Pocket, where it was actually a whole little playset that actually fit in your pocket, not the lame Bratz-knockoff stuff that had that name last time I checked). A girl at my preschool had one, and I loved playing with it, and then one time McDonald's had them as toys and I got this Christmas-themed one where you turned the knob on the bottom and she spun around a path inside of a house (the whole thing was red and green and shaped like a wreath when it was closed), and then one day I got my own actual one, and it was so awesome. It opened up perpendicular-type, like a laptop, and there was a treehouse with a slide that she could go down and there was a monkey that could hang from a tree branch, and some other animals that I can't remember.
(FAKE EDIT:
Found it! I didn't remember it being pink, but that is definitely it. And they have it for sale, too...)
(FAKE EDIT 2:
Found the wreath one too. Christmas of '93 makes sense; I would have just turned 4 and been in preschool.)
Sometimes I was embarrassed about liking that stuff. I remember feeling conflicted. I remember one time (this was, if my memory is somewhat reliable, shortly before the one where I got the Mexican dancer Barbie; pretty certain they were all around the same time, anyway), they had Barbies and boy toys, and my mom said I could get a friend for Pocahontas if I wanted, and I went with the boy toy instead, and then later (possibly the next day), I remember standing at the top of the stairs and crying because I really did want a friend for Pocahontas.
One year, I was at summer camp. One of my shirts was purple and had a big glow-in-the-dark moon on it with geese flying in front of it, with “Vermont” underneath the moon. Some of the other kids decided that meant I was gay, because it’s purple and apparently Vermont has a reputation for being gay (it was a Christian camp, so the counselors didn’t really do anything about the bullying – you know, just in case I actually was gay). Purple has always been my favorite color, but after that week, I never wear the shirt again.
So later, I remember watching
Motocrossed on the Disney Channel (it came out in 2001, so this would be when I was around 12, and just starting non-homeschool). For those who don’t remember the movie, it’s about a girl who cuts her hair and pretends to be her brother so she can take his place in a motocross race when he gets injured (Mulan with dirt bikes, in other words (or
Twelfth Night, if you will (THAT WAS SLIGHTLY A PUN!)). I remember that my sister’s tub of Barbies was there by the sofa, as well as a police or firefighter action figure (actually it was basically a Ken doll with more muscles) that one of my younger brothers had. On a whim, I was absent-mindedly seeing which of Barbie’s clothes could fit on him (pretty much the only one was a pair of overalls, which actually fit him quite well). So my mom and I were watching the movie, and my mom made a comment, I think about how the girl in the movie kinda did look like a boy with her hair cut and everything, and I said “She looks good either way” and immediately after saying that I realized that I had just said it and that I was holding a doll and I looked at my mom and thought “oh crap she thinks I’m gay now” and I stopped talking and felt awkward.
Skip ahead to college. 2006. I continue having crushes on girls. Some have long hair. Some have short hair. I can also tell that I am very attracted to a guy on my dorm floor freshman year. One of the girls I had a crush on was the ex-girlfriend of that guy, interestingly enough.
In 2008, I see a documentary that gets me thinking about transgender people. My exact words (to myself) were “How is a sex change different from laser eye surgery?” The standard argument I’d heard was that people can’t really be transgender because God doesn’t make mistakes, and he wants you to be whatever sex you were born as. But I started wondering, what about birth defects? People can definitely be born in less than ideal forms. I think that was what started me rethinking everything.
In fall of 2009, I first started thinking of myself as possibly bi. And I’ll admit, Bill Kaulitz was a part of that (well, pictures of him – Bill himself did not come over to my house and make out with me or anything, sadly). I told a friend of mine I thought I might be bi, and he, being even more conservative than I was at the time (in retrospect, I find it kind of hard to believe someone was more conservative than 08/09 me), was like “Nah, I don’t think you are,” and me, being highly suggestible, was like “Well, maybe I’m wrong, I dunno.”
January of 2010. I meet this girl. I’m attracted to her (Incidentally, part of the reason I was attracted to her was that when I first met her she was wearing a baggy hoodie and a baseball cap and looked kind of androgynous, and actually reminded me of this guy I went to high school with and then one time we went on a college trip with some kids from another school and there was this girl that looked like him, and so anyway this girl kinda remound me of both of them, which is an interesting sidenote I think (note, I don’t want this to come off as “she looks like a guy”, not that there would be anything wrong with that I’m gonna shut up now)). We get along. We end up dating.
I decide to go with “I could be bi; I choose to be straight.” I extrapolate from my own experience and figure everyone is bi, or has the capability of being attracted to all manner of people, and it’s which ones we focus on that matters. I decide that the reason I have same-sex attractions is because I was only taught to guard against opposite-sex ones, and I was so focused on keeping those out that I didn’t notice the gays sneaking in the back.
However, I also express frustration (well, to myself; I don’t really bring it up to anyone else) with Christianity for the way that the ones saying “You’re not born that way, it’s a choice!” never actually act like it’s a choice – you can’t stand up in church or in Bible study and say “I’m struggling with homosexual temptations,” because then you're not just another fallen person dealing with your own personalized sins and temptations, like people who are tempted to lie and be angry and take revenge and cheat on their spouse in a heterosexual way – you're just gay. Those are normal temptations, but only homos have homosexual feelings. They're unnatural, and the only reason you'd feel temptations like that is because you chose to feel them. Or maybe you're possessed.
I’m starting to soften a bit around now. I call out the BS of treating the Sodom and Gomorrah story as an indictment of homosexuality (again, to myself and the couple of random people that may have stumbled across the blog I had back then (where I mostly complained about Obama and talked about how awesome I thought Glenn Beck was). I ask, if the angels had been female, would God have looked at the goings-on and thought to himself “Eh, it could be worse”? The rapey part was much more important than which specific parts were involved. Likewise, I say, our beef is with promiscuity and unfaithfulness and frivolity and impurity and lack of love, which show up in relationships of all sex-combinations.
And around this time, I also start thinking about the nature of love. Doing a word search for all the instances of the word “love” in the Bible, I quickly realize that there’s really no mention in the Bible of anything resembling what we know as romantic love today. I’m unsatisfied with the examples of marriage in the Bible – the patriarchal, property-based marriages all leave me wondering, “Isn’t it deeper than that?” I try to read up on philosophical definitions of love. I write in my journal, “Romance doesn’t have to mean sex. It’s about companionship. If all you’re after is the physical stimulation, you’ve got two hands.”
But then, I ask myself, where is the separation between love for friends and love for a significant other? Love is not sex. So what is it? Is it the promises you make to each other? Then again, all loving relationships carry some type of promises, and we are to “let our yes be yes and our no be no”, so we shouldn’t have hierarchies of promises, right?
And in the midst of this, I ask myself, why does it have to be separated by gender? It ought to be about the individual, not stereotypes, right? The only general thing you can say about the differences between the genders and be even mostly right is that they’ve got different parts, but if it’s not about the physical aspect, why does that have to matter? Isn’t that a shallow way of looking at it? I particularly start thinking about this because I’m moving away from
complementarianism because it’s been pretty obvious for a very long time that I don’t fit the traditional definition of a good Christian manly man, and I don’t really want to – but if
egalitarians are right, then how can heterosexuality be a moral necessity?
Around this time I’m starting to become aware of the existence of actual Christian arguments against the traditional interpretations of the clobber passages. I don’t know what to think. I start doing more research, and try to take a more neutral position for the time being.
Easter of 2010, my girlfriend’s brother comes out to her as gay. She is angry and scared and devastated that the big brother she looked up to all her life is a [bundle of sticks]. I have no idea what to say.
May of 2010. I graduate. We keep dating for almost a year afterward, Skypeing at least once a week (Incidentally, we never slept together, but for religious and personal reasons, not because of incompatible sexualities). We eventually break up when it becomes exceedingly clear that we work better as friends than lovers, and continue to stay in touch to this day.
From late 2009 through 2011, I start becoming more skeptical of conservatism – at first, I guess it was because I was convinced that Republicans were all a bunch of lib-rull RINOs and Glenn Beck was right about everything. Then I start thinking hey Glenn Beck is actually kind of crazy, but by then I had already burned the bridge back to conservatism (Also, part of it is that since at least 2008, I'd been reading
Fred Clark's years-long super-indepth dissection of the Left Behind books (he's been going for nine years, and just recently started the third book in the twelve-plus-four-book series), and his challenges to traditional conservative Christian Americanism were growing on me). So now that I’m out of college, I finally start turning liberal. Over the course of the 2012 GOP primary, I gradually want less and less to do with any of the candidates.
As I talk – and especially listen – to more people, I realize that the assumption I’d been making, that everyone is bi, is probably very wrong. Most people only experience attraction to one gender or the other. I read
this article, and it’s huge. Eventually, I find
Justin Lee. I’d heard and read pro-LGBT Christian arguments before, but Justin’s is the nail in the coffin.
It’s the end of July. The Chik-Fil-A thing is happening. I get invited to the anti-boycott event on Facebook. I decline, leaving a link to gaychristian.net in my comment. And I notice another comment below mine. It’s from my ex.
“I support Chick-Fil-A not opening on Sundays, and I can appreciate that the man has his values. But I cannot support throwing the weight of the corporate success which is Chick-Fil-A behind homophobia. I can't go along with the entire LGBTQ (I think those are the right letters?) package, but I'm the proud sister of a man who loves a man. If you're my brother's enemy, you're my enemy as well. That's a traditional family value for you.”
In the comments below, a debate rages on. Although I hesitate to call it a debate when one side was presenting well-reasoned arguments and the other mostly just saying “But Leviticus!!” Her brother joins in, and tells her she’s his hero. I am filled with the feels. Some very original guy says “I just thank GOD it was Adam and Eve and not Adam and Steve or they [sic] would be NO ME!!!!” and she reminds him that as long as we’re taking Adam and Eve (and, by extension, Cain, Abel, Seth, etc) as a literal account of the origins of humanity, we’re endorsing incest, because Cain wouldn’t have gotten his wife anywhere else.
So that’s my story so far. I’m bisexual, or also pansexual, and Christian, and I’m okay with that now, but I haven’t come out to anyone in real life yet except for my two best friends. I’m still a virgin. I haven’t dated any guys yet – the selection of single attractive gay/bi Christian guys in small towns in upstate New York is sparser than you might think. In fact, as far as I know, it’s only me.
I really like girls, and I also like a lot of guys, and I like feminine girls and sometimes some masculine guys, and I also really like androgyny, and there’s also trans* people (in both directions (and other, non-binary directions too)) that I’m attracted to, and at the end of the day, I want companionship with someone who complements me, filling in my weaknesses and accentuating my strengths, and me theirs, and someone to love Jesus and neighbors with, and probably someone to raise kids with and make a family and make a home, and I’m open to finding that love wherever it might show up.
And this whole post is as long as everything I’ve written for NaNoWriMo so far this month. I think I'm going to include this in my word count.
Sorry this post is so long (~10 pages double-spaced). I wasn't really expecting that. Kind of sorry. But also not really that sorry. I guess I needed to say it somewhere. I think I started writing it so I could decide whether to vote bi or pan, but I don't remember now. If you actually read the whole thing, congrats!
How about some more pictures.
Poll
