Happy Pride, Everyone! Birmingham Pride is this weekend and Jules and I will be going up from London for three days of delight! I’m sure I’ll have something to say about it in due course, but in honour of Birmingham Pride and of Pride season in general, I wanted to post about my experience as a member of the LGBT+ community. Happy Pride!
There is a lot of duality in bisexuality, to the point where it resists categorization. But I thought the best way to represent my experience with bisexuality and the new perspectives it opened up for me was to create two posts, two halves of the same whole, two expressions that are both part of something and a thing unto itself. This is the first.
I discovered JJ in a diversity workshop during orientation week, and I do say “discovered,” because JJ was a rare gem. Jemima Jones, a first-generation university student who had worlds of compassion for her friends and worlds of contempt for her enemies, a woman who, let’s be honest, hugged with her boobs as well as her arms and who didn’t change her weave until it had gone stiff and course death because she was hoping to make the money stretch as far as possible. Her quick wit and sharp tongue had carried her down from Oklahoma to this fancy private university in east Texas, and right off the bat she shared her opinion on any and everything without having to be asked, though she spoke with palms-up hand movements that seemed to welcome debate and intrigue. I would learn to read her face well, from the sparkle of mischief to the sparks of pain, both of which seemed to plague her in equal measure.
Our emotional trauma ran deep like jagged chasms within us, our scars making us like twins.
Her sharp and soft dual nature is what initially drew me to her, though I didn’t know it at first. There was the comfort of home in it, something familiar hidden within something utterly foreign. In the workshop we were the two most outspoken ones, making eye contact across the room at each other as we rose to each discussion challenge. We had the most to say. We were the most willing to air our trauma in front of strangers. And our emotional trauma ran deep like jagged chasms within us, our scars making us like twins.
My university had a residential college system, which is to say that instead of dormitories, each residence was its own community with a name, a history, and a collection of students, male and female, freshman to senior, of all majors and disciplines and backgrounds. They told us it was like Hogwarts, that we were sorted into our colleges when we were accepted into the university and we remained in those colleges until we left it. JJ and I soon discovered that we were both new members of Martell College, and soon we were trading laughs and opinions around the wide wooden tables of the college dining room. Pretty soon I was often visiting her in suite’s common room, commiserating over our designated ailments, the gifts of our respective chronic conditions. I took care of her and she took care of me. A network of friends grew up around us, pairs and small groups of girls who had formed tentative friendship during the games and seminars of orientation, until there were nine of us, our Martell Family, with Jemima and I as the glue.
I believe that rather than influencing each other, we needed each other to become ourselves and something within us knew that.
That first year and on into our second, we were a close-knit sisterhood, interlinked and utterly irreverent. Some of us, myself included, were losing our religion. All of us, especially JJ, were steadfast in our determination to go against the grain. I got swept up in JJ’s wave, tasting the thrill of daring for the first time, starting to ask my questions, dancing with damnation. A Religious Studies major, JJ talked about religion with a detached interest that awed me. She came along with me to Christian meetups during that first year and tolerated their evangelics with a patience that only came out when she was utterly in her element, explaining to eager young zealots, with the logic of a philosopher, why she could not be roped in by Bible verses and promises because she did not believe in the truth of the Bible in the first place. Asking “why” was incredibly possible with her, even easy, even encouraged, and I hardly noticed at first as I slipped from my shell and shifted my point of view.
I brought JJ home for Thanksgiving that first year, knowing I was doing both her and me a favour, though I had no idea how my parents would be able to get along with her. She announced immediately, with her usual frankness, just who and what she was, and I fretted that if the Wiccan identity didn’t slay my parents where they stood, then the fact that she was bisexual certainly would. Fortunately for me though, neither was true. Though I knew they took issue, they didn’t show it, and JJ was welcome in their home. My mother loved her instantly and continued to until the day of our graduation; JJ had a way of endearing adults to her.
She was my first bisexual friend. She was my first LGBT anything friend other than the gay boy I’d known at Bible camp, another one destined to outgrow his surroundings. Before we graduated, three more of the Martell Family would come out as bi or pansexual, discovering themselves in the way university experiences can so encourage you to do. I believe that rather than influencing each other as some might believe, we attracted each other without even knowing it, that we needed each other to become ourselves and something within us knew that. More than that, it was our underlying ideologies, the way we approached the world, that bonded us; we were women who broke out of bounds, women with dirty mouths and strong hearts and a general disinterest in things like team spirit or sports or organized activity. We were more motivated by the conversations we had with associate professors around dinner tables, the conversations we had amongst ourselves around midnight, lounging in common rooms or slipping away of parties or watching Once Upon a Time every Monday night. So by the time Lucy came along, became my suitemate and joined the Family and awakened the bi woman in me, my own view of myself was an ever-evolving creature of her own, no longer afraid of who might lie beneath my skin.
Discovering my own bisexuality changed my perspective on women and on men and on where I fell between them.
In many ways coming out as bisexual transformed me, even beyond the fact that it made me who I felt I had always been. And I had always been her. I had for years looked too long at women, watched the sloped waist of a stranger, lingered on the long line of a neck or thigh, took close notice of the shape of the lip, the length of the eyelashes, the bend of the fingers, the hang of the frame beneath the clothes. I had for years compared female bodies to one another and not just just to my own. I have been an artist and crafter since I was a child, and perhaps that masked this other half of me that was always there. I was a writer first, a drawer second, a seamstress third, all hobbies that interacted with the body in some form. But, curiously, my focus was only ever women. I described them in close detail; I drew them with determination; I cast my designs over their curves. Recognizing my own bisexuality was like recognizing a part of myself, allowing her to admit to herself that she was more than just aesthetic appreciation.
But the transformation happened in my mind. Discovering my own bisexuality changed my perspective on people in general and on the structure and nature of relationships by changing my perspective on women and thus on men and, ultimately on where I fell between them.
I started to see women as more than something I was; I saw them as something I wanted.
When I started to see women romantically, sexually, I saw them as more than familiars to what I was. I saw them as something I wanted. And wanting them introduced a new dichotomy, because wanting them made me think and feel things that butted against my own identity as a woman, as a feminist. When I stood opposite men, it was easy to judge them, to chastise them for their treatment of women, to criticize them for behaviors that belittled and sometimes threatened us. Cat-calling was one behavior in particular I felt strongly about. Cat-calling was very usual in my city, especially in the evenings and at nights in downtown, especially for a black woman like me, because it was mostly the black men who had the daring to throw comments at a stranger. Everywhere I go black men talk to me. Here, too, in London I’ll walk down the sidewalk in my headphones and I notice them instantly, loitering in a doorway, lingering near a shop window, striding towards the same tube station; I notice them before they open their mouths and say “Hey there burgundy hair,” “Hey sister, how are you?” I’m trained to spot them. Because in my old city, on the evening streets of downtown, they truly frightened me. They yelled when they didn’t get a response. They followed me if they were able. They had nothing to lose.
“That’s why they do it,” a former flame once tried to explain to me. He said it’s the anonymity. It’s the lack of repercussions. Sometimes it’s this overwhelming pull of attraction that demands to be satiated, a need to make contact in whatever way possible. I found it hard to accept these answers. How could they not know that they’re terrifying me? Why would they think they’d get a favorable response? What do they expect out of that interaction? Why?? “Why not?” he answered sagely, trying to explain the urge that, to me, felt unexplainable. Why not, when you have nothing to lose?
Selena, a woman I loved in my last days of living stateside, captured the feeling of being cat-called. She said she used it sometimes to try and explain to men what they were doing to us, how they made us feel. “Imagine a bear,” she said, holding her arms like claws, “standing a few feet away, looking at you and licking its lips. That’s what it feels like.” She’d hit on it exactly. Like prey; being cat-called made me feel like prey.
But one night, one marvelous night out when my mouth was dry and my veins were buzzing and my body was bobbing to the eternal beat of its own music, Ozzy and some friends and I spilled from a club after two AM looking to find a place that was still open. I had been surveying the straight-white-female clubbing population all night with a vain hope of making even one small conquest. Still vaguely annoyed at being snubbed, I surveyed the scatter of bodies leaving another club we’d found and spotted a dark-haired woman with hips like half moons teetering on a pair of black stiletto heels, and my eyes were fixed. A new urge swelled inside me, something like longing, but faceless, something that yearned to reach out and touch, to make connection in any way possible, and the attempt was on the tip of my tongue.
I was both the pursuer and the pursued. I was the thirsty feminist, my natures ever at odds with one another.
Women are friends, not food. I remembered myself, the body I was in, the fears it had of the grizzlies that came calling in the night, and I shrank back from my open window. Impressions of them were there in my mind, all the men who had made me feel like prey, and I cowered for a moment at an internal shame. The feeling faded that night, but it returned to linger long afterward, along with the knowledge that something had changed in my mind, something that translated a concept that had seemed so incomprehensible to me before.
That was the beginning of many conversations with men about women, of many trading of opinions, of many questions and many answers swapped and considered. I was both the desirer and the desired, the pursuer and the pursued. I ogled at women and safeguarded them in my mind. I was the thirsty feminist, my natures ever at odds with one another. This is what it is to be a woman who loves women. This is what it is to be both predator and prey.
As a bi women, I felt I could more easily grasp how men who wanted women thought, and as a woman who had grown up as straight, I also understood how women who wanted men thought. I was on both sides of the curtain. I felt a sage sort of sanity in considering both sides, confident it would make me better at wooing either sex, confident it would make me more understanding of the worries and blunders of either. Bisexuality became, to me, a sort of balance. Not only that, but it made me a better councilor. As a passionate soul who loved love, I had long been a welcome consultant on my friends’ romances. They had dubbed me their ‘Aphrodite’ in college, and I accepted the title with pride. As a bi woman, I felt my powers increased as well as my potential for patience, understanding, and intimacy.
But in being two things at once, how could I have absolution?
But even as I gained a more balanced view of myself, I also felt my identity slip in a new way. It didn’t happen for a long while; I went years feeling like my life as a bi woman was richer, more colourful, that it was fuller, that it was more. I felt my options open up as well as my understanding. But I also began to feel the lack of absolution. In being two things at once, I could hardly be one thing. I could have half of two worlds, but felt that must mean that I wasn’t getting the whole of either.
Interracial friends of mine have expressed a similar sentiment, and I really began to understand them in a way I had only partially grasped before. I have never been a stranger to dichotomy. Growing up I had one Jamaican parent and one Trini one, one protestant parent and one catholic one, one unforgiving parent and one over-forgiving one. I was both immigrant and native in the land of my birth, both nerd and glamour girl on campus, both artist and scientist, and, more recently, both Christian and agnostic. But never before had I felt like such an in-betweener as I have as a bi woman.
I’ll come back to this in Part 2. It’s part of a bigger identity dance I’ve been trying to tease out in my journey, and I both love and hate the complexity of it. I both love and hate the complexity of almost everything. For now, this is where we’ll pause on my reflections on bisexuality.
This has been my story, but it’s merely my experience in a wider discussion of what bisexuality is and what it looks like. My bisexuality has always been linked to my polyamorous lifestyle, mainly because they both officially began in my life around the same time. But more than that, it sits at the core of who I am now, the choices I make, the life I live.
As always, your positive reflections are welcome, especially if they’re questions!
Glossary:
Bisexuality: romantic attraction, sexual attraction, or sexual behavior toward both males and females, or to more than one sex or gender
Pansexuality: (or omnisexuality) is the sexual, romantic or emotional attraction towards people regardless of their sex or gender identity. Pansexual people may refer to themselves as gender-blind, asserting that gender and sex are not determining factors in their romantic or sexual attraction to others
Cat-calling: (this one courtesy of Urban dictionary) to whistle or yell something sexually suggestive to a stranger, usually in passing. Often this is used by sexually frustrated males as a way of getting attention from females. It is not a recommended method of flattering someone
Google also defines street harassment as: a form of harassment, primarily sexual harassment that consists of unwanted comments, gestures, honking, wolf-whistlings, catcalling, exposure, following, persistent sexual advances, and touching by strangers in public areas such as streets, shopping malls, and public transportation
**Please do not cat-call anyone, male/female to male/female. It is not pleasant for the recipient and is very unlikely to receive a positive response. Or, indeed, any response at all. Don’t be unkind to strangers; there is no reason to disrespect someone you don’t know with unwanted advances.**
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