Coming Out Day
by: Nancy Vedder-Shults on October 9th, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Sunday we’re celebrating “Coming Out Day” at First Unitarian in Madison, and I’ve been asked to tell my coming out story. Compared to many, mine is pretty painless. It’s a story of ignorance, invisibility, and ultimately of the ability to pass. You see, I’m a bisexual woman in a committed heterosexual relationship.
I grew up in a small town in Upstate New York. It was definitely in the “provinces.” So perhaps it’s not so surprising that although I’d heard of homosexuality, I had no idea until I reached college that female homosexuals existed. I’m not sure I encountered the word “lesbian” until I was in my twenties.
In 1965 as a freshman at Smith, I started to hear rumors that the woman who lived across the dorm hall from me was “different.” Nobody stated directly how she was unlike the rest of us. But according to the whispers, she was recruiting other girls as well. By the time I returned from my junior year abroad, she seemed to have succeeded in enlisting at least one other girl, and it became apparent to me that they were lovers. None of this seemed to affect me very much. In those days, I was pretty sure that I was heterosexual.
It’s unclear to me if I ever would have discovered my sexual attraction for women if it hadn’t been for the women’s movement. Lots of the women I hung out with in the late 1960s and 1970s were out lesbians. They were strong, wonderful women. Eventually I had to acknowledge that I was attracted to more than one of them on more than a platonic level.
When I finally came out as bisexual, it was 1976. In those years American culture told me that I should be straight. Otherwise I was perverted, sick, sinful, and lots of other perjoratives. But as a feminist, I could ignore that kind of finger pointing. My friends in the women’s movement defended any sexual identity, as long as it was just one, it seems. I had a different problem when I came out. The lesbians in my life started to tell me in no uncertain terms that continuing my long-term, committed relationship with my husband was a betrayal of the women’s movement, of them, and of lesbians in general. It made me feel like running back into the closet and slamming the door.
But I was lucky. I found a support group for bisexual women, and learned to love and accept myself as I was. And I also found Wicca, a religion that accepts “all acts of love and pleasure” as the rituals of the Goddess. Teaching in the Women’s Studies Program, my new sexual identity made it easier for me to encourage my bisexual, gay, and lesbian students to love themselves and come out when appropriate.
I’m proud to say that while raising my daughter Linnea in the 1980s and 1990s, I was also able to encourage her to become who she was. Whenever the question of her future partner came up, I said, ” When you get married or fall in love with a woman…” But Linnea grew up in different times and in a much more liberal environment than I did. She went to a progressive school. And she attended First Unitarian Society (FUS), which was and still is a “welcoming congregation.” This means that FUS went through a whole process to certify that we’re actively welcoming to LGBT people. A continuing part of this is our celebration of “Coming Out Day.”
When Linnea started dating girls in high school, it was when lesbianism was beginning to permeate the larger culture. Ellen Degeneres had just kissed another woman on TV. And Linnea and her friends created the Gay Straight Alliance at their school to support kids who were gay, lesbian, and bisexual.
Linnea’s personal experience of her sexuality today is much more fluid than anybody I know in my generation. She has dated both men and women and has been dating her girlfriend Sarah for just over eight years. She believes (and I think she’s right) that when a movement gains greater visibility, it tends to become less dogmatic. Among her queer peers, sexual fluidity like hers is not a problem. I think we can see this in the queer movement in general (an umbrella term for LGBTIQ folks). Recently we’ve added IQ to our abbreviation in both senses of the word. I think it’s smart (IQ) to be as inclusive as possible, so adding intersexed (I) and questioning (Q) people seems right.
Thank you for sharing this, Nancy. Your story reminds me how uncomfortable we get when we can’t put people in neat little categories. I think we are uncomfortable with bisexuality in particular because of its fluidity and because it feels impermanent. To many people, being bisexual implies instability (I’m sure you’ve heard the negative comments). In a culture that favors black and white, gray is something that needs to be fixed. Changed. Pick one! And stay there, so I know how to respond to you, so I am comfortable! I want to know what tribe you are in, and if you’re not in mine or if you refuse to declare, I will not completely accept you, as you are.
We need to get comfortable with gray. Fluidity is a good thing. It is not our labels or the boxes we fit into that define us, but the content of our hearts. And the judgments we make about each other are the most telling thing about us, not the other.
Thanks for your comments, Dawn. I agree with you that one of the major functions of categories is to create safety and comfort. I think we believe that categories will allow us to be in control. And being able to control (or at least have the illusion of control) keeps us safe. Categories keep people safely in their little boxes, so we know how to deal with them. Then we feel comfortable. Otherwise, with all that gray, many people feel that we might end up with chaos. But what they call chaos, we know to be fluidity, gray, pluralism, seeing people for who they are rather than judging a priori.
It is said by some that we are all bisexual at some level and it’s culture that keeps us in our single tracks, when it does. I don’t know if that’s true. It seems plausible, and my time in an all boys’ boarding school lent some credence to it, and prison stories do as well. In my twenties in my feminist left circles it was considered true and, a heterosexual, I did my best on one occasion to have sex with a man, but my heart wasn’t in it. I could have worked harder at it, admittedly, but the fact is, I like having about half the human race being people I would never have sexual interest in: it seems to simplify matters! Monogamy also simplifies things if it’s working well. Both free up some energy for other things — though I can see that for some people multiple relationships, or just the possibility or relating sexually to just about everyone, energizes them. At very least, taking the possible sexual interest out of some relationships makes them different. At best in my experience it enables some pretty deep connections without risk that the relationship will suddenly develop into dangerous territory where it’s likely to disrupt existing commitments: so it can confer a kind of freedom.
I have no problem with practicing polyamorists but I feel towards them rather like I do to model railway enthusiasts or marathon runners: puzzled as to how they find the time.
Dave, That’s exactly what my daughter told me when she reached the age of 15 — everyone’s bisexual. I replied that I thought most people were bisexual and that society skewed the distribution as a result of its heterosexist bias. But I also said that I knew women who were only attracted to other women, and her father had shown absolutely no interest in other men and seemed to be completely heterosexual. And, of course, that I had been actively bisexual as a younger woman.
I agree that monogamy simplifies things. But becoming a feminist in 1968-69, I was sure that marriage was a patriarchal institution (and, of course, it was much more patriarchal than today). So I believed that it was politically important to be non-monogamous. But over time I, like you, realized that it was too time-consuming to be in multiple intimate relationships.
I don’t think you’re assuming this, but most people hear bisexuality and they think non-monogamy. We bisexuals, like most others, are usually serially monogamous.