#i was in a bible study group and gay relationships came up and i kinda wanted to say 'well i'm bi and...' but i couldnt
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moonmoonthecrabking · 2 years ago
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the shame of being intentionally closeted is that sometimes someone says homophobic and you just want to go "in FACT here is my lived experience on the matter fuck you" but you CAN'T bc you're closeted for REASONS and you just have to be like "mhm sure definitely not invalidating my experiences here no sir"
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flying-elliska · 5 years ago
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Hii Ellie. This is kind of a personal question and it’s totally okay if you don’t answer it. How did you come to terms with your sexuality? How or when did you know you were bi? I know that it’s not about putting tags on people or anything like that, it’s just that I’ve kind of been struggling with it and it’d be nice to read your experience if you want to share it
Ooooh anon do you have three hours ? lol. Of course I want to talk about it if it can help anyone even a little. 
The tl;dr is : in stages, I struggled a lot, and bi characters were super important to me. 
So I think as a kid/teen I always had this vague notion that ladies were very pretty, but I was not a lesbian bc I liked boys too much, and besides I had these horrible ideas in my mind about queerness being immature and yucky, it was bad. I think I pretty much did have crushes on several of my girl friends but I just didn’t understand that’s what it was, just super intense friendship and being jealous when they got boyfriends hmmmm. Also my ‘fashion folder’ was full of pics of Keira Knightley in a tank top, cause that’s the height of fashion, am I right. I also wrote a letter to a girl I met at camp telling her her voice was so soft and eyes were beautiful and full of stars...do you wanna be friends ? Lol I was so obvious I swear, but it’s funnier in hindsight. 
Then when I was 18 I met this older girl in my circle of friends who was bisexual and I thought it was really cool, but I didn’t really connect the dots. I am ashamed to say, I thought she was saying that to give herself a vibe. 
Then when I was 19 i bingewatched the series Torchwood  ( a Doctor Who spinoff) and it felt like an absolute revelation. Jack Harkness, the MC, is this incredible badass rogue time travelling adventurer from the future who charms women and men left and right without any issue about it. (I think he’s...omnisexual or something ?) But this is the first time I saw the possibility of being attracted to multiple genders as something that’s actually valid. Seems silly now but this was almost 10 yrs ago, lol. It was the dark ages in terms of queer rep back then. And it’s such an integral part of Jack’s character, and he’s just so cool and it really struck a chord with me, this idea that in the future anyone can love whoever they want. There was the idea of a society that is founded on those principles, and well, I am very political in nature I guess, and i was like. yes. i can see it now. but it remained theorethical. 
Then the year after that, Erasmus exchange and I meet this girl. Like, it was bam! in your face, I fell head over heels. Now, tbh, I don’t get attracted to people all that often, but when it came to her it was absolutely indeniable. Now, she was already with someone else, so we remained just friends and it did suck a little, but I’m not sad, because it taught me a lot about myself (and she was just such a cool person in general I’m glad I met her). I just couldn’t get past it, yeah she was cool and stuff but I didn’t just want to be her friend, I was attracted to her, I daydreamed about being in a couple with her, doing romantic stuff, etc. And it was super validating to learn she was also bi a little later down the line (she was such goals in general, god.) So then after that I was like...um am I a lesbian ? Like I do have a lot of issues with men. And so I spent a lot of time having this wishy washy thing in my head.  Also that year, I was in Amsterdam taking all those gender studies classes. And it opened up my mind in a radical way - learning about queer history, the fact that sexualities are socially constructed, feminism, activism, etc etc....it allowed me to let go of a lot of my crappy internalized prejudices. I also wrote an essay on burlesque with in field research because i ‘liked the costumes’ yeahhhh right okay. The levels of denial oh my god. ANyway. 
Then i got really, really into Supernatural for a while (sigh...it was better back then, I have to say). This was s8 and the high moment of the ‘let’s prove Dean Winchester is bi’ meta palooza on tumblr. And spending so much time hunting for clues and reading so much about people explaining their own experiences of being bisexual and not realizing it until later I was like....wait a minute....That’s just so me. Dean probs will never come out of the closet, because they’re cowards, but I certainly did, so yay, I guess. I looked over my past and I was finally able to understand. I wrote the meta of my own life. Lmao. And I was able to come out to one of my friends on the phone. I felt so fucking powerful afterwards. Then to a few other friends. And it felt good. 
Then I came back to Amsterdam and I was like, alright, time to stop being a coward and actually get involved in some real life LGBT stuff. So I joined a student association and man. It was so fucking scary. I remember, they had this meet up at a bar every month, and I actually went twice, and every time I just was too nervous to actually go inside, i stood in front of it, and I went home. So in the end I actually signed up to be a member and for the integration day, so I just forced myself to show up. And I did. It was so incredibly nervewracking. I met up with a group of students holding up a rainbow flag in front of the central station and we had these series of challenges to do - take a pic with a rainbow flag in front of one of those bible thumpers, stage a harry potter duel in public, order a starbucks drink with the name ‘Vagina Jensens’, mimick the titanic scene where they’re on the edge of the boat...it was so silly and fun and everyone was so nervous in the end, it was awesome. I ended up on the newsletter committee of that association and I had a blast, interviewing people, writing book reviews, etc...I did have complexes though, that everyone was more cool and gay aware than me lol. But it still did a lot for me and helped me come out to my family. (at a restaurant for my 25th birthday because i am a drama queen lol.). At the same time it was very...mainstream gay frat house lol. Focused on partying and drinking and being sociable in a way that can be exhausting to me, and a little light on the politics, which has always been important to me. After that I volunteered for the Eurobicon as I spoke about earlier and it was so important to me, that being bisexual is such a worthy identity to have in itself and important to me beyond being just queer, it was really cool. 
I’m not totally there yet I guess, because I find relationships in general difficult, it’s been a while, I often feel like i don’t have enough experience to call myself bi, I’m nerdy and awkward, I don’t fit the cliché of the seductive bisexual, etc etc. i sometimes think that i’m a little bit on the ace spectrum too or at least demisexual because i don’t seem to be into people as often as most of my friends, and even then it’s very emotionally-focused. I also feel very weird about gender in general so that’s also a whole other thing. And my brain is wonky and i feel it interacts with all that.  I still have moments of ‘oh what if i’m actually a lesbian ! straight ! ace !’ looool.
But less now. I’m learning to let myself just...Be. ahahahahaah. And also I have more and more bi friends and that helps a lot, to just randomly swoon over multigendered celebrities and learn to be very casual about it. 
Anyway my point is. I included all those messy (kinda embarassing) details because : getting to terms with your sexuality is fucking hard. The wow i figured it out young and then came out and it was great thing ? still not for everyone. I think a key part is, we grow up with these ideals of the perfect life, of what it means to be the protagonist of your life - and most of the time still it involves hetero couple, marriage, babies - and to look beyond that, for a while, it feels like you’re going off track, disqualifying yourself. So it’s hard. Sometimes you actually need several moments of revelation, of it sinking in. It’s fine, it’s all fine. You’ll get there. No pressure. Don’t try to fit your story into a certain pattern. It’s yours, so it’s valid. 
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Welp
So. Um. My mom is now aware that I believe being gay is ok? I was NOT expecting that conversation to happen yet and I was Not Ready lol, but…yeah, it happened. Since we’d talked about sex outside of marriage she ended up asking me later if I still believed homosexuality was wrong. And since I can’t lie for shit, especially not to my mom, I kinda had to just answer that honestly. I was not prepared lmao – I don’t know when I would’ve ended up talking to her about it but I was going to look over my research beforehand, plan out my arguments, pick an ideal moment to bring it up, etc, and…yeah….did not get to do any of that. But it went ok? I wasn’t sure how open she’d be, but it helps that she’s a generally accepting and loving person and also doesn’t jump to conclusions and freak out about me disagreeing with her on things. I started by talking about how the Bible really isn’t that clear about it bc there’s debate about the translations and that they hadn’t even studied the concept of sexual orientation back then, and that most homosexuality involved men with their servant boys and/or cult worship rituals, and that the word “homosexuality” didn’t even exist until the 19th century. And then I went on to say that ultimately it just seems like there’s a lot of good that comes out of people being gay and a lot of bad that comes out of homophobia, and how human beings’ lives are more important to me at this point than what the Bible may or may not say. And a big part of it for me is that Christians are putting compassion on one side of the issue and the Bible on the other, and isn’t the whole point of Christianity for those two things to be on the same side?
One thing that was hard was expressing how I can actually know for sure that there’s a lot of good that comes out of gay relationships – I really only have the internet for that and, as my mom reminded me, the internet has a lot of things that aren’t true on it. We both live in this small-town, conservative Christian bubble and neither of us has had much exposure to anything or anyone lgbt+ related. So it’s hard to find any kind of “proof” to give her that there really are gay people out there living their best lives and having healthy relationships. But she listened to me when I was talking about everything and asked questions and had statements to make (variants of “it just seems really unnatural” came up multiple times) but was overall very understanding and said it made sense for me to be doing this and starting to have different beliefs at this stage of my life. She basically landed on something to the effect of “I wouldn’t want my own kids to be gay (aka me and my brother), but I don’t know for sure if it’s wrong or right, but also I respect what you believe about it.” And I would honestly have been shocked if she just up and changed her lifelong beliefs about this after one conversation, so I think it went about as good as it could have gone despite my lack of preparation. Another cool thing is she mentioned that one of the youth pastors at our church might be lgbt-affirming – she’s not sure but she’s going to ask him on Sunday, and if he is she thought he and I might be able to talk about it. I haven’t talked to him much for a couple of years (since getting out of high school and thus no longer attending youth group and stuff) but I really like him and as mom mentioned he does a lot of Bible studying so she knows he’ll have thought it through. On one hand it feels nice to have finally told her this, but I’m also still processing the fact that this actually happened and as I said I was NOT READY lol and I really didn’t expect to be having this conversation yet. Also I’m nervous about accidentally letting slip that I’m questioning my own sexuality – if she asks me directly I think I really will just have to straight-up lie bc I know I thought I wasn’t ready for the convo we had but I’m really, really, completely not ready for any kind of coming out. Not until I at least have a better idea of what my sexuality actually is and some kind of support network.
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