(from a state that just voted against Marriage Equality)

I am extremely dissatisfied with the nature of the political landscape in my state.  I am afraid - of people.  I live in a state (and pretty much a country too) where it appears that more than half the people do not see me as equal, simply because of who I love.  I am near tears quite often.  I was near tears before election day was over, just thinking about the fact that the majority was voting on the civil rights of a minority.

I know that civil rights have come a long way since my parents were children, when racial discrimination was still legal.  Thinking of that both extremely disturbs me as well as gives me hope.

To think that slavery existed in my county is appalling.  To see how much has changed since then gives me hope, hope that the gross discrimination and inequalities of today might someday be changed.

There are moments when I try to fathom the thoughts of someone who stands smiling into traffic encouraging discrimination.  Those smiles, those freakish smiles make me so afraid of humans, and the power they have to control each other and cause each other pain.

One of the most disturbing things that came to light in the last few days was to find traces of that discrimination sitting right next to me…the guy in the next cube.

We’ve sat next to each other for the better half of 2 years, collaborating on work assignments, and sharing disgruntled thoughts about company imperfections and inconsistencies.  We talk about our weekend plans and the women we date.  We even go so far as to ask each other for advice once in awhile on how to appropriately responds to text messages from these women.  I thought we were buddies.  I bet he still thinks we are.

On election day, he was saying that he wasn’t going to vote because he didn’t feel strongly one way or the other about any of the issues.  I questioned him about the marriage equality vote, to which he ended up saying he was mixed, as he didn’t think “they” should call it marriage.  He says this to his buddy the queer in the next cube.  His buddy who suffers heartbreak just like him, timidly asks women out just like him, worries about relationship issues, just like him.

I was appalled.  I felt so disrespected, like he felt I was a lesser, less deserving, less holy being.  I think this felt weirder and more hurtful that the words of people I don’t know staunchly fighting against Marriage Equality.  Somehow the ambivalence he expressed was worse, especially because he somehow couldn’t see how hurtful that was to me.

In the past few days he has wanted to shoot the shit per usual, nervous about some wedding he is going to with his girlfriend.  I replied, “You should probably talk to someone else about that.  I don’t have the same rights as you.”

I had some very interesting discussions tonight, with a barely out bisexual woman and a radical lesbian separatist feminist activist.  The barely out woman has this activist on such a pedestal, because she brings to light such interesting discourse and conversation that jolts the foundation of her sheltered reality, in a very good way.  The younger bisexual woman hangs on the older woman’s every word, as if what she breathes is gospel.  I care for and respect them both.  I do have a lot of fear, however, for people who I feel nearly demand by the intonation in their speech that I of course must agree with everything they say.  While I dearly respect this activist and her process, I am afraid to bring up certain topics in her presence, because I don’t want to be judged, and I am scared of feeling uncomfortable or argued with.  It’s interesting to articulate the level of fear that I have with this woman’s politics.  They’re too extreme for me.  I am a liberal queer woman, who has experienced and witnessed discrimination within queer community.  That is where some of this fear lies.

Throughout my life it has been the words and actions of those who came before me that have often opened my eyes and heart to new ways of looking at issues, or even new ways of being that I never dreamed possible.  In high school I had an out lesbian teacher, who was pivotal in my growth as a human being raised in a heterosexist, homophobic, sheltered, bigoted American suburb.  Growing up in such a fashion ingrained in me all sorts of stereotypes that literally fell away the moment I met any real human beings of any sort of label I had been raised to think was a certain way.  The more I read about and listened to and made friends with people who were queer, the more I was able to come out.  I spent so much of my life dating men, even after coming out, that I held onto the bisexual label quite closely, though a good friend had reminded me that labels are for other people, not for me.

In any case, existing in the world as bisexual identified, I noticed that mainstream pop culture often portrayed bisexuals as something very different than what I meant by the label.  The local radio station would have “bi-day” where they would have hypersexual ditsy sounding women call in and recap their multipartner sexual exploits, in such a way that painted a picture of bisexual women as women who will let another woman into the bedroom for a fun menage a trois with their boyfriend.  For me, bisexual meant that I was attracted to people, regardless of their gender.  And though I am open minded and have tried all sorts of things and ways of dating and being, I find that I am pretty monogamously inclined.

Something else I noticed as an out bisexual woman was that regardless of my identity, it felt as though the world treated me a certain way depending upon who I was dating. If I was dating a man, society saw me as hetero, while holding a woman’s hand, I was a lesbian.  I thought about these things often, wondering about what else I could do to be seen as more of who I was.  Coming out and holding a woman’s hand and kissing a woman in public were certainly much scarier and triumphant acts than PDA with a male.  Heterosexual PDA is expected.  Homosexual PDA may or may not be, depending on the environment or the community.  Dating women, I often thought about and wondered about safety in ways that had never occurred to me when I was only dating men.

Which brings me to a concept that I have conflicting emotions about: heterosexist privilege.  I once had a radical lesbian separatist roommate who used this word in regards to me and it sounded like an accusation.  I remember thinking that I certainly didn’t date men on purpose to have this privilege.  I did notice, however, that I felt somewhat on the fringe of this little circle of friends that I hung with, purely because they were all lesbians and I was the token bisexual.  Interesting to me as well was the fact that many of these women had dated men, but just not at that time.  I even dated a woman who went back and forth dating men or women kind of like me, but “politically identified as a lesbian.”  I think she got some sort of lesbian privilege that way.  There was actually an lesbian artist’s group that many of them were in that I was excluded from because of my identity.  I kissed men sometimes.  In both the hetero world and the lesbian world I felt like an outsider.  I didn’t really know a bisexual world, except for the one I heard on the radio, besides just one friend and one lover.  What really got me was that an already marginalized and discriminated against community could turn around and discriminate against me.

Throughout the past decade I have dated men and women, and more recently, less men and more women.  Pretty recently (the last 4 years or so) I have dated primarily women.  Dating a woman for 3 years was a far different experience than shorter term relationships, in that I existed in a relationship that on the outside is labeled lesbian.  I even started to use that term more.  We were so serious that I didn’t really think about what the gender of my next partner would be, because I was in that relationship for the long haul (at the time).  That in and of itself did an interesting thing for my identity.  I liked identifying as lesbian.  In fact, I think over time I tried the word on more and more and just got used to it.  Once in a while we went to lesbian events and hung out with other lesbians.  I met more and more lesbians.  I felt like I belonged a bit more and more to my idea of the community that had once marginalized me.

Since that long term relationship ended, I have been more consciously examining my sexual identity, which is about a lot more than who my partner is, I think.  Even outside of that relationship, I heard myself identifying as lesbian.  I hung out with a couple ex-boyfriends in the wake of my heartache, but it felt weirder than it ever did.  Partly because they were ex’s and I had grown more confident about standing up for what I did and did not want.  But also, I think, because they were men.  I noticed that I was attracted to more and more women than men.  I still find men attractive.  I find women incredibly attractive.  Sometimes I look at men and I feel so gay.  I just think something related to something I thought as a child, “How is it that moms grow up and find these dads attractive?  Will I have to?  Is that part of growing up?  Why do women find Magnum PI attractive?”

In examining my sexuality, I’ve been noticing the types of people I have been finding attractive.  While I certainly love to ogle the bosoms of straight women, I find myself more and more attracted to butch women and trans men.  One of my closest friends is trans, and incidentally has been discriminated against by the lesbian separatist feminist activist I mentioned at the top of this post.  Which brings me back to the fear I was mentioning earlier, of the activist woman.  While I respect a great deal of the work that she does, I am shocked and appalled by the way her opinions and her politics ostracize many of the friends and loved ones and members of just that community for which she has a voice.  She identifies so purely lesbian that she has been labeled “trans phobic.”  After listening to some of her politics and to the friend of mine who she very blatantly discriminated against, I feel that that phrase may accurately describe her.  I hate to see such schism and discrimination within an already marginalized community.  In fact, the barely out bisexual who puts the activist on a pedestal divulged to me later that she was afraid to mention that she was bi, or to refer to the man she was dating.  Isn’t this just the same sort of fear lesbians want to break free of?  I have played the pronoun game to not divulge my identity both to heterosexuals and to homosexuals, lest either think I was “other” than they, especially if it came with discrimination.

I know for myself that I have broken through personal concepts that I now regard as ignorant through the boldness of individuals who are “out” whatever it may be that they are “out” about.  Perhaps it would be beneficial of me to speak up to this separatist when she says things I find ostracizing, rather than shying away and hoping for the conversation to end soon, the way I just laid back and waited for some unwanted hetero sex to be over.  Or perhaps there are other venues where I feel safer that are more appropriate to be out.  Like with my friends and in my relationships.  It is very empowering to say, “No, I don’t like/want that.” And it could be eye opening (and has been) to others when I do speak up and say what I really think and feel, whether I out myself in the process or not.