True Colors!

So, this Friday, I’m going to the True Colors conference at the UCONN campus in Storrs, CT.

I’m really excited. I’ve been there…about 4 times in the past? Always with a school group though. This time I’m going (kinda) by myself. I think my school’s GSA (gay straight alliance) is going, but I stopped going to the meetings a while back for a few reasons, and never went back because I’ve been busy with more important things (homework and cleaning my apartment and taking care of my pets among other things) so I’m not quite sure.

However, my youngest sister IS going, and I want to see her first time going, because I remember how much fun my first time was.

The first time I went was my sophomore year of high school. I had wanted to go my freshmen year but had been grounded. I was together with my girlfriend at the time, so things were pretty cool. Wandering around on a beautiful sunny spring day hand in hand with my girlfriend, everyone around my accepting, for once not worrying if people were glaring at us or about to call out mean phrases….just her and I happy together… I don’t remember much of that one. I remember going to a workshop and having it confirm my bisexuality even more. I remember free condoms, not because I wanted to use them but because I thought it was fun and ridiculous to carry around condoms with me (What? I was like…..15? And the idea of sex was still gross and such….)

Next time was junior year in high school. My girlfriend had a boyfriend, so we had broken up. I had a boyfriend too. We spent the time avoiding my ex and loving the spring weather. I remember even less about that time.

I went senior year. I hung out with my friends from a town I had used to live in. I have no recollections beyond that.

Last time was….sophomore/junior year (my time off makes it hard to keep track) It wasn’t as much fun that year. A lot of it seemed high school orientated, and I wasn’t allowed in the high school workshops. But there was fun. I bought a feather boa and a rainbow flag and had flaming purple hair so I became” Super Gay!!!!!” I saw some friends I hadn’t seen since high school. I went to some fun enough workshops. One that talked about safe sex (not gonna lie I didn’t know how to be safe for girl-on-girl, so I learned a LOT.), one about bisexuality (I knew most of it already but it was nice because i had a chance to buy some bisexual pride pins), a presentation about the ex gay treatment centers by someone who had survived one (yes the ex gay movement exists ouside “But I’m A Cheerleader”. Scary shit, and full of hypocrisy. The guy presented it in a humorous way though, which made it a bit less scary.) I think there may have been a few other workshops, but my memory is fuzzy. I’m surprised I remember any of it considering what happened later that week (for those who knew me back then: the asshole was made to leave that week. I’m sure you all remember how emotional I was that week…)

So my sister is a freshman and going. So Thursday night I’m going down, and Friday I am waking up at an ungodly hour and walking to school with my sister. Her teacher said I can hitch a ride with them, without which I would be unable to get there, because my mom, while being closer than me, is still far away from Storrs.   I will be reprising my role as super gay, except this time I aim to have rainbow thigh high socks and either ripped jeans or shorts on displaying them, a rainbow belt….and something rainbow-ey for the shirt, dunno yet. This is so exciting. I get to meet my sister’s friends, hang out with my demon child of a sister, and have a fun time in an accepting place. Who knows what I’ll learn! I will come bearing knowledge and maybe even pictures. YAY!!!

Bisexuality

Hello, my name is Momo, and I am bisexual. (Well, technically omni- or pan- sexual, but people tend to not know what that means, so I go for the easy label *smile*)

WARNING: Family…I don’t know if you’ll want to read this. So, proceed at your own discretion…

I’ve been wavering back and forth about whether I should make a post about my bisexuality, because I haven’t encountered much resistance about it recently. But then I remembered that I’m in a mostly liberal college town. And then I remember the recent suicides by people due to LGBT bullying, and I decided I wanted to make a post. This post is somewhat close to my heart, and I have a lot of thoughts about it, so I apologize if I bounce around from topic to topic…I’ll try to keep this coherent as I can.

I’ve somewhat always have been bisexual. I mean, I remember I had a girlfriend in first grade. She pulled me into the reading corner one day during recess, and said, “Momo, I love you!” and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Aw, X, I love you too!” I replied and gave her a kiss on the cheek. I told my mom about it, because I thought it was awesome. Eventually something happened…I think I moved away? Either way, I didn’t forget about it, per se, but I didn’t consciously think about it. There was no big deal about it, besides the bit of teasing I got from my family that I got whenever little Momo got a boyfriend or girlfriend.

That would be that, until the end of middle school/beginning of high school. I started getting crushes on guys, but also on some of my friends who were girls as well. Long story short, it culminated with me telling my best friend I had a crush on her and kissing her in my friend’s closet during a party, on Easter, I think, of my freshman year in high school. She didn’t know how she felt about me, which caused no end of confusion on all sides. Due to some drama within the friend group, with exes and the like, combined with her uncertainty, we decided that it was best to just be friends. But due to that experience, I came to the realization that I liked both guys and girls. I slowly started coming out to my friends.

Most of the people I hung out with were cool with it all. I mean, I was a weirdo, and I hung out with the other weirdos in my school. There were a few people not really that happy about it, but I wasn’t that close to them, so no big loss.

But when things “hit the fan”, so to speak? I was in tenth grade. I had a really good friend who I hung out with all the time. We were near inseparable. And then, we ended up together. Things were grand. I had a girlfriend who I loved, and she loved me, and nothing else mattered.

But this school was more “city” than the suburban school I had gone to the year before, due to moving, so there were a LOT more people outside of our weirdo group, and a lot more people willing to tell me exactly what they thought was wrong.

I remember the day I had a shouting match with a kid in my study hall. You see, he pointed at a picture of my girlfriend in the yearbook, and asked if I knew her. “Know her? I’m her girlfriend!” I replied cheerfully.

“Girlfriend?” he asked, his face suddenly getting angry. “You’re a sinner! You’re going to hell!!!”

All my cheerfulness vanished. I was stunned. He wasn’t super religious or anything, and before that point, I had only encountered super religious people who had been against same-sex relationships. I blinked a few times, and sputtered out my first coherent thought, which was “I don’t believe in hell, so I’m afraid your threats mean nothing!” It wasn’t a lie. I wasn’t an atheist yet, but I already knew the concept of heaven and hell just didn’t mesh with what I thought at all.

“That just makes you more of a sinner, you’ll surely go to hell!” he yelled, drawing the attention of the entire room.

“I’m sorry, but if god exists, which I’m not quite sure he OR SHE does, I think he’ll care more about whether or not I try to act like a good person than whether or not I believe in it, or who I love. And if it does exist, and wants to throw me into hellfire for all eternity for LOVING someone, then I wouldn’t think he was deserving of worship anyway!” I replied. I was purposefully not trying to be inoffensive at the time because…well, the guy was calling me a sinner and saying I was going to burn in hell for all eternity, he was attacking me, why should I have worried about offending him?

The teacher essentially separated us for the rest of the class. Told us to stop it or we’d both be sent to our administrators. It just wasn’t worth it to me. But I did give the guy a huge smile whenever I saw him, just to piss him off.

The next big incident was during the Day of Silence later that year. We all taped the flyers that we had hung around the school on our shirts that day, so that the teachers would know we were participating. I knew there would be trouble from the start. First, a lot of our flyers were either taken down or vandalized, what with pictures of penises and “Fags get AIDS and die!” and other such derogatory comments. None of us were really surprised by the comments, because we knew by that point there was a large homophobic population in our school. (Side note: People who say homophobia is gone in the North East? Lies! I lived in Connecticut when this happened. I’ve also encountered some homophobia in New Hampshire recently, although not to the same extent as when I was in high school…) What did surprise me was my first period teacher’s reaction. I forget the exact phrasing, but it was something like, “I don’t get the point of this day, it’s such an inconvenience to the teachers, why are these kids even silent anyways?”…IN FRONT OF THE WHOLE CLASS. After we had gone to their teacher’s meeting the week before, and explained what we were doing and why we were doing it. If I hadn’t been silent, I would have stood up and said, “You want to know what? It’s really inconvenient that I get teased every day for walking down the hallway with my girlfriend. It’s really inconvenient to get called names and given dirty glares just for being who I am. And it’s really inconvenient that when I try to take a stand, a teacher puts me down because she’s annoyed that she can’t call on three people out of a class of over 20. That’s what’s REALLY inconvenient!” But I was being silent, so I held my tongue. (One of us told the GSA coordinator what had happened, and he talked to her, because the next day before class she pulled the three of us aside and apologized for being so “inconsiderate”. But we could tell she was only doing it because she was told she had to. She didn’t look sorry… She also said something to the class about it, although she stopped short of saying she was sorry for them to the class, so it seemed like she was only sorry that someone had said something.) It was one of the hardest things I’ve done, to this day, to not go off on that teacher. But then I would have broken my vow of silence, and probably gotten suspended, to boot.

The day continued on in a similar fashion. Instead of sitting and thinking about why we were silent, the cruel kids decided it was “taunt the fags ’cause they can’t fight back” day, even though many of the people participating were straight. They just couldn’t seem to wrap their heads around someone supporting gay people who wasn’t gay themselves. And if we did fight back, we were made fun of, with “HAHA made you talk!” And it was so sad, because there were people who I know were on my side, but were too scared of getting made fun of themselves to step in and help. I was teased mercilessly. ALL. DAY. There were people laughing at me, saying they made me talk when they hadn’t. Someone I know, who I thought was my friend, who was nice to me every other day of the year, even tried to taunt me into talking. He didn’t make fun of me, per se, but he said things he knew I would be burning to respond to.

Because of this, I decided that I would not participate in the day of silence anymore, at least, not in high school. While I think it’s a nice sentiment, I decided I would not willingly put myself in a position to be victimized without a way to defend myself. I would stand up and fight, use my voice to try to make things better, instead of echoing silence, because if you’re silent and compliant, why in the world would anyone change anything to make it better for you? I understand that it’s supposed to be about raising awareness and spreading acceptance, but since it was only the weirdos that did it in my school, it just served to further marginalize us. It also didn’t help that some people did it for a period or two, and then laughed with friends about how they got out of answering questions in so-and-so’s class because they hadn’t done the reading. If some of the “popular” people had participated, maybe it would have changed things, but…it was like cows lining up to the slaughter.

When I was eventually outed to my mom, by a nosey neighbor who had seen me hug and kiss my girlfriend before I walked home after school and told my mom in a “DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR DAUGHTER IS DOING?!?!” way…it wasn’t pretty. My mom has always had a lot of gay friends and such growing up…but I guess her own daughter having a girlfriend hit her in a weird way. She wasn’t happy, to say the least. (UPDATE: Look to the comments for my mom’s response) It was a rough couple on months after that….although, most of the taunting came from my mom’s asshole of an ex boyfriend. I remember one time I had my girlfriend over, to celebrate my 16th birthday. We were eating pizza on the balcony of the place where I lived, and I hugged my girlfriend at one point, because I was so happy that it was my birthday and she was there and we were having pizza, and it was a sunny day, and for once, things seemed to be going well. I then got a text from the asshole, telling me to not “lez out” in front of my younger sister…

But things got better. My mom mellowed out about the whole thing, and eventually ditched the asshole. My sister was able to come out as a (mostly) lesbian to my mom and was greeted with acceptance and love surrounding her. Now when I meet homophobes, their words no longer hurt me as much, because instead I just imagine how hard it must be to live with that much hatred inside of you, and feel sorry for them. I mean, yes, of course I get angry sometimes, but I no longer hate them, as I did when I was younger. I have grown to a place where I can (at least sometimes) be the better person.

Okay, now, I don’t speak for all bisexual people here, but there are some things that annoy me about when people find out I’m bisexual, that I’m going to share with you…
-People asking me to answer questions for or speak for all bisexual people. This is as impossible as speaking for all straight people. There’s a very diverse group of people, with a very diverse set of experiences and viewpoints. Each person is their own person.
-Ask me if I’ll have a threesome with you and your boyfriend/girlfriend/whatever. This is wrong on so many levels. SO. MANY. LEVELS. If you were a girl, and you were straight, would you think it was okay if someone asked if both he and his friend had sex with you at the same time? I mean, if you’re into that, fine, I don’t really care, but if the person knew nothing other than the fact that you were female and liked guys, and they asked you this question…you would probably be offended, whether you were into it or not. And after it happened time after time after time, I bet you would probably get pretty angry, right? Now you get it.
-Imply that I can’t have a monogamous relationship. Seriously. Just because I’ve been known to like guys and girls, does not mean I can’t find one person. Now I don’t have anything against polyamory or what have you, but it drives me maddening that people assume that that’s my default just because of my orientation. If you’re dude, and you like girls, do you stop liking girls (being straight) because you’re with someone? It’s kinda the same with me. I know there are many polyamorous bisexual people out there, but there are also many monogamous bisexual people. If it’s unclear, ask, but try to have some tact. If you are at least trying to be nice and tactful, in my experience, people won’t bite your head off, but this person might have been asked this a bunch of times recently, so try to be understanding if they get a bit miffed. It’s hard to constantly be questioned about this stuff.
-Don’t try to imply that they’re really just “on the fence” and will some day “decide what they really want”. I had my first girlfriend when I was 6, and had girl crushes way before then. That’s a LONG time. And the fact that it’s usually said in such a smug, condescending tone, like the person knows so much better than you what’s in your head and heart than you do… or the twist on it where the person feigns concern and says I’m just confused…no, I’m pretty sure I know what I want, thankyouverymuch!
-Don’t imply they’re only doing it for attention. I know there are girls out there who kiss other girls at parties who do it for attention….but most of the ones I’ve met don’t identify as bisexual when outside of the parties. And even if they do…it’s not the majority of bisexual people. Stop making assumptions about the majority based on the minority, thankyouverymuch!

So…yeah. That’s about all I can think of right now. Homophobes will either be argued with or have their comments deleted, based on how I’m feeling at the time. 🙂

And for anyone who is having a hard time, especially with homophobic idiots, here’s a video from George Takei that might cheer you up…

Peace love and harmony to you all, and may you never experience hatred 😀