Growing up without a community
Submitted by Heather on December 07 2000 18:50:03
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Something that I said to a member below sparked a memory about my own life. This isn't really a CBF post, since it doesn't have anything to do with Christianity, but since it's about community, I thought I'd post it here. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I read The Man Without a Face and then went to my mother and (with great trepidation) announced that I thought I was gay. My mother didn't believe me; she was sure I was straight. As it happened, we were both right; I was bisexual. Which made it a heck of a lot harder (from a certain perspective) than if I'd been gay. This was about a decade after Stonewall; there were plenty of mainstream books available on homosexuality. A couple of years later I got the courage up to raid the local university library, and there I found Peter Fisher's The Gay Mystique, which was the classic book on homosexuality at that time. Seeking information on bisexuality, I read the following passage: "Bisexuality" is assumed to represent some sort of fifty-fifty balance between homosexuality and heterosexuality: I like them both just as well, it makes no difference to me. This is unlikely. . . . There could be some people who feel absolutely the same about heterosexual and homosexual relations, but I have never met one. Most people give evidence of a clear preference for one or the other, although they may not admit it. . . . Not a few basically homosexual individuals find it easier to think of themselves as bisexual. Well, now, that was an encouraging message for a young bisexual trying to edge her way out of the closet. My mother thought I was a heterosexual in denial; now it appeared that the gay community thought I was a homosexual in denial. Stubborn as always, I came out of the closet anyway, my freshman year of college. And lo and behold, during my freshman year of college I read Plato. I can still remember the feeling – spread over time rather than a single Aha! – of finding myself in a world where bisexuality was the norm. My gut feeling (unduly influenced by my personal preferences in such matters) was, "Well, of course. That's the way it really is." And I haven't been able to shake the feeling ever since then that the modern world – where heterosexuals think they're the normal ones – is very, very weird. Have you noticed anything missing from my story so far? What's missing is community – I wasn't part of the bisexual community, because no such community existed in the early eighties. At age twenty-five, during a national gay march in Washington, I finally met a group of bisexuals, but at that time the nearest bisexual support group was in New Jersey. Naturally, this was before the age of Internet support groups. To this day, I've never attended a bisexual support group. I did take part in the gay community for a couple of years, but being around gays is like being around straights – I sort of identify, but it's not quite the same thing. I've met a smattering of bisexuals over the years – mainly ungentlemanly bisexual men – but it wasn't until I came onto the boylove boards that I began meeting large numbers of bisexuals. That was twenty years after I read The Man Without a Face. I wonder now how my life would have been different if I'd taken part in the bisexual community. Would I be ghettoized, as so many sexual minorities are, revolving my life around my orientation to the virtual exclusion of all else? Or would I feel more normal than I do today? Perhaps, though, if I felt more normal, I would identify less with boylovers than I do. So perhaps it's just as well that I never took part in a community of my own "folk," since that has helped to bring me into this community. I don't know whether this is of help to anyone else, but I can't help but wonder whether any of you who feel lonely because you're not part of a real-life boylove community might find yourself on the same road as I took. Perhaps there's another community out there of people who would like your participation, whom you'd never learn about if it weren't for the fact that no boylove community exists near you.
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