How can you really understand yourself when you don’t have the right language to use?
This, to 13 year-old-me, was a challenge to be faced when trying to understand the fact that I found girls pretty… and boys pretty.
By that age, I had heard people talking about the idea of being gay and had seen some films and tv shows where men had kissed other men, but I still didn’t really know what it meant.
It didn’t help that seemingly no one else in my school year was talking about these issues, and I didn’t really know if I wanted to try and raise it. 2011 was a difficult time to be surrounded by prepubescent boys in school who still called everything they didn’t like ‘gaaaayyyyyy’.
I don’t know where I heard the term for the first time, or when I began to fully understand what it meant, but in the following years, ‘bisexual’ would be the term I became more and more comfortable with using to define myself. It was a fantastic moment when I realised that this was something a lot of people also felt, that there was a whole range movement dedicated to making the world a better place because of it and that the bisexual flag looked absolutely awesome.
It’s not been a straightforward journey, however. When you’re taught, if you’re taught, about LGBT+ issues at school, it rarely goes into great detail about nuance and history, as well as how these terms and ideas can continue to evolve and differ for different people. Though I had a term I felt content to use, I still had to keep learning about different ideas within the LGBT+ community, both out of a sense of curiosity and interest, but also out of a feeling of strong solidarity.
Learning about how LGBT+ people have always existed, learning about trans and non-binary people, and learning how these issues intersected with other concepts such as gender, race, and culture is a long process, in a way never-ending. But for me, it was fulfilling, and I felt connected with this history even if a lot of it didn’t match with my identity.
But, theory can only get you so far in life. Eventually, you’re just going to have to ask someone out. I feel that I was very much limited in my exposure to these issues whilst I was at school, even whilst I was actually out. As I said before, no one in my peer group openly identified as anything in the LGBT+ acronym (though I now know many who have since come out, and good for them). But it left me kind of isolated in my queer identity at school, whilst having to deal with endless questions of “So who do you prefer”. Not the best time.
Fast forward to being an adult, however, and I have managed to branch out and make more LGBT+ friends and expose myself to more of the issues, a fact which I’m massively grateful for. In 2018, I was involved in a gender-flipped production of a William Shakespeare play, and here, the vast majority of the cast and crew were openly queer, and being surrounded by people who shared this with me was a fantastic experience.
I am aware now more than I was then however of the challenges that face adult bisexual men. For one thing, I started donating blood regularly when I turned 19 after finding out I was a universal donor. Because of the laws from that period up until recently, I had to ensure that I limited my sexual activity with men before donating blood since you banned from donating blood unless you had abstained from sex with men for a period of three months. Another issue is that I’m very ‘straight passing’ meaning I’m typically read as straight by people who meet me for the first type and have to come out multiple times, even in a queer space where I otherwise might have just been read as gay.
Being a bisexual man is an important part of my identity and has exposed me to ways of learning about the world and understanding people around me that I believe has made me a kinder, more open-minded, and more empathetic person.
