There’s Room for You Under That Rainbow
Coming Out Day snuck up on me this year. My social media blew up with beautiful people making beautiful proclamations of identity, and I cheer for every one of you. I guess one thing I particularly love about watching people come out in recent years is that we are finally filling out all the colors of the rainbow in a way I have never seen in my lifetime.
The rainbow flag became popular before I was born. I was taught that it was a celebration of diversity. But back then, everyone I knew was either gay or straight; everyone I saw was either male or female; sexuality and gender were dichotomies. That’s not true, of course, but that is the lie that we were living, and through my childhood eyes, I believed it. Bisexuality existed on a continuum between gay and straight. It felt less like its own color of the rainbow and more like a shade of grey inside the black and white paradigm of 20th century sexual orientation.
I didn’t have a language for non-binary. I didn’t resonate with a hetero-, homo-, or bi- sexuality. I didn’t have a developed sexuality at all; I was a kid. But there was something inside me: feelings too young to have solid form but real enough to know I didn’t see them on any map of adulthood around me.
In 5th grade, my maiden voyage into a lifelong love of poetry began with Lord Byron. I don’t know how I first discovered him or learned the salacious details of his personal life: He came out to his wife about his many affairs with men and women and ended up fleeing England for his life. He hid out in Geneva with notorious “free love” advocate, Percy Shelley, who had invited his wife to live with him and his teenaged lover, Mary, as a threesome. His wife opted for suicide instead, so he married Mary and proceeded to try to entice her to take other lovers. While the men were writing love poems, Mary Shelly, depressed over the death of a premature child and not particularly interested in free love, dreamed up one of literature’s most notorious monsters. History paints neither of these men as particularly ethical in their proclivities, and I have never been one for soap opera intrigue. Byron is not a role model. I loved his writing but I pitied his lovers. I saw something, though, in the lines themselves that grasped at feelings swimming inside him that were not mapped anywhere in his society.
Ours too the glance none saw beside;
The smile none else might understand;
The whisper’d thought of hearts allied,
The pressure of the thrilling hand;
The kiss so guiltless and refin’d
That Love each warmer wish forbore;
Those eyes proclaim’d so pure a mind,
Ev’n passion blush’d to plead for more.
— To Thyrza by Lord Byron
Byron may have been a liar and a scoundrel but his words, again and again, spoke of a purity within his passion. He was almost killed by an angry mob in the land he called home, not for infidelity, but for deviance. Plenty of men were unfaithful. Plenty of people were having gay sex. His crime was deeper. They had a word for sodomy but they didn’t have words for whatever he was. If he was a liar, what was his truth? A man so skilled at language, he could make the heart weep, yet he eternally struggled to find the words to convey the love he felt in a way that his world could see as virtuous.
Maybe I project too much on Byron. History is of full of people who maintained fuzzy boundaries around their sexuality without taking so much collateral damage in the hearts of those around them. Maybe I just latched onto his story because my childhood taxonomy was starved for any representation of sexuality that outpaced the common vocabulary.
It was the late 80s/90s. We weren’t taught the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity. We thought that who-you-feel-attraction-to, who-you-fantasize-about, what-sex-acts-you-enjoy, how-you-present, who-you-love, who-you-develop-emotional-attachments-with, and who-you-share-your-life-with were all bundled together and dropped as one parcel somewhere along the Kinsey Scale and usually near the poles.
Throughout middle and high school, I found more bright spots. Prince and Boy George both disrupted the dichotomy between masculine and feminine. More of one isn’t less of the other. Bowie with his unapologetic lifestyle and his powerful connection with Jagger that captivated our imaginations. Dennis Rodman and Kurt Cobain both moved the needle on our cultural scripts. Thank god for RuPaul. Grace Jones, just everything Grace Jones!!
In high school, I was too cis-gendered and boy crazy to be a lesbian, and that is fair. I’m an ally, but I never endured what a lot of y’all went through. I didn’t walk through the world with that same target on by back. I held my boyfriend’s hand in the hallway between classes without a care. I dressed the wounds of my friends who weren’t that lucky.
Everyone saw through me, of course. There was a “Mean Girls” style plot in which a girl who was supposed to be my friend conspired to kiss me in order for the other girls to scrutinize whether I was gay. I turned her down. Sorry, honey, you weren’t the litmus test.
My mom was the best. She researched famous gay people and picked a few she thought would be good role models. I love her for that. (And for many other things!) I couldn’t come out to her though, because I still didn’t have the words.
As time went on, I was careful about the women I chose, less so with the guys. My attraction took me outside the binaries, but the gay community was never my home. It was “pick a side,” or “you’re just experimenting.” I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want to claim what wasn’t mine. I would rather be an ally than a traitor.
I take responsibility for the fact that I couldn’t stop seeing myself through other people’s eyes. I was reacting to all the stereotypes: I wasn’t with this person because it was fashionable. I wasn’t offering my relationships up for the titillation of men. It wasn’t a liberal college thing. It was easier to strink back and keep the activism focused on the ones who were more immediately in the crosshairs.
Still, I was trying to carve room in my intimate relationships for a connection that could be good and true and ethical, and I didn’t have models for how to do that. Because inside me, I didn’t feel a specific sexual orientation so much as a drive to authentically connect with the people I care about, and to playfully and respectfully co-create that connection, whether it was sexual or not. I am not dissuaded if our time is brief. I don’t have a set path we have to follow. I’m not doing it for external observers. I am very comfortable with ambiguity in relationships. I understand how that can be read as questioning or experimenting, but it is not.
The first girl who wanted the mantle of “my girlfriend” completely blew me away. She was gorgeous, talented, and emotionally grounded. She was 5 years older than me, which was a lot at that age. I don’t know what dumb shit I said to make her put her foot down, but she was very clear that she wanted to be known as my “girlfriend,” because that is what this was. She was right. I loved her. I just didn’t think I was allowed to have a “girlfriend” because I didn’t think there was a place for me under that rainbow flag. She knew differently. I wish I could tell her how much she gave me and how much I still smile to myself when I think of her. She died last year. We hadn’t spoken in ages.
I hope I’ve been better to my lovers than Byron was. I have never lied, but I have been more careless with words and feelings than I would like to admit. There are people who will never forgive you for loving another after loving them. There are people who will try to void a whole relationship by saying it was an “experiment.” There are people who will try to fetishize it. The world is full folks who are trigger happy to slap a label on your lived experience. They use their words to try to own something that is not theirs. But there is something righteous and pure about the moments that are just for you and that other person. That may be the most pure thing there is. In that space, words become a powerful bond and the labels we choose for ourselves create the boundaries and safe spaces we need to be free with each other.
Within my girlhood, we went from calling everything that wasn’t straight “gay” to more nuanced terms like LGB. The inclusion of trans people in LGBT was a hard won fight. And the acronym has only kept growing as we continue to wrestle with how to achieve a more perfect inclusion.
I love the community of whimsical savants that I’ve surrounded myself with. I love my supportive family. I was never hiding from any of you. You have always seen me.
