How I went from Homophobic to Bisexual
How to break out of a conservative bubble
Not a lot of people know this, but I used to be homophobic. Well, kind of. It’s a bit weird to say homophobic because even back then, I wasn’t all like “gays are an abomination!!” But I guess I deserve that title, considering.
I also don’t think my Christian upbringing had a lot to do with it. I mean, yes, they do tell you that it’s not okay for two people of the same sex to love each other (although not all churches, I admit) but I was “woke” enough to know that it just didn’t make sense. But that didn’t stop me from making this absolutely cringeworthy speech in front of my class when I was 13.
When I was 13, I attended this debate club. Since it was an English debate club (my first language isn’t English), we had an instructor from the States come in and supervise us. Let’s just say his name was Harry. Harry went to UCLA and he was, like most West Coast people, pretty liberal. But at the age of 13, I had no concept of identity politics so I just kind of said whatever I wanted to. So when we were having a debate about gay marriage, I made this speech: (It makes me want to crawl into a corner and die every time I think about it)
“I personally do not believe that gay marriage should be legal. I’m perfectly fine with gay couples falling in love and living their lives together, but I don’t think that we ought to legally bind them together. Also, there is the concern that if we let them get married, they might try to adopt kids. Which is relatively fine, in my opinion. But what if they tried to reproduce on their own? With technological advances, that may be possible and that would be an imbalance against nature.” — Me when I was 13
Let me just take a moment to cringe.
Okay I’m done.
Anyways, I could turn my 13-year-old self into mush by the sheer power of logic, but I’m going to just omit that at the moment since I think we can all agree that what I said was a) a slippery slope b) honestly none of my fucking business if they decide to have kids or not c) what even is technological advances?
I’d like to talk about how I transitioned from that into now.
I didn’t have a particularly fantastic revelation or anything. And I’m not like 100% proud of it but process is process. It was all gradual, really. And it started with my Macbook Air.
For my fourteenth birthday, my dad got me a Mac Air and I was so excited to finally have my own laptop. Little did they know, if you give a fourteen year old a laptop, that fourteen year old was bound to see some… explicit content.
Well, to clarify, I never actually looked at actual porn starring actual people. I would’ve if I could, but I didn’t really know where to look back then and most mainstream porn sites are blocked by the cyberpolice in Korea. Instead, I turned to erotica.
I was a big fan of Harry Potter even back then (still am) and I discovered the vast world of fanfiction. I think the first Harry Potter fanfiction that I ever read was something with Snape and Hermione and Dumbledore and it was weird and it did scare me in the beginning, but I found other relatively normal ones through fic recommendations on tumblr. I was hooked with Drarry (Draco & Harry) and I think I’ve read mostly every “classic” Drarry pieces out there on archiveofourown.org (A fanfiction sharing website, one of my favourite places). I know a lot of people look down on fanfictions, only thinking about fifty-shades-of-grey type pieces (which I personally also enjoy) but there are a lot really, really well-written pieces of literature out there. I think you’d be surprised.
And I’m not going to say that the practice of reading fanfictions was what made me discover my sexuality. Coming out is another story. But it opened my mind a bit more, reading about two guys falling in love in about a thousand different ways, and seeing how it wasn’t really that much different from straight relationships. I became intrigued to learn more about the LGBTQ community after that, and then I started studying.
Tumblr is a great place to study about gender identity and sexuality in general. Not only is it updated in real time, it provides a lot of actual, real-life insights into the concepts you can’t really understand with your heart. And also, there are tons of people you can talk to (if you approach them nicely) and ask questions. I talked to a whole bunch of people from the LGBTQ community and just learned about their lives and how they managed to discover who they were and I was fascinated. It was around that time when I started learning about the new wave of intersectional feminism and I talked to a lot of women who identified as queer and feminist as well, and that’s when I built the grounds for my feminism.
There are also so many YouTubers in the LGBTQ community that make insightful and educational content for young people to watch and learn, and I’ve watched a lot of coming out videos and storytime videos to really grasp an understanding of what this group was, and what principles they stood for. And honestly, it was really simple. Love is love. Simple as that. And also, don’t assume people’s gender. Then you’ll mostly be fine.
On the internet, I was normal. But in real life, I had niche interests (like gay fanfictions) and talking about LGBTQ in my school was out of the question. So I went on tumblr again and made the HP LGBT Network. I gathered about 100~200 people in the Harry Potter fandom that identified as LGBTQ+ and made group chats. We shared our experiences being in the LGBTQ community and also our passion for Harry Potter and it was magical. I now have friends from around the world that are LGBTQ+. I didn’t talk about my experience coming out here since that would take a bit longer, but I think it was around this time when I made the network when I realised that I, too, was bisexual.
I made it sound like it happened in a *snap* but this happened over the course of 5 years. It’s relatively easy to tolerate the LGBTQ+ community like a lot of people do around me, but to love and advocate the community? That takes a lot longer. I think the difference between toleration and advocacy really comes down to personal issues. Would you be okay if, say, your family member came out as LGBTQ? My friends who tolerated the community were very hesitant to answer that question. On the other hand, I was like, “that’s great!” But also, keep in mind that just because a you have a gay uncle doesn’t mean that you’re an advocate. It doesn’t give you a free pass. I think the person that would know whether or not you tolerate or advocate is yourself — you can’t lie to yourself, after all.
So I learned from my experience that it really does come down to what you surround yourself with. I was born in a conservative country in a conservative family but I turned out to be a loud-mouthed bisexual feminist. With the internet, I think we are able to provide so much more insight to people and despite the fact that it is hard to break out of your bubble, you really can with time and effort. So don’t blame your environment for your bigotry if you happen to be doing so. If you are able to read this article, I assure you, you can also break out of your bubble. Your will to do so is what matters.
