Coming Out to My 10-Year-Old Was Easier Than Writing This Post
Last June, my child’s father had taken her to San Francisco for a weekend trip and she’d returned with a pride shirt. She didn’t know it was a pride shirt. It said L-O-V-E in rainbow lettering across the front, and she LOVES rainbows.
When her father saw what she picked out, he said, “Your mother will love that.” But he didn’t tell her why. So, when she brought it home, she was excited to show it to me and to see if he was right.
I told her I did love it. I told her I knew she loved it because it had a rainbow. And I told her rainbows are also a symbol of gay pride for the whole LGBTQ community.
“Oh, double bonus, then!” was her first response. Then she said, “Mom, can you explain ‘gay pride’ to me again? What are all those letters?”
The first time we’d been through this she was five or six. I think it came up during our early forays into sex education. We were reading a book for the ages 5–7 set called What Makes a Baby by Cory Silverberg. It’s a great book that explains things in simple, concrete terms and allows room for babies to be born and raised into all kinds of families.
As I was reading it to her, it was suddenly so strange to me that my five-year-old had never been exposed to the idea that men can love men and women can love women. Here I was, a bisexual woman, in a monogamous marriage with a man, living a very straight-looking life with mostly straight friends. My daughter had no way of knowing that there even was such a thing as a queer community, let alone that I considered myself to be a part of it.
So, I explained to her what the word “gay” meant and that a baby could have two daddies or two mommies instead of a mom and a dad. She didn’t find that strange at all — just interesting.
But a year or two later into our seemingly straight-ass lives, it came up again. The word “gay” had been mentioned on a car ride home (I can’t remember why), and she said, “Mommy, remind me what ‘gay’ means.”
I reminded her, and she looked at me skeptically and said, “Mommy, are there any gay monkeys?”
Wow, my seven-year-old was engaging in the nature v. nurture debate. I took the bait and explained to her that there was another group of people who considered themselves bisexual, meaning they could be attracted to both men and women. And then I told her about bonobos.
She thought a moment and then asked me if it were possible for a person to marry more than one person, and I told her that was against the law in this country.
“But that’s not fair, Mommy! If there are people who are attracted to men AND women, they should be allowed to marry BOTH!”
So, this seven-year-old went from skepticism about the reality of same-sex relationships to advocating for polyamorous rights in the space of a five-minute drive home from school.
It felt odd at the time that I didn’t tell her that I was one of those people who considered themselves bisexual. But we had moved on to talking about monkeys and then we were home, and she ran in to see her dog. The moment was lost. And, of course, there was no reason I had to tell her.
Most people in my life don’t know that I’m bisexual. I discovered my sexual orientation in my senior year of high school and was very out and proud in college — even leading two student-run organizations dedicated to gay pride and education.
Since then, I have been married twice, both times to men. When I moved to my current suburban, somewhat conservative town, I was a woman married to a man, a mother with a young child ready for kindergarten. My life looked very straight. I wasn’t afraid to tell people I was queer, but there usually wasn’t any need to. It didn’t come up in conversation.
I remember a writer friend of mine coming out to me, and in response I came out to her. She was surprised, but more surprised at how easily and casually I said it. To me, it’s just a fact about me, but not a very prominent one, at least, not at this moment.
I have been on dates with women since my recent divorce, but as you may know the only thing I’m dating right now is my novel, so my sexual orientation isn’t up front and center in my life.
I fully acknowledge that this makes me much more privileged than most of the queer community. I’ve been “passing” for many years now in my seemingly straight life. I get to choose when and whom I want to share my orientation with because there’s no partner to introduce, no alternative lifestyle on display. I’m cisgender, and I look it.
And in many ways that also makes me petrified of talking about my sexual orientation. I feel like a poser. I’ve been treated in the past like a poser, by both straight and queer people. I’ve been vilified and threatened for being out in college, and I’ve been dismissed and condescended to for daring to identify as queer in my het-presenting adult life.
My relationship to my sexual orientation is complicated by so much history. The history of both violent and silent homophobia (and every kind of prejudice in between) has affected how both straight and queer people can feel threatened by a woman like me.
But my daughter has none of that history. The day she showed me the pride shirt that she hadn’t known was a pride shirt, I explained what each letter in LGBTQ stood for. When I got to B, I told her that I, myself, am bisexual — that I can be attracted to both men and women. She smiled wide and said, “I didn’t know that!” like it was a cool new color she’d never seen on me before.
When I was done explaining, she said, “Okay!” and she took her new pride shirt to her closet to hang it in a place of honor and wore it religiously as her self-professed “favorite shirt” for almost a year until she outgrew it.
It was the easiest moment I’ve probably ever had as a bisexual woman. And it was a hell of a lot easier than hitting PUBLISH on this post!
