Coming Out as Bi+ Later in Life
Bi erasure, section 28 and late-blooming queerness
I was already fourteen years old by the time Section 28 was repealed in England and Wales. Introduced in 1988, Section 28 legislation in the UK prevented the “promotion of homosexuality” by local authorities – essentially, for me, this meant that the discussion of, teaching of, or often the mention of queerness in many spaces including schools was hugely curtailed.
As a teen I understood very little about the LGBTQ+ community and the words “gay” and “lesbian” were thrown around as insults regularly in the playground. (I suppose bisexuality was so under-represented that it didn’t even make it into the lexicon of everyday school bullies!) Even as an older teen entering adulthood, my understanding was generally that queer people could be feminine men or butch women and, since I was neither, I therefore must have been straight of course.
In many ways, why shouldn’t I have assumed I was straight? Every romance I’d ever read, film I’d ever seen or romantic relationship I’d ever witnessed – all of these had shown me a heterosexual reality. Yes, it was the 00s, but as a kid in a home with one shared TV and one family PC, I’m sure I wasn’t alone in lacking access to the few queer stories that were around at that time. It wasn’t until years later I came across anything like the L word, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Will and Grace.
In an environment where everyone was straight until proven otherwise, the other confounding factor was that as a bi+ woman I am, and always have been, attracted to men. Is it really so surprising, then, that it didn’t even occur to me to consider that there could have been a queer side to me? From my mid teens I was constantly in long-term monogamous relationships with boys and men. My mid teens – when section 28 was still going strong.
As someone in my early 30s, I don’t think I seem very “old”, but it is worth remembering that my teenage and young adult experiences of queerness were hugely different from those of teens and young adults today. The challenge I currently face, as someone who embraced their queerness at the grand age of 32, is the level of scepticism I confront due to my life experiences. “Why now?” “What changed?” “How come you only just realised?” It’s quite difficult to counter these stark questions with the answer that, of course, it’s a bit more nuanced than that. ‘Realising’ my queerness was not some kind of light-bulb moment, but rather a gradual and careful process impacted by my own self-doubt and, I’m sure, internalised homophobia.
Throughout the 2010s as I moved through my twenties, I learned more and more about the LGBTQ+ community. I made queer friends, partied at drag nights and enthusiastically began attending pride. “Your life’s getting really gay these days!” a friend joked to me a few years ago. “Yeah, apart from my whole marriage-to-my-husband-thing” I (naively) laughed back. Stereotypically I quietly googled “Could I be bisexual?” quizzes – many times! – and came to the conclusion that maybe if life had gone a different way I could have had a warm, intimate, loving yet chaste relationship with a woman. That hardly meant I was bi+ though….right?
My marriage abruptly ended when I was 31 and, once I had begun to process and grieve this experience, it occurred to me that I was now single for the first time since I was a child! Never before had I even ‘chosen’ my romantic partner – it was always a man who had approached me. The opportunity to begin to explore dating gave me my first adult opportunity to actually look around and consider – who do I fancy? The answer shone through remarkably clearly to me: anyone who is beautiful, of course!
I’m still exploring labels (bisexual, pansexual, queer, fluid?) and navigating the many and varied responses from loved-ones, but right now I’m really enjoying learning more about myself and fully embracing my place in the queer community. I often feel like I’m the only person ‘like me’, with most other stories I’ve read either about people who figured out their sexuality in their teens, or who came out as lesbian or gay at a much older age after a lifetime in the closet. That’s not my story – I really did fancy those men I dated before – but I still am a later-in-life queer who happens to be bi+, and I think I surely can’t be the only one.
Julie (@_jules_writes) writes poetry and short stories on themes of mental health, identity, relationships and being human. She has been published in a number of zines and journals, and regularly contributes to spoken word events in her local area.
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