I am ready to come out finally. I have settled on a description of my sexual orientation which is no small thing. I have been in phases where I have no idea how to identify. I have called myself straight but I felt that was not right, since I have had enough sexual encounters with women to know I am more than just curious. I just never found the right woman to be with, romantically.
For a long time I felt that I could have sex with a man or a woman but I only wanted to be with men in relationships and that I only "fell in love" with men. So, that is straight, right?? Then I realized that it was internalized homophobia that stopped me from being open to having a girlfriend.
It is easier to rationalize a hook up with a girl than to look deeper at the fact that I am actually demi -sexual (my attractions are based on getting deeply emotionally close with people) So this means that it is more important to me that I can form deep emotional and spiritual bonds with someone than that they have this or that gender assignment! I have had relationships with women that go very deep but do not become sexual and I have had sexual encounters with women that did not go deep at all. It has kind of been all over the map!
I am truly interested in and attracted to the ones who will go deep with me and without that, I am going to lose interest very quickly. I experimented a whole lot with guys to know this was true all across the board. Male or female, I want to go deep. Male or female, I am attracted to intelligence, and that adds this piece to the puzzle. I am sapiosexual. That makes 3 labels on this situation. Bisexual, Demisexual, Sapiosexual. Quite the summary, yes? I think I will be able to identify with these 3 words for a very long time, they capture enough about this complex orientation situation.
Now, since I married a man, I get a lot of straight privilege. It is all well and good to come out on the internet but when I move in the world with my husband, we get straight privilege everywhere we go. There is nothing to be done about that except to acknowledge that because I married into a straight and not a lesbian relationship, I am not visible as Queer. I have mixed feelings about that because I want to always be in solidarity with my fellow LGBTQ folks. Since people assume I am straight, they often assume a level of homophobia is going on too. I can feel that. I despise that.
I grew up with a bisexual mother. She divorced my father when I was 10 and had a number of lesbian relationships after that. While I did not always like the people she chose, I always loved her and wanted her to be free to be herself. Since my mom is Queer and even participated in the SF Pride Parade, I knew about the ugliness of homophobia early on. I am not sure whether this made me less or more wary of living my authentic expression of self regarding my own queerness, but I am grateful to her for modeling that critical way of being true to herself. She is strong and amazing and I am so glad I saw that amazing strength lived out in a real way,
In the meantime, I can live authentically and speak out for protection of my fellow LGBTQ people and support the fight for the rights fellow Queer folks deserve, the right to marry being just one right among many. Happy Pride Month, 2019!!
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