I’ve known I’ve liked girls since I was twelve years old. In fact, I knew I liked girls “that way” long before I was certain that I even liked boys. But, this isn’t something I’ve ever been all that comfortable admitting to. Lots of gays and lesbians have been friends of the family over the years and they’ve always been embraced with open arms, but there’s a quiet sort of pity that I’ve disliked. My family accepts and loves them in the same, patronizing way they might accept and love a three-legged dog. “Poor dears, they can’t help it” would probably sum it up fairly well. And, my mother has said often enough that she doesn’t get why gays have to push their personal lives in her face. She doesn’t feel that coming out is necessary. She finds it offensive. Don’t tell her about your sex life! Straight people don’t do that!
So, obligingly, I haven’t told her. I’ve dated women, but there’s never been anything remarkably serious and so I’ve kept it quiet enough. Most of my friends in college knew. Now that I’ve graduated college and moved away from Anything Goes Las Vegas to Small Town USA, I’ve had a pretty remarkably dismal love life and so it’s been an entirely moot point. All of the friends I’ve made over the past few years are unaware of my interest in women. Most of them don’t say anything blatant, but they’ll occasionally make comments about being made uncomfortable by lesbians and so I figure they’d have a hard time dealing with the fact that I’m bisexual and no, really, I don’t want to molest them.
There was a girl I’d met that I rather liked and who seemed to be hinting at the same sorts of feelings, but she backed off pretty quickly, so I didn’t push and lived in terror for a few hours that I’d soon be known as the village dyke. Nothing like that happened and I felt silly for having worried so much.
But, now I’m finally, finally getting a writing gig. It’s something I need desperately, since my current day job is looking really awful and uncertain and any extra bit of cash will help. The column I’ll be writing is on LGBT issues. I can use a pen name. Nobody ever has to know it’s me.
But.
I am so sick of saying nobody has to know. It’s nobody’s business. I don’t want to trouble anyone else. Why is it trouble? Why is it offensive? Why am I twenty-six years old and terrified to just be myself? My co-workers and friends tell me about their sex lives constantly. I can spout off the contraceptive method used by nearly every woman I know. I’m shown pictures of people’s kids and invited to weddings and every last bit of it is a reminder that straight people are screwing.
So I’m not using a pen name. I’ve told my mother the magazine I’ll be published in. I’m left sitting here wondering, do I let her figure it out for herself or tell her first? She’s said over and over again, all of my life, that she thinks “coming out” is offensive, but it still seems like it’d be an asshole move on my part to not warn her. Then again, it seems almost as if she’s willfully ignorant at this point. She knows the magazine, she knows I’m writing about gay topics. She’s told me, that’s okay, a straight woman can write about LGBT issues and not be stigmatized. :dubious:
It’d be really, hysterically funny if it wasn’t so frustrating.