Before There Were Heroes

and why it matters that every letter is in the queer alphabet soup

My story is not the most important story to tell this Pride month, with the horrors facing our trans siblings and with remembrances of horrific violence aimed at young queer folk. Yet I suspect someone might need this today - someone who is trying to find their place and their voice within the LGBTQIA+ umbrella. This was first published a couple of years ago in Bi Women Quarterly, and I think it may be helpful to republish my words here.

Also note: General Assembly is next week, and while I expect I’ll have lots of opinions about what’s happening there, there MAY not be a post next week. But I will be around - I’ll be singing in both choirs, recognized in the Service of the Living Tradition, and occasionally at the UU Entrepreneurial Ministries booth in the Exhibit Hall (along with several other amazing religious professionals whose work I think is important and inspiring).

Anyway… on to the essay:

As a young queer cis woman in the 1970s and 80s, I was already the beneficiary of those who came before. In my teens, I was introduced to the music of Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, and Holly Near. I discovered Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle and the poetry of Adrienne Rich. As the 80s became the 90s I cheered when Ellen DeGeneres came out on national television, and when Melissa Etheridge and k.d. lang came out through their music and concerts.

These were my heroes. Women a half generation before me, showing me it was possible to be queer. I wore my lesbian identity proudly, being part of a Lesbian Avengers group, belonging to a lesbian chorus, organizing pride marches and events for women-only spaces. I had dozens of older sisters, cheering me on, grateful for my youth and energy.

And something was still missing.

I suppose I always knew I was bisexual; my crushes and early sexual experiences were with both boys and girls (we still thought gender was binary then). But after some disastrous relationships with men, I fell in love with a woman, and decided that was it. I was a lesbian. The impulse to lean into the sisterhood was strong, and comforting, and helped me forge an identity and a place I thought I could call home.

Yet the crushes on men continued, and I kept them like a dirty secret. I remember telling the first partner I thought I could trust with this, and while Tricia accepted it joyfully, she issued a stern warning: “do not tell anyone about this.”

Tricia’s words reinforced the secret, even as we worked tirelessly under the LGBT banner. We were so proud to have fought for the inclusion of a trans woman into our midst. We professed “it doesn’t matter who you love, love is love.” Yet for all of our rhetoric, it was clear that this community did not believe the B. I grew to understand the B as meaning “not really gay” or “can’t make up their minds” or “horndog” or “we want a threesome.”

After Tricia died in 1998, I found comfort not from my gay and lesbian friends, but from my straight male friends. They seemed to hear the pain in my heart – especially Mark. Mark’s comfort was inviting, and my relationship with him did turn romantic for a while. And that was fine. My mistake was telling my lesbian friends, who branded me a traitor to the sisterhood, who called me a “hasbian,” and then proceeded to ostracize me from the community I had loved and served in for years.

There was nowhere to turn. No heroes to look toward for inspiration or comfort. I had no community left, and decided that since I was not attracted to women at the moment, my lesbian days were over. I was… well, I didn’t know what I was. When I started dating again, I dated men – some of whom thought my past relationships with women were a turn on, and some of whom tried to convince me I was straight now.

And something was still missing.

What was missing, as it turns out, was not a hero to look up to, or a community to define me, but a simple way to define myself. It was the simple definition from Robin Ochs, in her 2014 essay “Bisexuality 101”:

“Bisexuals are people who acknowledge in themselves the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”

I was bisexual all along and didn’t know I could claim the B. I didn’t know, because there were no heroes for me as a young bisexual person. I didn’t know because the community draw the circles too tightly. I didn’t know because there were no out bisexuals in media to look to. (That has changed in recent years, but in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was no one.) Bisexuality is still so often erased, so often invisible.

So.

I am now an out loud and proud bisexual. I am bi in my relationships, bi in my attitude, bi in the pulpit.

And yes, being bi in the pulpit can be a challenge. I learned from my years serving a congregation that even the most enlightened congregant tends to identify a person’s sexuality by the person they date. When I spoke about the death of my partner in one service, the congregation assumed I was lesbian. When I mentioned a man I had a relationship with in a different service, I got a series of very carefully worded questions, not wanting to pry but absolutely being confused by my use of different pronouns for those I’d been in relationships with. Even after being explicit about it, bi-invisibility reared its ugly head, with questions about preference, suggesting again that I was the one confused or conflicted, and once I was advised to get therapy to ‘answer the question once and for all.’ And while there are any number of colleagues who currently identify as bisexual, we often find this ground difficult to travel as we seek the support and models that help us – and the people we serve – understand that nothing about sexuality is as cut and dry as we’d hope but instead is much more nuanced, varied, and infinitely more delightful.

But still, we carry on. We find our way. We name our identities and challenge the status quo. We ask for nuance and curiosity. And… we figure out how to model this for those who come after us.

The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said that life is lived forward but understood backward. Here in my late-50s, I look back on this journey and see that in fact, I was the hero I had long sought. I blazed my own path, held my own romantic and often wounded heart, and affirm to myself and the world that there will be better days when we embrace our truths.

May you find better days, and be the hero you need when heroes are hard to find.