29 YEARS

 

It's that time of year again, Pride,  and that means it's time to retell the story of how I realized I was bisexual and what happened when I came out.

My coming out took 29 years to complete.

I realized I was attracted to ladies and fellas when I was seven. The revelation was facilitated by the movie RETURN OF THE JEDI. Every guy of a certain age fell in love (or maybe into lust) with Princes Leia in her gold bikini, and I was no different. What most guys didn't do was have the same feelings for Han Solo.

I didn't have the vocabulary of a world where LGBTQ+ people are openly out loud and proud. All I knew was that I wasn't like the other boys I knew at school and from around the neighborhood.

I kissed my first boy, a friend who was curious about kissing when I was 8. He thought that, like him, I just wanted to know what it was like to kiss somebody. He, in the end, turned out to be straight.

I, Of course, did not.

It wasn't long after that I heard my maternal grandfather use the F word, the one reserved for people like me. Not fuck. I asked my two step-uncles, one was my age and the other was a year older, what that word meant. Without realizing who and what they were talking to told me that what I was was evil and disgusting. They told me I was going to go to hell and burn forever.

For eight years, I didn't tell a soul.

Fast forward to when I was 16 and a junior in high school. That year I fell in love with a guy, and I also fell in love with a girl. But that is a story I've told before.

Teenagers, they fall in and out of love so fast, don't they?

In the end, my guilt over my orientation, the knowledge that the guy I was enamored with could never be told, and the first symptoms of my bipolar disorder rearing its ugly head caused me to make a suicide attempt. It was the first of two, but as with the love story, I've told that story before as well and won't be rehashing it here and now.

After that, I came out to my German teacher. She was amazing and was the shoulder I needed to cry on.

In the aftermath of the attempt, I allowed myself to be checked into a psychiatric facility. I got lucky. The hospital was very LBGTQ supportive, and in the end, the counselors were the first people (other than my teacher) who made me feel like I wasn't a freak.

In the process of getting all of my marbles back into the bag, I came out to a select few family members. It was a test to see how living my true life might work out. It went as well as you might have expected. Some were very supportive, some acted like it was all a hoax, and some (very few) used it as a tool to backbite and sew chaos.

I stayed closeted until 2004.

When I was in the hospital being diagnosed with diabetes, they pumped me full of morphine, and it did what narcotics always do to me in that drug-addled moment. My lips were loosened, and I spilled my guts.

I told my wife.

She was hurt that in the eight years we'd been together that I'd never told her. But, for some reason, she loves me and has always had my back on the subject.

I came out to the world in 2012.

There was no fanfare. No fireworks and air horns. I simply wrote an entry on my old blog and posted it for everyone to see. A few of the responses behind the scenes were negative, but for the most part, I received support and love.

That's it.

That's my story.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Pride. I know things look dark right now. I know people are trying to push us back to the 1950s. But never forget we are strong, we are resolute, and we are a community that looks out for one another.

- Josh (06/05/2023)