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catherineldf“Strange, But Not a Stranger”
Feral: the act of escaping into or going back to the wild. Of leaving behind a bed, warm or cold, and an almost certain meal, of choosing outside over inside. Sometimes you choose to be outside, other times it chooses you. You can see the
campfires kept alive and warm by belief, by genuine connection, by semi-rhetorical devices like “sisterhood.” On the other side are the walled villages, the suburban enclaves of church and state sanctioned ceremony. I can feel myself roam around the two, vacillating between hungry and lonely, wild and free.
I have lived in both camp and village at different times in my life. I was straight, in my own way, all through high school and college. It didn’t always sit well on me, but always more of a doer than a thinker, I didn’t dwell on it. The time my high school prom date canceled on me saying I was too ‘weird’ to go with was a little rough. But I didn’t mind too much. I had a string of lovers and lot of booze to make life go down a lot easier, to numb me to things I might have noticed otherwise.
I spent my first two years of college dating the physics department, my last two finding myself as an activist and a feminist. By the end of my last year of college, I had weathered a one weeklong engagement and a lot of protests, women’s collective meetings and peace rallies. A lot of my friends came out at college but I, determined to do things my own way, was straight until graduation.
I could say my coming out was the result of much soul searching but the truth was I got drunk and fell into bed with a friend. I woke up happy, hung over and crushed out. She woke up in love with someone else. I could say that I began rewriting my adolescence to reflect who I really was, recognizing my innate queerness in every gesture and clothing choice. But that wasn’t what happened either.
Instead, I bounced around frenetically and told a few friends, then had a fit of angst. A kindly gay friend loaned me Judy Grahn’s Another Mother Tongue and his shoulder to process on. Then my ex-boyfriend took me back when it became apparent that this woman that I thought I loved wasn’t interested in me. Voila! I rediscovered myself as bisexual in less than a month.
It was more emotionally complicated than that, of course. I no longer felt straight but I also didn’t feel like I would only be attracted to women, forever and ever, amen. At the time, I thought this was the requirement for identifying as a lesbian. Bisexuality felt like a better fit. It described how I felt about my relationships and how I responded to other people. I realized that I could be attracted to whoever I wanted to be, no set rules, no blinders. I could step outside the limits of gender and sexual duality and embrace an alternative, at least in theory.
Could I have rediscovered myself as a lesbian? Possibly. I’d spent years organizing feminist events, working in a women’s bookstore collective and taking women’s studies classes. There was plenty of support available to me if I wanted to identify as a dyke. In fact, there was plenty of pressure for me to do so. Anything else was seen as suspicious, reflecting a lack of commitment and political backbone.
On the other hand, though some of my friends were bi, there were few bisexual resources in the Midwestern city where I lived in the mid-eighties. This changed a little when one of the few out bi women I knew started a bi women’s support group at the women’s bookstore where I volunteered.
The bookstore was not the healthiest of atmospheres. Collective meetings would periodically collapse into screaming matches over such hot topics as whether or not store newsletters should be mailed wrapped in brown paper so no one would be outed. Hosting a bi women’s group was not wildly popular in this atmosphere. But no one kicked us out. They just wouldn’t date one of us. So we held our meetings and our potlucks and were generally tolerated, if not appreciated. I was fairly oblivious; after all, I could find a guy when I wanted one.
In the mean time, I embraced feminism as a religion. It defined me. I hung out at women’s dances, stopped shaving my legs and became friends with some of the most outrageous dykes in the community. The charm of Meg Christian and Cris Williamson eluded me but I could still sing “Leaping Lesbians” with the best of them. I fit in. Almost.
It was still easier to date guys. I knew the rules. Granted, there was little subtlety to most of my relationships, many of them more one night stands than anything else. My long-term relationships tended to be tumultuous, their passion extinguished by expectation and a steady loss of communication. One of my ex-boyfriends even told me after we broke up that he always expected me to dump him for a woman, perhaps one who existed only in my mind. He was right.
By that point, I had turned 30. I had tattoos and a shaved head, the souvenir of a bad crush on a girlfriend. I ran the bi women’s support group at the women’s center on campus and my very own feminist bookstore. I went to Michigan and the National Women’s Music Festival. I spoke to classes at the university about being bi, about being betwixt and between, about building an identity and a community on shifting sands.
Since I still hung out primarily in the lesbian community, I also got to be around for a lot of bi trashing, some of it directed at me, some just general. When an acquaintance left her lover for a man, a mutual friend said, “We’ve lost another one.” A lesbian co-worker announced, “I’ve decided to stop hating you for being bisexual” in a way that suggested that I was supposed to be flattered. A kinder soul told me, “I know you say you’re bisexual, but it’s just easier to think of you as a lesbian.”
Indeed. Sometimes it was easier for me too. I got in the habit of playing the “pronoun game,” dragging out conversations for as long as I could without revealing the gender of my current lover. At the time, I did this because I wanted to play with and confront assumptions about my sexuality. I enjoyed correcting people when they guessed wrong, enjoyed the speculation and verbal sparring that went on beforehand. In retrospect, it seems dishonest, more a function of the pressure I was under to conform than a real challenge to assumptions.
At the same time, it made me think about assumed monosexuality and how we learn to box people in. Are you a girl or a boy? Gay or straight? Married or single? Even now, decades after the Sexual Revolution, we’re still stuck in the same binary boxes.
Despite the word games and the way I was occasionally treated, I thought my work would bring me acceptance by the women’s community and make me worthwhile as a human being. Change the world. Instead, I found that it made me invisible if I wasn’t careful. I passed even more once I started dating women: not always, not consistently, but more often than I wanted to or should have. When I met my current partner, a genuine gold star butch, and grew my hair out, it escalated. I was part of the gang now. A real womyn among wemoon.
Don’t get me wrong - I liked being a part of the lesbian community. I like the company of women and the sense of sisterhood it can give, however illusory it can sometimes be. It made me a lot of what I am today, giving me an independence and strength that I would have had a hard time finding otherwise. As a direct result of hanging out with lesbians, I’ve had opportunities and relationships that helped me grow and I am grateful for what I learned, both good and bad.
But I find that I am still left conflicted, still feeling pulled in several directions. Despite my sense of otherness, I am, to all appearances, a lesbian now. I’ve lived with the same woman for a decade and a half. We’re monogamous and own a house, complete with the requisite cats, furniture and garden. I’ve become a writer who’s primarily known for her writing about lesbians. The only thing standing between the “l” word and me is a desire to be honest with myself. The question is: what else should I call myself?
I want a word to call my own, and “byke” doesn’t cut it. “Lesbian-identified bisexual” smacks of the academic. Someone I know identifies as “sovereign,” which has a nice ring to it but doesn’t really describe how I feel about myself. “Other” comes closest in some ways but doesn’t have the most positive connotations. Reflecting on it all gives me a sense of dislocation. Am I really bisexual if I only sleep with a woman? Am I really bisexual if most of my writing features relationships, sexual and otherwise, between women? What is a real bisexual anyway?
Contemplating my personal identity spills over into contemplating my personal community. When I first came out as bi, I felt isolated and wanted a bi community to call my own. I made due in the straight world, but I still wanted something else, something more. By the time I was in graduate school, I felt ready to try and build that community that I had always wanted. By then, I was one of the town’s “performing out bisexuals.” Back then, there were only 3 or 4 of us around to do the talks to the classes, to insist on including the “B” word in GLBT, to plan the potlucks.
But slowly, our numbers grew and it got a little easier. Soon there were other people to fight the good fight, to plan the meetings and floats at Pride. I looked at what they built and found that I didn’t feel like I fit in there, either. I don’t mean that anyone made me feel unwelcome or even that I disagreed with what they were doing. Generally speaking, that wasn’t and isn’t the problem.
I don’t live in that university town any more, and the city I live in now does have a bi community. But somehow, like identifying as a lesbian or as straight, it doesn’t feel like home. I think some of it is big picture stuff; a lot of the issues under discussion give me a sense of deja vu. It seems like more energy goes into an endless process of self-definition and support than into moving forward. I know that isn’t a completely fair criticism. A lot of people are working on the big picture and I do respect and actively support a lot of the work that is going on. It’s just when I get too close, I have an overwhelming sense of “been there, done that.”
The kind of organizing and processing that goes on isn’t the only thing that stands between me and card-carrying bisexuality, truth be told. I’m still very woman-centered, for one thing, and I don’t always feel there is room for that at the bi conferences and events that I’ve attended. It’s as though it’s not “true bi,” whatever that is. Given my background in lefty and feminist politics, it’s also difficult for me to immerse myself in organizing around my sexual identity. For me, it’s always “I’m bisexual and…” I keep looking for something more and I don’t often find it.
On the other hand, one of the things I admire about the bi communities I see now is their lack of rigidity. While I’ve seen leather and trannie-related issues, polyamory and monogamy heatedly discussed, the separation between the groups hasn’t really ossified. It’s all still under construction. The really beautiful thing about building bi community is that like bisexuality itself, there’s so much flexibility and potential that it can go in any direction.
That said, I don’t really know what I’m looking for in terms of community any more than I have a good word for what I feel myself to be. My personal community is a diverse lot of individuals whose identities range from staid heterosexuality to polymorphously perverse. The kind of people I choose to hang around with tell me that maybe it’s enough to accept and be accepted and not worry about the larger picture, the torturous twistings of GLBT politics and identity.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s enough to make community where I find it and to play with the words, using them as tools, as building blocks. And so I will. I am an anarcafeministbiwiccan, middle aged, fat, writer and more. I’m happy to have made it this far, and to see some of the road ahead. Maybe it’s enough to scrounge around outside and just be able to visit now and again. I don’t know. Like my identity and community, I’m still a work in progress.