the outing

“If you were gay...that'd be okay...I mean, cause, hey...I'd like you anyway...”

This post has been backdated because I would like to keep the timing private.

I don’t like words like “lesbian” or “bisexual”. Too often they are bandied around by young and naive girls and boys, accompanied by loathsome stereotypes. And you probably also know a fair bit about my hatred of categorisation. So it’s quite obvious that I’d appreciate neither label applied to me, especially when you consider the way lesbians look down on bisexuals, and vice versa.

I don’t mind “queer” though; I’ve been called a “queer little thing” before, though not with reference to my sexual orientation. And it suits me. Quirky, queer, quaint, all these words beginning with the letter Q. And you know why I like them? Because the most important thing to the letter Q is U!

Speaking of letters, I will now give you a quote from The L-word, the television program my mother will not allow in our house.

Alice (The L Word): I follow the heart, not the anatomy.

In all honesty, I don’t think you should love your girl/boyfriend just because they’re the opposite sex (or same sex, if that’s your thing). You should love them because they’re a great person and the two of you “click” together. “Pansexual” is a word I’ve heard a few times – usually in conjunction with the gorgeous Captain Jack Harkness of Doctor Who and Torchwood fame. It’s certainly an interesting concept, but again, the mere word carries many connotations. Pansexual implies promiscuous in the same way bisexual implies that a person needs to have 2 simultaneous partners, one of each gender, in order to reach sexual satisfaction. Common-sense will tell you that this is not necessarily the case with a person who identifies as either.

So – here’s your short answer. Me? I don’t fall in love with a person’s chromosomal arrangement; I fall in love with a person themselves.

Why am I not done yet? Or rather, why am I not “out” yet?

This note is now becoming as much directed at me as at you.

To start with, I don’t like it when people try to “figure me out” in the style of a mathematical problem or chemical equation. As much of a science-lover as I am, I believe there are some things that basic knowledge will never be able to explain (this is because a) human experience is limited and b) reality is constantly changing). Some aspects of people we can set out in black and white – like a person’s favourite colour or political stance – but some things we simply can’t. You can’t measure how compatible two people are for a relationship, you can’t precisely predict who will win an elite piano competition and you can’t choose a school for your child based on purely academic factors.

But, the moment I identify myself as lesbian or bisexual, people are going to want to know why. One of the select people I’m “out” to said, the other day, “Oh, did you hear the thing about left and right brains and sexual preference? You’re ambidextrous – so it probably explains why you’re the way you are.” An innocuous enough comment, but if more people knew, I would have more people going, “she’s a lesbian because she has only 15% body fat” or “look at her hand – the length of her fourth finger clearly shows she was exposed to excessive testosterone in utero”, or “look at her flat chest – no wonder,” or, like my mother, “I tell you what’s wrong with her; she’s too loud!” I absolutely cannot live like that; I want to keep some aspects of my personality indescribable.

I spoke about human experience being limited. And now I’ll speak about reality constantly changing. Sexuality, like any part of a self, is a fluid thing. You start out asexual as a child, and then you might start to swing one way, then you might experiment a bit, then you might choose one particular orientation for a number of years. In high school I took for granted that I was “straight”. In university, for want of a better word, I’m “bisexual”. Who knows when I’ll change again, or if I’ll change at all in the future? But human nature is such that we want to cling onto things and put concrete, unchanging labels on them. Men who were attracted to other men when they were young, but are now in heterosexual marriages are often frowned upon. Once I “come out”, there’s no going back. And I’m in an industry where the identity you forge for yourself in school carries onto your workplace. There aren’t a lot of glbtq doctors out there; it’s a very conservative world. Call me a coward, but I don’t want to jeopardise my career and the careers of people around me. My flatmate is female; her family are quite homophobic. I don’t want her to have to move out simply because of me.

One positive thing that can come out of this is that our world won’t be prejudiced forever. People will become more open-minded; all I have to do is hang in there, and wait until “reality” changes. It really wasn’t that long ago when the term “homosexuality” didn’t even exist. We know that in ancient cultures (for example, the Greeks), same-sex-attracted people lived in harmony alongside opposite-sex-attracted people. Some people even practised both heterosexual and homosexual love with one lifetime.

This time will pass. My time is coming.