By Solveig Stafford
When I talk about my past romantic and queer-platonic relationships to others, they are often surprised by how much experience I had regarding my bisexuality at a young age. It began as early as third grade. My oldest friend is a lesbian, and although we didn’t know the weight of it at the time, she and I, alongside our other friends, would play kissing games and skirt around conversations about sexuality in nervous excitement, often encouraged by our self-assurances that they were just games, and the effects of late-night-sleepover-induced delirium. My first sexual experience was with a woman, in the eighth grade, and I carried it like a badge of honor, not knowing I’d done something that might have seemed wrong or strange to others. She had a boyfriend at the time, and she let me know that it was simply practice for when I had a boyfriend one day. When I later had boyfriends, though, I’m not sure the knowledge was put to much use.
In high school, the girls in my figure skating club and I had crushes on each other; my little skating girlfriend and I would kiss in the locker room with our skates on, and when back on the rink, we would blame the blush in our cheeks on the cold. Another girl I liked in my youth kissed me in the bathroom at our regional high school band contest. She pulled me in to kiss her by the tie of my androgynously-modified concert black uniform, and I felt the butterflies take my whole body over. Sadly that day, we were filmed and made fun of by other students who knew what we were doing. That was the first time I realized the way I carried myself could lead to embarrassment or danger. At the time, it didn’t bother me too much. I felt proud of myself, really, finding a sick superiority in the fact that just a kiss could make our local world stop spinning for a moment. A privileged thought, but one I had nonetheless. I brought many girls over to our home in high school through the years, always introduced to my parents as a friend, and always leaving the sleepovers with messy hair and wearing at least one article of my clothing.
Ultimately, most of my good friends growing up later came out as queer. To this day, not by any particular method or screening process, I have almost exclusively queer friends, and very rarely encounter straight people in intimate social settings at all, unless I am romantically involved with a straight man. The question I often receive is how I managed this. I have lived in small towns all my life. The town I lived in during middle and high school had a population of 315, and my graduating class was double digits. Additionally, I grew up a pastor’s kid in a homophobic synod, and was bombarded with reminders of the consequences of being out publicly my whole life, especially in the eras before marriage equality and other protections, when I’d watch my parents get in their car to vote against my rights, and the rights of my brother, who is gay as well. So where did I get the idea to do all that I did, or the strength?
My father, as both the spiritual leader of my home and my church, spoke a lot about faith to me when I was a child. Once he told me the best way to evangelize to others is to be kind and have unwavering values, to show non-believers that Christians are good people. He said if you preach or come off haughty, it closes people off and makes them uncomfortable. In his view, it was better to let them come to conclusions on their own about how beneficial Christianity would be in their life. If it was chosen and not forced upon them, it would stick. I agreed with this in my childhood, and still do, despite no longer aligning with that faith. If your way of life is good, and you, a liked and respected person due to your displays of kindness and care, are outwardly pleased by it, people will want to come to it. Ironically, considering everything, I believe that this concept shaped the philosophy that has led to my storied and successful queer life.
I was proud of who I am before I knew what that meant. I’ve always taken what I wanted and not been held back by shame, even if it was present within me. I have never understood social rules and I have failed to learn them every time I’ve tried, so it was hard to make me believe that I should be doing something else. I didn’t think being queer was wrong, so I did it, and in turn, I helped others discover it, too. For every girl I was with in my youth, I was the “first girl they’d ever been with.” Straight girls who have never been with women again (as far as I know) kissed me at parties and asked me questions about my sexuality, or shyly and curiously flirted with me as I told them they deserved so much better than their ex-boyfriends. Other closeted kids came out of the woodwork to be my friends, and we stood in strength together. I used Tumblr and Instagram to meet other queer people out there in the world, and learned more about queer history and culture, eventually bringing that knowledge into my school and local community in both word and deed.
I write none of this to assert that those who did not get to acknowledge or practice their sexuality until later in life did something wrong. I know that my experience is an outlier, in a small town or anywhere. Additionally, I understand that less privileged people than me would not have the ability to flaunt their identity in unsafe spaces as I often have. It was by no means perfect for me either. The incident at the band contest wasn’t the end of the effect of homophobia on my life; I faced bullying and harassment for my queerness, and for my heterosexually-promiscuous exploits as well, due to misogyny. The harsh reality is that I lost out on many opportunities and comforts because of how my identity and actions affected my reputation.
I write this to say is that, despite everything, I am so very proud to be an ambassador of a bisexual life. As bisexuals, specifically, we have lots of opportunities to walk between worlds. When we go out with straight people, when we chat with people while out at a non-gay bar, when we bring a same-gender partner to family events after bringing opposite-gender ones in the past, we have a unique mission and honor to show the beauty and joy of queerness. Maybe those “straight” people are actually closeted and may be inspired by us to come out, or maybe they are allies on principle but don’t have any queer friends, and we can offer them friendship. Maybe a covertly homophobic coworker whom you’ve made acquaintance with will find out you’re queer and second-guess their bigotry. Again, different situations and one’s own intersections of identity, along with their comfort levels, dictate the risk versus reward in these interactions. We never need to put ourselves in obvious danger, nor do we need to make ourselves “respectable” to straight people by watering down the radical aspects of our identities. However, all of these possibilities of showing the world who I am represent strength to me, and make up a large part of what I love about being bisexual.
Simply put: the bisexual life is a good life. Amen!
Solveig Stafford (she/they/he) is a singer-songwriter, healthcare worker, social work graduate student, and proud bisexual from the beautiful river valleys of Mankato, Minnesota, in the U.S.