By Alexandra Rae
You feel it first at seven, this fluttering of feelings you cannot explain. Two girls, both older than you, play with you and your friend at the park. One of them has an undercut and a silver ring on each finger; the other wears their straight black hair in a messy half-up, half-down style and claims to be sixteen. You won’t remember her name or how you ended up crossing the jungle gym with her or what her face looked like, except for the bejeweled septum piercing peeking out from her pale nostrils, gleaming in the midafternoon sunlight. Your friend wandering off to find boys to play with, the tattoos you thought were Sharpie drawings on each of the girls’ arms, the one with black hair holding you under her t-shirt so you wouldn’t fall off the rope hammock some other teenagers kept pushing, a bra the color of carnations, the warmth of her breasts against your face: what you do remember. She called the one with the undercut her girlfriend, but you heard girl / friend. You didn’t know closing the space between these words was possible. As your friend’s mom drives you home, away from the park, away from the hammock, you see the girls kiss at the top of the wooden castle, two princesses rewriting their fairytale. Something in you stirs. You want. You wait.
Gay: a word you learn young. And to not be it. You will hear the boys at school stick it like a shiv into each other. To be gay is to be a fag; to be a fag is to be weak; to be weak is to be a pussy; to be a pussy is to be a bitch; to be a bitch is to be a girl. And even the girls fear being gay, gathering themselves between the rows of the locker room, forming a panopticon of flesh and white underwear to look for wandering eyes. What they reject is not femininity but masculinity, and gazing at breasts or thigh gaps was an act of masculinity; of gayness. You learn their code and teach yourself to do the same, to watch out for girls looking at your naked body. It becomes harder to do with your eyes always on your own feet, not wanting to look up for too long.
You start to form crushes on any boy with brunette hair in middle school. Your panic over something being wrong with you fades away. Johnathan would do.
You will cover your walls in One Direction posters and smother your lips in red lip gloss to practice kissing Louis Tomlinson in your diary. You will wear a different scarf every day and become known for beating the boys in kickball at recess, a neon-leopard tail flying in the Tennessee wind as you reach home base. You will be made fun of for reading so much and not care. At night, you will dream of the Twilight wedding scene, making all your free throws at the next game, British boys, a bra the color of carnations.
Not quite fourteen, and now you know what sex is. Health class covers the hetero version of things (because what else was there to assume?) and gives everyone pamphlets on changing bodies, hygiene tips, and what intercourse is. You started your period almost five years ago, so you skip right to the section on “Intercourse 101.” A series of medical diagrams shows what happens when the bee truly pollinates the flower. You are the flower meant to be broken into. A part of you fears it; a part of you wants it, this breaking. You place the pamphlet on the desk and accept the candy bowl being passed around the class. It is Friday. You have a sleepover at Lily’s tonight. You choose a cherry lollipop and watch the clock on the wall. When the bell rings, you smile at Johnathan before you leave.
Friday night is pizza, Pepsi, jumping on Lily’s trampoline, petting the golden retrievers, braiding hair, lesbian porn. A girl you know from math class brings up the pamphlet and starts making fun of the way the vagina looks on its glossy pages. You laughed with everyone else. Then real-life vaginas are the subject of discussion, non-glossiness and all. The way they look is gross, the way they smell is gross, the way they will one day cry blood is gross. You pull your oversized t-shirt over your knees, hoping no one can see the outline of the pad you’re wearing underneath your thin flannel pants. Lily grabs her iPad and you are relieved, thinking she’s going to start queuing up music videos to watch like you usually do at her house. Her glasses reflect the screen glowing beneath her, and it’s here she looks like an evil wizard to you, her mischievous smile growing wider as she brews up something in her cauldron that makes you feel sick. She tells everyone to come sit by her. When she turns the iPad around to face the group, she is already laughing. From the YouTube search bar, you see girls kissing girls typed in. Between everyone’s snickers and ohmygodwhataretheydoingthat’ssogay, you hear wet smacks and fake moans. Lily turns the screen to type something else in. When it’s flipped around again, a real vagina is in front of you. Another girl’s hand appears and disappears inside it. The girls at the sleepover are hysterical now, screaming WHAT THE FUCK? LESBIANS ARE SO WEIRD! EW! Lily thinks she hears her mom coming downstairs and exits the video right before she comes. The girls have to cover their mouths to hold back their laughter, and you are so so quiet.
You liked the way boys rubbed your back when they hugged you. You also liked the way girls held your hand on crosswalks, at the mall, school dances: gentle, but firm. You start to realize, but do not accept, the possibility of wanting both.
You see a girl in the bookstore with long auburn hair you wish you could touch and immediately leave. You see a boy with the most incredible smile make your coffee and are too afraid to say anything other than Thank you. A girl at Walmart, testing out liquid eyeliners on her hand. She buys the same one as you. Boy, cross-country team. Girl, red light in your hometown (you never see her again). Boys, many of them, pulling through the drive-thru at your job. Girls, many of them, pulling through the drive-thru at your job. On TV, sidewalks, your mind.
Repression is an art form. It’s one you learn well.
Bisexuality: sexual or romantic attraction towards men and women, aka the beauty and curse of desiring both.
You think of bi things: bicycles, bilateral mastectomies, bikinis, bipeds, bilinguals, binaries, biannual meetings, bipartisan efforts, the bifocals your grandmother wears to sew, biology (your least favorite science class), bipolar disorder, biceps, Bible. You.
By the time you are eighteen, your closet is a fortress.
You say goodbye to your small hometown after high school. You flee to Pittsburgh, where you want to learn to be a writer. Pride flags hang proudly from every building on your urban campus. Still, nothing.
Queerness, your shiv; what you learn to conceal.
You hear it called a “phase,” that it’s not real, that it’s for people who are confused. You apply this logic to yourself. The conclusion: you’ve been confused for a very long time. Too long to be a phase.
You think of saying something. Most of your friends are queer or women themselves: you know they’ll love you for who you are. Why imprison yourself in this silence? You lie in bed, lie to yourself, lie to everyone around you. You tuck your knees to your chest and sob, answerless to the question of this shame, the origin of your hidden queerness.
You go on a few dates with men. This is good. You can be seen embracing this half of yourself while the rest of the world believes it is a whole.
Purple, Pink, Blue. Colors you loved at one point or another in your life. Just not all at once.
That summer in New York. All those late nights spent in underground queer clubs, glitter and chaos unfurling around you like a ribbon, like a gift. That’s when you knew what you were wasn’t a mistake.
You turn twenty-two. You look in the mirror and, finally, can say: My love is unbound, two-fold onto the world and the people in it. I am a bisexual woman. I have been, for a very long time. My queerness is not a shiv but a flower, learning to open on its own. It is as real as I am.
You are terrified, but you do it anyway.
I uncloset myself for myself. I’m doing it anyway.
Alexandra Rae is from Ohio in the U.S. She is a submissions reader for Narratively and the editorial assistant for Brink Books.
