Declarations
“Mom,” my sixteen-year-old daughter asked me one day, “did you know there’s a scale for sexual orientation, zero for exclusively heterosexual and six for exclusively homosexual?” A few seconds later she added, “I’m a three.”
This was not news to me. She’d struggled quite openly for the past two years to understand her sexuality. The surprise twist was my declaration. “I’d say I’m a two-point-five.”
“What? Shut up!” was her stunned reaction. I could see delight in her eyes even as her brain worked to catch up. It was the kind of delight one feels when admitted into the inner sanctum. The questions came flying: “Does Dad know? When did you know? Have you been with a woman?”
I explained that I’d had numerous “signs” of my bisexuality since college, when I reacted viscerally to a beautiful female classmate. I’d attempted to strike up a conversation with her, hoping for something I couldn’t identify, let alone articulate. And yet, I told my daughter, despite occasionally finding myself intensely attracted to a woman, I wasn’t ready to understand my bisexuality until I watched her coming to terms with hers. But even then, knowing the truth about myself, I waited until she seemed firmly settled in her identity. This wasn’t just to give her the space she needed—I was still having trouble coming out myself.
For 22 years I’d been married to a man and had never been with a woman. Some friends said I had no reason to come out, while others said I couldn’t know for sure I was bisexual until confirming it. They were wrong. I had to come out to be freed from the exhausting task of convincing myself I was straight. To feel the relief of understanding it was okay. And I did not need to touch a woman to recognize the surge of lust, just as a heterosexual man or woman doesn’t need to cheat to know he or she really wants sex with someone who isn’t a partner.
The trust my daughter showed in me, in baring her most personal struggles and fears, was what led me ultimately to be brave. For how could I repay such trust with secrecy, whether to her or to myself?
A few years later it was my daughter who gave me the key to yet another door. We were folding laundry, the sort of peaceful activity that promotes intimacy, when she said, “I don’t know, sometimes I just feel like there’s this guy in me.” This hit me like a rock. A guy in me. A guy in me. The reverberations spread out over years, both forward and back. Days afterward, I was driving her to the train station when I said, “I so love that you feel you have a guy in you. It makes me feel like I’m not alone.”
“Well, I didn’t mean really,” she said, scrolling through her smartphone. “I meant that when I’m attracted to a female, I’m a much more aggressive pursuer than when I’m attracted to a male.”
“Oh,” I said. I was crestfallen and confused.
“Wait a minute.” She shifted in her seat to look at me directly. “What are you saying? Ma, are you gender fluid?”
Gender fluid. The words hung for a long moment. I’d never heard that term before, and the tumblers of a lock were suddenly clicking into place. Here was a Rosetta Stone, to make sense of an awareness that had always been without language, had always made me feel outside the norm, a poseur. And it was this: I was living as a female, with the body of a female and the socially established trappings of a female, but was not nor had ever been exclusively female. Now I knew what to call it. Now it was named, acknowledged. Now I could declare my entirety, to my daughter and to myself.
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I’m so proud and pleased you put this out there and “testified”. And it’s all the sweeter that you came to understand something so significant about yourself with help from your daughter, and the way you gave her time and space to work out her own orientation before diving into your own. Elegantly written and from the heart, as usual–it’s the sound of liberation.