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The Laziest Coming Out Story You’ve Ever Heard
Adventures in budding bisexuality
Published in
8 min readMar 23, 2015
- A new friend told me that her number on the Kinsey scale went up this year after reading my book Women, about a lesbian love affair, and after watching the actress Allison Williams play Peter Pan in Peter Pan Live.
- Another friend emailed me: Ryan had heard I’m now open to dating women and he was like, “So what does that mean, what are you doing to meet women and date?” and I was like, “Oh literally nothing, I’m just like, inwardly identifying as queer now and am now open to being seduced by anyone, male or female.” “That is the laziest coming out story I’ve ever heard,” he said.
- I told this friend I would be using that anecdote in an essay. I asked her if she wanted me to use her name, or call her “a friend.” She replied, “A friend. I’m not out yet.”
- “Everyone’s bisexual!” This was me and a best friend’s party trick in middle and high school. It riled people up and we knew it. And by ‘people,’ I mean males. They laughed in our faces, thinking it a ridiculous claim.
- After my first relationship with a woman, I talk to that best friend on the phone. “Everyone’s bisexual, remember?” she said.
- The writer Ashley Ford interviewed me over the phone for Buzzfeed LGBT. To have the acronym LGBT even associated with my name is odd to me. I never came out as bisexual. I just wrote a book with a narrator confused about her sexuality. I asked Ashley why it was important to her to have “B for Bisexual” in her Twitter bio. She explained that because even though she’s in a relationship with a man, it’s still part of her. I asked her about coming out. “I never came out, I just started writing about it.” “Me too,” I told her.
- Which begs the question: is that a cop out? Someone told me it was brave. I disagree. I told her it felt passive aggressive. “I guess we’re thinking about it in different ways,” she said.
- The end of the Buzzfeed article quotes me saying, “I’m okay with the label bisexual, I guess.” It makes me cringe. I have issues with labels, yet don’t know what to do without them. Once I was dating a guy, and over his shoulder saw an email he’d written. “My girlfriend’s here for the weekend,” it said. I was immediately…
