This is a piece I wrote this year on a bisexual college student.
Kelley is agitated. Irritation runs through her from the bright pink and bleach- blond streaks underneath her short ponytail to her delicate plaid blazer, ruffles and all. She has a lot to say, but something is off. On the chalkboard next to her, Chinese characters are written in large print. She takes one look at it and gets up to erase what someone else has written underneath them: “Yo don’t speak your language.”
“Your language?” she says, wiping off the English words with a quick swipe of her hand. She’s careful to get every bit of white chalk off the board. She has no patience for intolerance. “What does that even mean? Your language, what is that? I’m really sorry, but I just can’t stand…. assholes.”
Kelley, a 26-year-old university student, has lived in both Newark and Wilmington for all of her life. She works three jobs, takes 18 credits and is a registered bail enforcement agent, or bounty hunter, in the state of Delaware. Her vice? Crushing on people.
She owns up to having a lot of crushes on men. And a lot of crushes on women. She is an aquality bisexual woman, or a bisexual who dates people based on who they are, regardless of gender. What she wants more than anything is to be taken seriously and to be understood.
Within the gay community, Kelley says bisexuality has many negative stigmas attached to its name. This is due in part to transitional bisexuals, or people who claim to be attracted to both men and women, because they are afraid to truly come out as gay or lesbian. For this reason, the classification is not always taken seriously among those in the LGBT, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, population.
“We get that kind of pat on the head, from the gay community like ‘Oh you’ll be gay one day,’ ” Kelley says. “And I want to punch people in the face and say ‘Yea, well maybe you’ll be straight one day.’ ”
She says she came out at the age of 20, during her first year at the university. However, she believes she was always attracted to both sexes, but wasn’t aware of what it meant to be truly bisexual. After being introduced to a bisexual girl one night at a poetry reading, Kelley says she began to re-evaluate her stance on sexuality.
“Three hours after meeting her, I was walking home with a friend and I started thinking, wait a minute…I’m so not straight,” she says. “I always had crushes on girls, as long as I can remember having crushes on men, I had crushes on girls. But that’s just my personality — I’m a very crushy person. I just don’t do anything about all of my crushes, because if I did, I’d be like, a hoe.”
Within a month of her sexual realization, Kelley says she began to date her first girlfriend. She had just gotten out of a four-year relationship with a boy, and was ready to embrace her newfound sexuality. She met her first girlfriend while playing in the marching band at the university.
“I was the brass drummer and she was the cute flute girl,” Kelley says, remembering her first bisexual relationship with an air of quirky nostalgia. “It was a very intense relationship, and after two and a half months, it kind of fell apart. Women date so much more intensely than men do, because we have strong emotional ties. When two women get together to date, I have personally experienced that it’s more intense because women are more active than men are when dating.
“From what I understand, we tend to settle down more than men.”
Kelley says she immediately came out to her mother, knowing that she would be
understanding. During a phone conversation, she revealed to her mom that she was dating a girl, and her mother’s response was “Oh that’s funny.” She says her mother was three hours late to work that morning, as Kelley did her best to explain how she stumbled upon her newfound sexual identity. Her mother was generally accepting and supportive, however, she confessed the fears she had for Kelley’s new lifestyle.
“She said, ‘It’s not that I don’t want you to date women, its just that I don’t want you to have to deal with what the world has to offer you if you date women,’ ” Kelley says. “She would just rather me date a guy because she wants it to be easier for me.”
Soon after, Kelley came out to her father, who, to her surprise, was accepting as well. The only person she hasn’t told is her grandmother, and she believes this is for the best.
“I don’t know her stance on gay and straight,” Kelley says. “But the only curse I’ve ever heard her say, in my whole life, is faggot.”
She laughs uncomfortably at what seems to really pain her, then jumps right back into her persistent rant, attempting to show she is impenetrable. Oftentimes, Kelley says it is difficult for her family to see her go back and forth between dating men and women.
“Its always kind of weird for your family, because they have hopes that you will be straight or you’ll end up with a guy,” Kelley says, smiling quickly at what she clearly sees as their ignorance. “But my big thing is that you have to be a good person, and I date splendid people, like amazing people that are wonderful. I just think that if communities were more supportive, we would have a lot less problems.”
Andrew Clark, president of HAVEN, the university’s RSO for students of all orientations and genders, says he believes bisexuals are misunderstood within the gay community, because many people feel they are being greedy by actively pursuing both sexes, or taking steps to transition into a homosexual lifestyle.
“Its so hurtful for bisexuals to encounter gay people who aren’t accepting,” Clark says. “Support from within the gay community is crucial, because if the people inside of it are saying bisexuals aren’t real, then why should people on the outside believe it?”
Jen, a bisexual university student, says she believes the idea of bisexuals being “greedy” is also often coupled with the belief that bisexual people withstand from monogamy. For this reason, she says many people who are attracted to both men and women often hide their sexuality.
“Many bi people don’t share their sexual identity because people don’t understand what it is to be bisexual,” Jen says. “It is so common for people to not understand that I am open to meeting either gender. Someone can be attracted to either gender at the same time; it’s not a mutual-exclusive thing. But there is also a difference between being bisexual and being non-monogamous. They don’t go hand-in-hand.”
Kelley says the plight of the bisexual population can only be understood in breaking down different communities of people, regarding their acceptance or misunderstanding of what it is to be attracted to both men and women. She says she feels straight women are almost always understanding of what it is to be bisexual. Aside from certain fears that a bisexual woman will try to sleep with them or hit on them, Kelley says bisexuals are more often than not well received by these women.
She says straight men accept bisexual women because they think it’s “gorgeous” or they may have hopes of taking advantage of the situation. Kelley says that is often a common misconception for those outside of the bisexual community.
“I deal with that all the time,” she says. “People think we’re oversexed or we’re sluts or whores. Some people think they have to date both sexes to be ‘truly happy’ or that we are always looking for that next person. I’m like, ‘ok, you just made me throw up in my mouth. This is my life we’re talking about here.’ ”
Gay men are often very supportive of bisexual women, she says. She believes this is because bisexual women do not pose a threat to homosexual males. Lesbians, however, are often very intimidated by bisexual women, Kelley says.
“No matter how you put it, lesbianism is a bit about being separatists and about being away from male power,” Kelley says. “They love women, but there’s some sort of power in removing yourself from patriarchy, and the fact that I am attracted to men, and I sleep with men absolutely frightens them.”
In the past, she says she has met lesbian women and hit it off with them, but upon revealing her sexual preferences, Kelley says she has been turned down. On one occasion, she says she was talking with a lesbian woman all night and had hopes of dating her.
“She said ‘Your nails are too long for a lesbian,’ ” Kelley says, “And I said, ‘I’m not a lesbian, I’m actually bisexual.’ And she said, ‘You just broke my heart.’– That was it, she stopped talking to me.”
Jen says she has run into the same issue in the past in regards to lesbian women.
“Absolutely, its those who are not as open-minded or willing to challenge the beliefs they currently hold,” she says. “I have friends that are lesbians that will not even entertain the idea of dating someone who is bisexual. It’s very, very upsetting.”
At the university, Kelley says she feels widely accepted by students and faculty alike. People in the 18 to 22 age demographic are very understanding of alternative sexualities, she says, despite the occasional rude comment here and there. However, Kelley says she has hopes that President Harker will push for full partner benefits for professors in the near future. This goal will only be achieved, she says, through the student body rallying to support alternative lifestyles. But first, these lifestyles need to be understood.
Clark says he believes mainstream media will help to bring a better understanding of bisexuality to society at large. Shows such as MTV’s “A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila,” featuring a young bisexual girl searching for her true love, have appropriately presented this type of a lifestyle, he says.
“The more its in people’s faces, they more accepting of it they will be,” he says. “They have to be. I’m not going to say whether or not I believe Tila is bisexual, because I really don’t know. But she was true to bisexuality. When bisexuals are properly represented like Tila Tequila, people can understand the bisexual experience.
“It’s about the person you fall in love with, regardless of their gender.”
Although Jen says she disagrees with media portrayal of bisexuality, she says she believes it is important to get the word about alternative sexual preferences out to the general population.
“When I was younger, and I realized I was bi, it wasn’t talked about,” she says. “Although the way it is portrayed isn’t necessarily amazing, teens now know what it means, so in a way, its good.”
Frustrations with the invisibility and misconceptions of what it is to be bisexual have inspired Kelley to write a book. Over the past year, she has done in-depth interviews with more than 60 bisexual people of all ages, races and genders across the country. She hopes that her research, when published, will give the public a greater understanding of this alternative sexuality. The last time any major research was done on bisexuality was during the 1980s. For this reason, Kelley says she believes society is in need of a skilled, in-depth examination of the topic, and bisexuals are in serious need of a support system nationally.
However, she says she feels bisexuals will always struggle with defining themselves. When dating a woman, she says bisexual women are assumed to be lesbians, and when dating men, they are assumed to be straight. For this reason, many bisexuals will just identify with whomever they are dating at the time, which proves troublesome for Kelley.
“Its always a fight to get the visibility,” she says. “Unless you’re holding the hand of a man and a woman when you’re walking down the street, most people aren’t going to assume that you’re a bisexual. This is even harder to fight when you’re in a committed relationship. I would rather people just assume that I’m a lesbian, because I’m more comfortable with being queer than I am with being straight, simply because there aren’t that many queer people. I feel they need a voice too, so I would rather stand up with them than stand with the straight community.”
Kelley says it is disappointing to her that bisexuals are not well received in the gay community, a place where they should be at ease and comfortable with people in similar situations. She says she believes suppressing one’s identity can prove to be ultimately damaging to his or her being, and feels that in light of homosexual relations becoming more mainstream, the gay community has chosen to outlaw bisexuals from the group.
“It’s an othering kind of thing,” she says. “The more you put another person down, the higher up you become. They always have to have someone that’s not okay, and bisexual and transgender people are becoming the target. If you let bisexual people be okay, then what’s next?
“People are truly afraid of this, and I think that just sucks.”
