1993
From one who knows.
So, you want to be a rural midwestern bisexual teen, eh? Well, you've come to the right place. Now, as you know, no one can exactly instruct you on how to live your life. You know that? Well, of course you do. But part of the midwest experiences is trying desperately to find someone to live your life for you. So here's what you do...
The first people that you desperately want to control you are your peers. Groupthink. Yes, it's all right there. All these fellow Nebraskan boys and girls out here on the plains. They can play dodgeball better than you, so surely, they must have the keys to knowledge. So you seek them out. You soon learn that most of the insults these people are hurling at each other while they play dodgeball better than you center around being attracted to your sex. You puzzle this out and figure that something is amiss because, sure, you are attracted to your own sex Ð but you're attracted to the other one too. So you can't be a -- dare I say it -- FAG! So let's play dodgeball and just forget that an equal number of the boys and girls trip your trigger your trigger. Better yet, just look at the other sex and space yours off. Oh-oh, you haven't screamed Ôfag' today, you'd better do it or someone might get wise...FAG!
Getting sick of the mundane world of screaming fag and
violently throwing balls at other people, you turn to the television. It becomes too
difficult to hang out with a whole crowd of people because you find from time to time that
you're looking at the wrong person too long. "What the hell are you looking at?"
They say. And excuses are hard to come up with for that one. So television is the next
step. You still notice that both the men and women on the TV turn up in your dreams. Here
as well, people insult each other by hinting at the possibility that they might be gay.
Again, you try to puzzle it out. Am I gay or what? I must be imaging things. Or maybe I'm
sick. You can pick out one TV show at any given time that has a gay character in it, so
you catch that one every week to see if you feel like that person. Generally not, but you
can certainly sympathize. But this is one character, on one channel, one night out of
seven. That's a really small number of people even when you think about it in terms of the
whole world. Plus, that's one character saying it's okay, but everyone else says it's
really bad news. Even the character who says it's okay is always having trouble with it.
Meanwhile, your mother has been carting you off to church every week for the last 13+ years. You have never really gotten into it, but you decide that if it's been around for 2,000 or so years that there must be something to it. You throw yourself in with both feet. You read the bible every night, looking for parts about being gay when there's no one around. You know they must be in there somewhere because religious people seem to hate them so much. You pray that god will let you in on why you are attracted to both sexes or to just make you stop being attracted to yours. "I can serve you much better if I'm not so confused, Lord," you say. But it doesn't stop. Both Dan and Suzi's butts are equally exciting. If it was just Dan's butt you could say, "Well, I'm gay." And while it may be hard to deal with, at least you know what it is.
Meanwhile, church stuff continues. Going to mass, to
confirmation classes, having long talks with your priest -- never bringing up the subject
of sex, but just trying to make sense out of religion as a whole. You watch your fellow
parishioners go to mass and leave church and the be the biggest hypocrites in the world --
constantly praying for forgiveness and then being the most blatant bigots.
Finally, the church's inability to even address your problem drives you away. You float back to television for a while, but it's the same as it was before. So one day you're in the library doing a paper for school and you happen through the psychology section. Your wandering eye happens to catch several books on sex. You've heard of Freud, so you pick out one of his books, looking guiltily up and down the aisle first. Then you pull out an Erik Erikson and the first page you open it up to says: BISEXUAL. You freak and slam the book shut. Your heart is racing. You're no fool, you know what the word means. Your worst fears, you're actually what you felt like you were! Someone walks by and you pull the book to your chest so they can't see the title. You sandwich the two books between your books on a mining town in Colorado and find the most secluded reading carol in the library and start reading, looking up every ten words or so. You tsart reading about a natural homosexual period during which boys play at sex with other boys. Okay, fine. You read on about the phase of bisexual confusion which is a period between the onset of puberty wherein an early teen is attracted to both sexes and this is confusing. Then it goes on to talk about how this is all natural and when puberty kicks in you'll be totally and happily heterosexual.
Well, this is wonderful! You are thrilled! What friends
and religion couldn't take care of in several years of confusion, the wonder sciences of PSYCHOLOGY
took care of in less than a page. Psychology becomes your new best friend. You pledge your
life to this savior of yours. You read Rollo May and both Freud and Jung and the rest.
They turn you on to Nietzsche and Locke and Hume and Descartes. And you read and read and
read, checking every day for that first pimple, surely the sign to the end of this damned
period of bisexual confusion.
Suddenly, several books later, you're 18 and have a face full of pimples. Only now it's worse, instead of just being attracted to both sexes, you're lying awake at night -- your head a sea of genitalia. You go through a few heterosexual relationships, never telling them that you feel this way. This deceit ends up killing your good relationships and fostering usurious ones.
You become more and more miserable. Just waiting for that fateful day when they will hand you that absurdly worthless high school diploma and you will be free to flee the midwest, screaming at the top of your lungs.
Hang on tight, Midwestern Bisexual Teen, the road to graduation is a rough one.
BVI