#bisexualwriters

I grew up reading and watching books for girls. Drawn to books by women, and increasingly, strong feminist, lesbian authors. But the earlier novels that stayed in my mind and moved my fantasies and ambitions were still shaped for girls who would go on to become women in heteronormative nuclear families. Much later, I encountered poetry by lesbian authors (of whom I would later learn, Carol Ann Duffy was not lesbian but bisexual), books about lesbians. I was drawn to lesbian works but didn’t dare to watch them. In them, I felt I would come too close to seeds of something too much other, to be made visible to others. Even to my queer friends.

I had many queer friends, in university and thereafter. But I felt trapped anyway. In university, the seniors were queer and loving it, but they held a privileged position — untouchable in their elevated status. The more flamboyant and gay or lesbian they were, the more they held that status of exception: they could be anything they wanted and no one would hold it to them. And they defended that position well, with harsh cynicism and witty, holier-than-thou remarks at the non-queer majority.

It didn’t help that people closer to me rubbed shoulders with them, but confided in me their discomfort with them. Feminism came to me: to amount to nothing: in the practice of feminism amongst some individuals, I found scarring, violent, tendencies towards dominance and subjugation.

By university, I was well into ignoring my doubts about my own sexuality. I had dated a boy by then, I had crushes on boys, I shipped boys and girls in fanfiction, I stayed well away from girl-on-girl romances. I felt so strongly the male use of the female body, that I would not submit to indulging in or consuming media that celebrated the female body, except in the permitted instance of a heteronormative coupling: yes, I could not possess the female body from a female’s point of view, but I could do so with the male gaze as wingman. If only I had been less strict with myself, less Virgoian Moon, more Taurian Venus.