Posts on ncod

Fifteen years ago this October, I started becoming aware that I was attracted to girls as well as boys. I still have my journal from that fall. The entries are rambling and melodramatic and tortured. They'd be ridiculous if they weren't so full of self-loathing.

Now I'm thirty, happily married to a man, comfortable with my attraction to both sexes, and, unfortunately, assumed straight by the average person on the street. I'm not whining; I'm well aware of the preferential treatment society and the law give me simply because my partner is a man, not a woman. I don't even have to come out.

But being bisexual is part of my identity. I've made peace with it, and I want people to be aware of it. Because my connection to my husband is so visible, so obvious, so easy, I've found it hard to combat the assumption that I'm straight. I worry that it's irrelevant. I worry that I won't be taken seriously.

This week, I found this personal essay on the Human Rights Campaign website, " Coming Out as a Happily Married Bisexual." Jesse Liberty, a bisexual man, writes:

In my mid-20s, I married a woman, and now, 21 years later, we are still monogamous and happy. The people we meet assume I am straight. This has always bothered me, but until recently I couldn’t see how it was anything but my own private business. Without really thinking about it, the closet closed around me.

Wow, I thought. That's totally me.

I'm not as brave as Jesse, to come out as universally and overtly as he describes. But for those who read this blog, I hope this post will help explain why I'll talk about my husband one moment and launch into GLBTQ issues the next, and why I'm so invested in writing books with queer main characters. (Not that there aren't straight supporters out there who do the same, e.g. the marvelous author Ellen Wittlinger. Thank you, straight supporters!)

So there you have it. I'm a writer, I'm a librarian, I'm bisexual. Happy National Coming Out Day!

I encourage you to check out the HRC's NCOD materials as well as Lee Wind's coming out links. There's tons of stuff on Lee's site, so do a find-in-page for "Coming Out?" to zero in on it. Author Brent Hartinger's personal essay is especially worth reading.

I spent some time this morning reading Walt Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," probably the first slow, proper read I've given it. It's beautiful. The rolling, wave-like rhythm, the image of the mournful bird singing by the ocean in autumn, the awakening of a poet's soul, the endless cycle of birth and death... Blah blah blah, Walt Whitman was a genius, blah blah.

My reason for sharing it today, though, is this stanza:

O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself—projecting me;
O solitary me, listening—nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you;
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night,
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous’d—the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.

The Destiny of Me is a play written by Larry Kramer, who was better known as a gay rights and AIDS activist than as a playwright. The play is about a young man grappling with being gay. This Whitman stanza is the epigraph.

When I was in high school, one of my older friends performed a portion of The Destiny of Me as his "dramatic interpretation" piece for forensics competitions. Though he didn't explicitly come out until years later, those Saturday performances in dingy classrooms, with their tiny audiences of high school and college students, were the beginning. At least, that's how they seemed to me, watching him whenever I could, wondering if I could gather the nerve to tell him I understood.

I couldn't, didn't. He went off to college, and except for a couple of notes and emails that talked around the subject, we never spoke of it. My friend is now out to his family and friends. He's happily (and legally—thank you, Massachusetts!) married to his husband. But I still feel regret that neither of us was brave enough to come out to each other in high school.

Tomorrow is National Coming Out Day. I encourage everyone, regardless of your gender/sexual identity, to take time in the next couple of days and come out in support of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise queer members of your community, your country, your world.

Don't be shy in asserting your belief in GLBTQ individuals' right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—equal rights in the workforce, in the community, and in the eyes of the law. By doing so, we create a more enlightened and accepting environment for everyone. We make it easier for the closeted teens of today to gather their nerve, come out, and embrace their destiny.

Catch this week's Poetry Friday round-up at Picture Book of the Day!

I'm playing catch-up with my book display photos (which are, I realize, probably more for my own archival benefit than anyone else's). Here's the one I took down this week...

...with some historical fiction, some mysteries, and some historical mysteries. Today, I put up this Halloween horror display...

...as well as this mostly realistic fiction display.

I'm unable to escape the irony of creating a book display for junior high kids with the heading "just be yourself," considering that it's hard enough to know yourself, much less be yourself, at any age—especially when you're in junior high. But hey, it's something to aspire to.

The "just be yourself"/"stand up for what you believe" display is full of books about individuality as it relates to exploring one's own identity and/or standing up for social causes. It also serves as an opportunity to include a larger-than-usual number of books with GLBTQ characters in a nod to National Coming Out Day on October 11.

ETA, 10/7/08:
Upon request, here are the titles I originally pulled for the individuality display: Stand Tall (Bauer), Walking Naked (Brugman), Born Confused (Desai), Crossing Jordan (Fogelin), Leaving Fishers (Haddix), Totally Joe (Howe), The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place (Konigsburg), Absolutely, Positively Not (LaRochelle), Peace Is a Four-Letter Word (Nichols Lynch), Going Going (Nye), Define Normal (Peters), That Fernhill Summer (Rodowski), How to Get Suspended and Influence People (Selzer), Stargirl (Spinelli), The Gospel According to Larry (Tashjian), That Girl Lucy Moon (Timberlake), Missing Abby (Weatherly), Adam Canfield of the Slash (Winerip), Make Lemonade (Wolff), The House You Pass on the Way (Woodson), and Am I Blue?: Coming Out from the Silence.