On Celebrating Change

A year ago today, I published my first blog post. Titled “On New Beginnings,” the piece explored the ways in which I’ve grappled with change throughout my life. In particular, I tried to unpack the reasons why I’m so often afraid to try new things and hesitant to end old routines. At the end of the post, I made a promise to myself: I may be terrible with change now, I wrote, “but I’m going to change that.”

The past year has certainly been full of changes. In the fall, I became an uncle when my sister-in-law gave birth to a beautiful baby girl named Natalie. In the winter, I stepped down from a year-long EMS leadership position I had held, and in the spring, I began working in a new neurobiology lab as I looked toward writing my senior thesis. Along the way, I made new friends, watched new movies, and even reevaluated certain long-held opinions and beliefs. I’ve tried my best to embrace each of these new or different experiences as they’ve come—to view the underlying change as an opportunity for growth, rather than a potential for failure.

Still, there’s one change I’ve been struggling with a lot this past year. Something I’ve been afraid to admit to myself is true and terrified to talk candidly about even with some of my closest friends. I’ve been reflecting a lot on this particular change lately and today, I think I’m finally ready to start transforming my fear into pride. I’m finally ready to keep the promise I made to myself a year ago as I share publicly for the first time that I’m bisexual.

Bisexual. It’s a term that can mean different things to different individuals. I identify as bisexual because I’m attracted to people of the same gender and different genders. In the past, I’ve had romantic experiences with both men and women, and in the future, I don’t see gender as being a barrier to starting a relationship with someone that I like.

It’s hard to say exactly how long I’ve known that I’m bisexual. The label is new for sure, but the identity and internal feelings are not. While I can’t point to a single moment that alone defined my sexuality, I can recall specific instances in my life that led me to my identity today. The earliest, I think, comes from sometime in elementary school, before I even really knew the term bisexuality existed.

My favorite actor in second grade was Zac Efron. When the movie High School Musical first came out, I told my best friend at the time that I wanted to be exactly like Efron’s character, Troy Bolton, when I grew up. I would be captain of the basketball team, play the lead in all the school musicals, and of course, date Vanessa Hudgens.

But by the time High School Musical 3 came out, the line between wanting to be Zac Efron and wanting to be with Zac Efron got a little blurrier. Did I actually find him attractive? I began to wonder. Did I admire him so much because he was a role model, or because I had a celebrity crush? The locker room scene in the final movie where Troy takes off his shirt right before singing “Scream” certainly didn’t help with the complicated feelings.

What made things especially confusing was that, on screen, I found Zac Efron to be attractive, but in real life, I wasn’t really attracted to any guys I actually knew at the time. Meanwhile, I had lots of crushes on girls in my classes. I imagined myself marrying a woman one day and having kids, just like all the male adults in my life had done. It was easy to convince myself that my feelings about men were just admiration or even jealousy, while my feelings about women were romantic.

Everything I was told by peers and adults about same sex attraction only further cemented this distinction in my mind. On my first day of middle school, I learned from an upperclassman in the restroom the single most important rule of the boys’ bathroom: always leave at least one urinal’s worth of buffer space between you and another guy, or else “everyone will make fun of you for being gay.” At the time, I was already having trouble making friends and fitting in. I didn’t want to give anyone an explicit reason to bully me. I took the urinal rule—and its implication, that being gay warranted being made fun of—to heart.

Most of the adults in my family were pretty accepting of the LGBTQ+ community, but coming from the Soviet Union, where homosexuality was expressly forbidden, they still had their own biases. The message I generally got at home was one that I think was pretty common in the early 2000s: we’re okay with homosexuality, so long as we don’t have to see it or interact with it directly. I adopted this same mentality over time, and as a result, chose to suppress the side of me that felt same sex attraction, in favor of the part of me that could pass as straight. I continued to do this even as I began to have more pressing romantic feelings toward boys I knew.

Seventh grade was an especially complicated time for me. My dad died at the beginning of the school year, which meant that I lost one of the biggest male role models in my life. A few months later, I had my first girlfriend, followed by my first heart break when we eventually broke up.

At the end of the year, I met, through a mutual friend, a guy from my town who went to a different middle school. We started texting pretty often and one day he asked me, in typical middle school fashion, if I had a crush on anyone. I turned the question around and asked him if he had a crush on anyone, to which he eventually replied that he did. He came out to me as gay that day and told me that he liked me.

I didn’t really know how to respond. He was the first gay person I had ever known. I didn’t have feelings for him, but that didn’t matter because I didn’t want to have feelings for him anyway. I told him that I was straight and that I wasn’t interested. After that day, we never texted again.

There’s few moments in my life that I would say I truly regret, but my reaction that day is definitely one of them. I had the opportunity, at the very least, to be an ally for him—to show him that nothing had to be different in our friendship just because he was more open about his identity. Knowing what I know now about how scary it can be to come out to someone, let alone in middle school, I’m ashamed to have disappeared from his life at a time when he probably needed my support most. It’s funny because I always used to think the term homophobia was kind of silly. Snakes and spiders are scary, but how can love, even in a nontraditional form, be scary? Looking back on it, though, I realize now that I had internalized so much hateful, anti-gay rhetoric as early as middle school that I was actually afraid to be this boy’s friend because it made the questions I had about my own sexuality all too real.

But middle school soon transitioned to high school, where people were generally more accepting of LGBTQ+ identities, though still not totally comfortable with them. I spent a lot of high school trying to prove to people that I was straight. I got questions about my sexuality all the time, I guess because I fit a certain stereotype. After all, I wasn’t athletic like guys were expected to be. I had always had a lot of close female friends and not as many male friends. I also generally had what were perceived to be slightly more feminine interests. Over time, I became obsessed with trying to defend the idea that a guy like me could be straight.

It wasn’t until partway through college that I finally realized this wasn’t something worth defending. My sophomore summer, I travelled abroad for an internship program. Early on, I became good friends with another guy on my trip who, one day, hinted at the fact that he liked me. He was very open about his sexuality and his self-confidence was contagious. I was torn because I still desperately wanted to be straight, but I was also starting to develop real feelings for him. I stayed up all night trying to decide what to do.

I was going to tell him I didn’t like him. I planned to explain that I was straight and that we should just be friends. I even mapped out how the whole conversation would go with a friend from back home. But the next night, when a group of us went out, instead of pulling him aside and reciting the speech I had practiced over and over again in my head, I ended up kissing him. When I got home, I felt both confused and excited. I stayed up the whole night again as I came to terms with the fact that, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I really liked the kiss. I really liked him. And I wasn’t really straight.

That summer, I became acutely aware of the differences between being with a man and being with a woman. When you kiss a guy in public, I soon discovered, people will stare at you. Some might even whisper mean things, as if you can’t hear or understand. I remember the first day I started dating my ex-girlfriend in high school. We walked laps around the high school building that morning before class, holding hands so that everyone would know we were together. In contrast, with him, there were certain streets it was better for us to not hold hands down, because it didn’t quite feel safe to do so at night. One day, when he and I danced together at a salsa club, another guy from our program came up to me and told me he was surprised none of the locals tried to beat us up for breaking traditional gender norms.

I think about that last comment a lot, not because I was actually hurt by it or thought it was true, but because it reminds me each time just how lucky I have it. My fear of coming out was fueled largely by internalized homophobia; at the end of the day, I was my own worst enemy when it came to coming out. But so many LGBTQ+ individuals around the world can’t come out because it is literally unsafe for them to do so—they risk being the victims of hate crimes and discrimination, or in some cases even being put in jail. My parents left the Soviet Union and carved out a new life in the U.S. so that I could have religious freedom and greater educational opportunities. In doing so, I realize now that they also gave me a life where I could be openly bisexual.

Ultimately, things between me and the guy didn’t last, and before I knew it, the trip was over, too. Coming home was strange because I had spent the last eight weeks of my life being out for the first time ever, and now back home, things were back to the way they had been before I left. I came out to a small handful of friends when I first got back, but by and large, no one outside of my trip really knew I wasn’t straight. On the one hand, there was something good in this. It was as if my trip had been a trial period for my new queer life; finally feeling more confident in my sexuality, I could now choose for myself how and when to actually come out to everyone else in my life. On the other hand, it was too easy to revert back to my old fears and remain silent about an identity I had worked so hard that summer to finally embrace.

I took the year that followed to reflect on my experiences. I asked myself whether I was truly bisexual or if I might be gay, and decided ultimately that I very much still felt attraction to more than just men. I went through cycles of being really proud of my bisexuality and cycles of being ashamed again. I came out to some friends here and there, but for the most part I just didn’t really talk about my sexuality. I tried to keep it in the back of my mind.

The hardest part about not being out was feeling distant from my family. Being bisexual was starting to become such a central part of my identity, yet my mom and brother knew nothing about it. I was afraid to come out to them because they had always known me as being straight. I thought back to how often they had even defended my straightness to other people. Less than a month before my experience abroad, a family friend asked me over dinner if I had a girlfriend, and when I responded “no,” proceeded to ask if I had a boyfriend. Before I even had time to answer, my mom and brother simultaneously burst out with, “Of course not! He’s straight!” They had known me as being one way for so long and I didn’t know how they would react to my new label.

Finally, in May, I came out to my brother. He was home for the weekend and I caught him one morning doing work on the living room table while no one else was home. I sat next to him for what felt like at least 5 minutes and pretended to scroll through my phone as I worked up the courage to say what had been on my mind for so long. In a sheepish voice, I finally asked, “Can I talk to you about something kind of personal?” And then I told him.

My brother was so supportive. As was my mom when I came out to her a few weeks later. In fact, pretty much everyone I’ve come out to up until now has been incredibly kind, sensitive, and encouraging. I know that probably won’t always be the case, but at least now I know I have plenty of individuals on my side to help me through the tougher times. I know for sure now that there are people who love and support me no matter, and that makes posting this reflection a whole lot easier to do.

I thought for a while about whether I wanted to write this post. I actually spent a lot of time watching coming out Youtube videos in preparation for writing this piece, and I began to question if I even had anything worth saying. There’s no new message in my story that hasn’t already been expressed by so many amazing people who came (out) before me. After all, I’m far from the first person to experience bigotry, heartbreak, internalized homophobia or any of the other themes that come up in my story. I didn’t want to write a cliché coming out post and I didn’t want to come off as attention-seeking or overly dramatic, but I did want an outlet to organize my thoughts and share an important journey with others who might benefit.

I decided, ultimately, to write this post because I realized that maybe the fact that my story feels standard or cliché is kind of a good thing. Being bisexual can feel so isolating at times, especially when you’re not out. Knowing that my story is not an anomaly—that I’m not strange or abnormal for having the feelings that I’ve had—is what has most helped me feel ready to come out. It’s my hope that by adding one more story out there, I can help at least one other person feel better about some part of themselves, whether it’s their sexuality or something else entirely.

At the end of the day, this post isn’t about liking men or liking women (though, to reiterate, I do like both!). Instead, it’s about learning to like myself again after years of being afraid that changing the label I use to describe my feelings will turn people away. Today, I’m finally ready to celebrate myself and the growth I’ve achieved.

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Tomorrow, Monday, September 23, is Celebrate Bisexuality Day (also known as Bisexual Visibility Day), an international holiday to recognize and support members of the bisexual+ community. To learn more about the holiday and about bisexuality more generally, check out this website.