Cortigiana Onesta

I really wanted to post this yesterday, in honour of National Coming Out Day however I am on a mini-vay¹ and I am doing quasi-vacation like things. Like taking as many naps as I want, drawing, and otherwise relaxing.

This entry is extremely long, and extremely personal. Probably one of the most revealing things I’ve ever written about myself. If you can sit through the whole thing, I think you’ll see me in a completely different light.

There are tons of footnotes in this entry, mostly because I do not want to abuse parenthesis and brackets. You’ve been forewarned.

I am bisexual. I am not a “proud” bisexual, but I am bisexual. Before you start pelting me with rotted fruit or lit torches, let me explain why.

I do not believe that I was ever straight. Being bisexual is all I’ve ever known. And just like (most) straight people are not specifically proud of being straight, I am not specifically proud of being bisexual. It’s all I’ve ever known. I am no more proud of being bisexual than I am having freckles, or small hands. It’s just a part of who I am. And while I am proud of myself AS A WHOLE, I am not proud of individual aspects of my being. Much like I love having black eyes, I also love being bisexual. I just find proud to be the wrong adjective.

That being said…

Lets start at the beginning.

I was not exposed to other children when I was young. I was exposed to my grandparents, my mother, and my mother’s friends. My first experiences with other children came in elementary school. I started kindergarten at age 4², I could already read and write, and my vocabulary was at a “late second grade” level. The only reason I was not skipped to first grade was due to age.

As you can imagine, these factors made me socially awkward to say the least. I preferred the company of adults to children, and women to men. At 4, of course, I thought nothing of this. I latched onto females, and greatly ignored males. Some of my first crushes were on female friends of my mother.

That changed when I hit second grade. I have always had horrible handwriting.³. My teacher decided that a boy with beautiful handwriting would tutor me and my handwriting would improve⁴. The boy had cornsilk hair, crystal blue eyes, and a wide smile. And so marked my first “feelings” for a boy. I also faked being bad at math, since he was the best math student in my class. I did eventually get caught (as the teacher found it suspicious I went from an A in math to a D), and in a fair amount of trouble.

As I got older, I had more crushes on both sexes. I didn’t think anything of this until I was 8 or 9 and laying around in my room. I overheard my mother on the phone discussing sexuality. It was at this point I first heard the word “heterosexual”. And I thought it meant “lesbian”⁵ mostly because of the context it was used in. “Look, really it’s no one’s business that I’m heterosexual”.

It was the fear of my mom being a lesbian⁶ that took me to the library⁷ under the guise of wanting to read hardback Babysitters Club. I started reading up on human sexuality at my local library. And not only did I learn my mother was not a lesbian, I learned she held no attraction for women at all.

And the world fell out from underneath me, as it was at this point I realised that I was not “normal”. And that after reading what I had just read, I would never be normal. And I couldn’t pretend. One trait that I have always had is that I refuse to be something I’m not. I knew that day, that I would never pretend to be straight. And I never have.

I put my sexuality out of my mind for awhile, as other changes had started to occur. In the fourth grade, at the tender age of nine, I developed breasts. Not “Mom I need a training bra” breasts either, “Mom my tshirts are tight up top” breasts. At the time (early 1994), a girl going through any type of puberty was rare. My doctor was sure my period would start soon, and I would have my growth spurt.

My period, nor my sorry excuse for a growth spurt⁸ didn’t come for another 3 years, however. The only thing to make an appearance was my sex drive, the summer I was 10.

I was introduced to porn, by a male friend of mine⁹ who was 2 years older. Our mothers were best friends. He was spending the night once, and methodically searched for my mother’s boyfriend’s porn. We found 2 videos, and a whole lot of magazines.

Porn was a wonderful experience for me. I knew what sex, condoms, and all that were¹⁰ but I did not know the mechanics. Porn taught me where the penis went¹¹. At one point, while watching a video, my hand wandered south and I discovered my clitoral hood¹². About 10 minutes later I discovered orgasms. A few days after that, I discovered vibrating objects¹³. This discovery was a turning point in not only my sexual awakening, but my life.

I developed what I can only describe as an addiction to masturbation for the next few years. In the summer it was 10 or 11 times per day, to the point where I could have an orgasm on mental command while masturbating. I did not need any visual or mental stimuli. During school, it was several times from when I came home until I went to bed.

The summer I was 12, I discovered a porn novel. I can’t even call it Erotica. It was honestly a terrible book, and completely unbelievable but it did it for me.¹⁴. Both my mother and her boyfriend left for work around 3, I can still remember laying in bed on the warm days reading the book and mastubating non-stop through the whole novel and then starting again only stopping for dinner. I would put the book away around 12am before they returned home and masturbate to the thought of it.

Why is this relevant to my bisexuality? Because the thoughts I was masturbating to were all about the women. I would think about how they sounded, how they looked, how they felt, how they smelled, how they tasted. I would read the lines and imagine I was watching them. The male was completely irrelevant. To this day, I do not fantasize about men when I masturbate. I will mention that this does not apply to when I am having sex with a man, the man is COMPLETELY relevant then.

This went on for awhile, even after I lost my virginity in 9th grade (age 13). I masturbated thinking about women, but had feelings for boys. It was around then I started to question whether I was only sexually attracted to women, or if I could feel emotional towards them as well.

About a year or so later, bisexuality became trendy. Many bisexuals hated this trend. Me? I loved it. Yes, many of them were posers, but at that point I just wanted to be with a woman for the first time. I did not care if she regretted it the next day or was just experimenting.

That year I kissed my first girl, and someone took a photo of it. I hung the photo in my Catholic high school locker and the entire school knew within twenty minutes. I became known as the only bisexual in my school. Some people thought it was awesome, some were horrified, and some had already realised it (and didn’t care) when I hung pictures of Alicia Silverstone in my locker 2 years earlier. But this was it, this is when I truly came out. If I was asked I said yes, I liked girls.

The administration was not happy and demanded I take it down and I was “forbidden” from speaking of women. I told them when they took down pictures of boys kissing girls from lockers, I would remove my photo. When girls speaking of boyfriends in the hall were forbidden, I too would stop talking. While it was a Catholic school, they did hate when they got called on equality issues and the photo was allowed to stay the rest of my high school career. At this point I still had not had romantic feelings for a woman, merely sexual.

Bisexuality got less trendy, and there were no more girls to kiss for awhile. The timing was good, as I went through some hard times. My mother and her boyfriend split after ten years, we moved, I met new people, had my rebel phase, had uterine surgery, and then finished high school.

In 2002, a year out of high school, I met Isabelle¹⁵. I don’t know what there is to say about Isabelle other than she was wonderful. I didn’t know what to do with my hands when I was around her, I was completely nervous. I bought her a pair of purple Janis Joplin style glasses, that to this day, I can still close my eyes and see her in. Isabelle had an off/on girlfriend so I knew it would never work in the long run. But I enjoyed her while I could. We had something so minor I don’t even know that it would qualify as a fling, but it meant the world to me. We had sex¹⁶ and it was pretty intimate. For me, sex with a woman isn’t about orgasms or penetration, but it’s an emotional experience. While orgasms can and do occur, they aren’t important. The whole experience was more erotic than emotional, and I still questioned whether or not I was capable of loving a woman or just lusting for one. I got tingly with Isabelle but nothing I could describe as love or even “really really like”.

After Isabelle, I had a long (voluntary) dry spell with women. It was in early 2007 I met Ella¹⁷. I met Ella on a lesbian/bisexual personals site. I felt something draw me towards her. She was beautiful and her profile was nice, but it wasn’t just that. I could not explain this incredible pull I felt. So I paid $9 for a subscription, and got her email address.

Ella and I emailed back and forth off and on for several months, as she was a) shy b) extremely busy with university c) dating a guy. She was a photographer, also taking some Fine Arts courses. And there was just something about her. I held out hope she would eventually have time to meet me. And one morning, when I was up uncharacteristically early, she did. She had broken up with her boyfriend recently and I knew it was time to act. I convinced her to skip class and meet me by promising to buy her waffles at Waffle House. And so we met at Waffle House, and I ate 2 chocolate chip waffles with her¹⁸. We hung out the entire day, to the point where she was late meeting her mom for dinner. We talked more frequently after that, started spending 1-2 days a week together. It wasn’t easy, as we lived about an hour apart and both had commitments, but we made it work. I liked her, a lot.

I knew that I was falling for her the first time we kissed. I was spending the night (as a friend, her parents did not know she was bisexual) and neither of us could make a move. Eventually though, when all the lights were off and we were both drowsy, it happened. And I felt beautiful, and understood. We spent a lot more time together after that night, and soon after we were intimate. I don’t know that there was ever a time in my life where I was that happy.

Unfortunately, the relationship was ill fated due to her not being out, and her parents expecting her to date men. They were getting suspicious of how much time we spent together. It worked out for the best, as I had ended up needing to relocate cross country shortly after our break-up.

Before my relationship with Ella I had identified to people (when asked) as bisexual with a preference for men. I would then elaborate saying that I had sexual feelings towards women but both sexual and romantic towards men. Turns out, I just hadn’t found the right woman to feel romantically about aside from minor crushes as a child.

Ever since Ella, I am 100% confident identifying as bisexual. Just turns out I’m very picky about the women I fall for.

1. I got that term from a book about 15 years ago, started using it, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what book it was [↩]
2. Everyone else was already 5, or turning 6. [↩]
3. To this day, my handwriting is not what you’d consider “feminine” or “good”. I have unique, distinctive handwriting that I like but I will not wax poetic about how that’s more important than readable [↩]
4. it didn’t [↩]
5. While I had heard gay, straight, queer, lesbian, and dyke I had never heard the terms hetero, homo or bisexual. [↩]
6. she was in a long term relationship with a man and my fear mostly stemmed from not wanting them to break up [↩]
7. At this point, Internet was not really in homes yet. AOL 2.5 didn’t come for another 4 years [↩]
8. I went from 5′1” to 5′3” and then slowly made it to 5′5” over the rest of high school [↩]
9. who I happened to have a crush on [↩]
10. I learned “where babies come from” at 6, and about STD, the pill, etc around 10 [↩]
11. I hadn’t really discovered my own vaginal opening at that point [↩]
12. I never really discovered my glans clitoris and to this day I do not like when it is touched. Hood stimulation only please! [↩]
13. In the form of the Squiggle Wiggle which to this day I will still maintain can be one of the most intense clitoral vibrators [↩]
14. The book was called Her Sister’s Husband and to this day, I still use the scenarios in that book to masturbate. I would love to get my hands on a copy. I also discovered a book called Helen’s Insecurities that I remember, but do not use as “material” anymore. [↩]
15. not her real name, for obvious reasons [↩]
16. I have not had the urge to engage in penetration or oral sex with females, there are other ways to have sex and I and my female partners have been happy with it so far [↩]
17. again, not her real name [↩]
18. Strangely enough, I just found the shirt I wore to meet her yesterday afternoon [↩]