The One With The First Queer Meet

There I was, sweating, fidgeting with my hands, contemplating about whether to attend a queer folk meet to discuss on our readings by delving in a bit deep into our sexualities.

For the most part, I was an out and proud queer icon in my campus, but, was I ready to indulge myself into a space I know I constantly had to think and rethink about? Perhaps, I visualized the whole scenario in my head as a way to understand what I am and why I am, it didn’t seem to clear.

I took my phone out to check the time and it was already 7p.m., the sun had set into the duskiness of the city’s traffic pollution, and I could hear the thumping of my heart grow louder and faster.

You see, being bisexual isn’t a trophy winning identity, everyone assumes it’s invalid on the face of sexual orientations, worse more when you’re situated on the throne of infidelity on that basis. So, evidently I wasn’t a big fan of a meet where my identity was assumed null.

I was the first of the attendees and the room was decorated with yellow, and purple fairy lights. There was a mirror attached on one of the walls, covering up the entire concrete space, everything about the place felt like a metaphor I was running away from.

7:15, and people began entering the small room located in the basement of our college building. To my absent surprise, the male members took up most of the population leaving me, my junior, a transwoman, and the host the only female participants.

The session began with the obvious and awkward self introducing our own selves, funny how the heteronormative notion of queer is pictured to be ever so confident and unbending, there we were, little balls of flesh fighting away our pangs of anxiety while trying to maintain eye contact with one another.

In that instance, quite weirdly however, it felt normal.

There we were a bunch of 15 of us discussing our “gay-me" (game) point with regards to the literature that liberated us. In our short parallel drawn conversations, there was a breath of Murakami, of Butler, of Gidlow, and of Sappho; with the inclusion of a few underground writers I seem to have forgotten.

Then, as conversations rose and fell came the devil of the evening, and perhaps, everyone’s nightmare; the coming out story.

It began with a heartfelt but supportive family story from one person’s mouth which soon leaped to the pit of another person’s journal of calamities; from accepting peers to aversion therapy, it did feel like a lot to take.

Suddenly, I witnessed myself drowning. Drowning in the depths of my own despair, was I ready to unravel my story to the world yet? Was I donning the iconic image I so was proud of after having represented myself as a bisexual? Or was it my internalized homophobia seeping through that I tried so hard to bury? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now.

"Deep breaths, deep breaths"

But after a while, it vanished, the dreadful pain on the left side of my head disappeared. I realized the people around me have all gone through what I have had, and yet, they were still there, sitting, waiting, probably even anticipating a positive outcome from the narrator’s mouth.

Maybe it’s conditioned, that we’re used to know and hear of gut wrenching stories of people from the community, that anything ushered with hopeful ending would either be to good to be true or a blessing.

I narrated the story of my bisexuality, shutting the voices off with a clean slate; I told them of how- like everyone else, it took me time to own the truth of my being, and the acceptance – like everyone else, is going to take time to own it as well.

#Queer, #Bisexual, #LGBTQIA, #LGBT, #Out