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I’m Here
All my life I’ve known I was “creative” and “different.”
Only recently have I realized that I’m both neurodivergent and bisexual.
In my youth, as I struggled with drugs, alcoholism,
depression, and underemployment, it never crossed my mind that I was neurodivergent—not
that the term existed then.
Even after I was diagnosed with an Anxiety Disorder some
ten-plus years ago, I didn’t make the neurodivergence connection. It was only
as my ex and I began coming to grips with our
kid’s autism that I began to recognize many of her autistic qualities in
myself and other members of our family.
And it’s only in the past year or two, and only with my
daughter’s help, that I’ve come to realize I’m bisexual.
I’ve known I was attracted to women since age
five, when my mom took me into the powder room at B. Altman, where I gazed with
open mouth as ladies touched up their lipstick, fluffed their hair, and
adjusted how their bodies fit into their dresses. I was dressed in a wee suit
with short pants and a bow tie. Two of the ladies picked me up and called me
handsome. A lady kissed me. I smelled flowers as she enveloped me in a hug. A
deep hunger was born in that moment. (I know. That sentence is gross.) Years
later, in college, as I watched the adoration sequence during my first viewing
of Fellini’s 8 1/2, I recognized my own experience of awakening.
Yet for all those years of knowing I loved women, I didn’t
understand that the love I felt for male friends could also be a romantic attraction.
I remember writing a short story about a failed connection
between two male high school friends. Thinking I was another D.H. Lawrence, and
that my hermetically sealed tale was secretly ripe with deep meaning and
profound feelings, I shared the story with my peers in the graduate creative
writing program where I was hiding to avoid growing up.
A colleague in the program, who was a far better writer than
me, and an out gay man, disdainfully labeled my work “another failed male
bonding story.” I thanked him for his honesty and because his ability to use
words that way amazed me, but I didn’t understand why he didn’t understand—because
it was I who didn’t understand. (Understand?)
And so the decades have passed.
At this point in my life, being single works for me, and,
after two marriages, I have enough to get on with, just working and being a
dad. So why even share these fragments and evasions? Surely who I find
attractive is of interest to absolutely no one.
Except that Fascists in my country are drawing lines,
turning back the clock on human rights and human decency, and I’ll be damned if
I’m going to sit silently warming my feet at the hearth of some late-recognized
private truth.
If they want to outlaw queerness and Blackness and ovaries and pretty much any identity other than Ward or June Cleaver, then they’re not just a threat to humanity and a wrong turn in the arc of history, they’re my enemy to fight. I’m right here, motherfuckers.
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