Bi the way
MANILA, Philippines - What I know about being bisexual is that it holds the same issues any person-to-person relationship brings: the same sacrifices, self-improvement, conflicts, and joys.
Bisexuality isn’t actually about sex. It’s not about being wild. It’s not about publicly making out with a girl friend at a party because your boyfriend cheered you on. Girls who kiss other girls for the benefit of boys are the bane of bisexuals. It cheapens what we’re about. It’s also not about threesomes — well, not all the time — and it’s not about promiscuity. Bisexuality is about loving someone as a person, beyond gender roles, beyond gender itself.
At this very minute — and hopefully for a long time into the future — I am in a healthy, beautiful relationship with a boy. The first kiss I’ve ever had, though, the first kiss that ever truly mattered, was with a girl. It was in high school, and we had been drinking, and it was as simple as her holding out her arms to me. I fell into that kiss head over heels. Sorry, boyfriend, but that was the sweetest and most innocent kiss of my life. It felt so true, and that was when I figured out love goes beyond the body, love goes beyond what you were taught you’re supposed to be.
She didn’t become my girlfriend, though. I went on to fall in love with another classmate in our super-Catholic all-girls school, writing bad poetry and convincing myself that this might just be a phase. I was proven wrong. In college, I dated around, mostly boys, but what stands out from that time in my life was the girl who used to show up at my house past midnight, claiming that her dorm down the road had locked her out.
“Why are you holding a pillow, then?” I asked her, as she stood forlornly at my gate. “Why do you have pajamas in your backpack?” I asked her again as she curled up in my bed. She asked me not to leave the room that night, and as I lay beside her, struggling with my feelings, I asked whatever god I believed in to send me a sign that this was okay, that this was possible. “I’m not going to mess with you,” I told her, as I lay firmly scrunched up on my side of the bed, “unless there’s a sign from God.”
At that moment — and I kid you not — a lightning bolt struck the breaker outside my house and the electricity went out. She turned to me in the dark and said, “Well, there you go.”
I fell in love and I fell hard. She would bring me chocolate fondue in between classes, and I wrote her poem after poem, getting better at it all the while. She was flighty and self-destructive and also the prettiest thing I had ever seen: the real stuff of poetry. She broke up with me on a football field, claiming she was in love with someone else, a boy, and that she was doing the right thing because maybe she was straight after all.
I remember walking home from school in tears. I sat on the porch and sobbed the way anyone post-breakup would, and my father came out and asked me what was wrong. “It’s this girl,” I wailed. “She’s not my friend anymore.” My father patted me on the shoulder and said, “I don’t think she was just a friend,” and he went on into the house. The pain you feel after breaking up is universal; whether it’s a boy or a girl, you have to hurt.
I let her go, and went off to be all right. The next boyfriend was a good one, sweet and solid, but we broke up for reasons that had nothing do with my sexuality.
The next person I had a serious relationship with was a girl. She was silly, spontaneous, adventurous, and hilarious — all these wonderful qualities that extend beyond gender. She had moved to the Philippines from Virginia, a tried-and-true lesbian, and she asked me to be her girlfriend simply by changing her Facebook status to “In a relationship with me.” I accepted, thinking it was a joke, but it turned out to be a very real love.
She would commute all the way from Las Piñas to Katipunan to hang out with me, and we would lie around in my room trading jokes and kisses. I encountered no resistance from our friends, not even from my parents, who must have figured out why she was sleeping over so often. To this day, I’m thankful they’re so cool.
Cooler than me, I guess, because I broke up with her for a boy I thought I was in love with. It also happened on a football field, and she turned cartwheels with me in the grass even though she knew it was over. To this day, she’s still my friend, and I’m thankful for that as well. The truth is that the girls I’ve broken up with have stayed friends, and the boys, maybe not so much. It’s not that girls are more emotionally stable, or that dudes are jerks, but it cuts to the core of how mature you are, and how you handle what you want to be attracted to.
Right now I’m dating a boy, and the love is so good that we’ve built each other into our plans for the future. A past boyfriend had this to say about my bisexuality: “It sucks that I’m competing not with 50 percent of the population, but with 100 percent.” My current love has no such fear. True, the right girl turns my head every now and then — my taste in girls is highly different from my taste in boys — but in the end, I’m with him.
It’s pretty basic, commitment. It should be the core of every relationship you have, be it with a girl or a boy. What I know about being bisexual is that it holds the same issues any person-to-person relationship brings: the same sacrifices, self-improvement, conflicts, and joys. I can honestly say that I’m a better person now than before, thanks to the men and women I’ve loved: I write better, think more, work harder to make a relationship good and true. It’s true that who you love changes who you are, and if you are lucky, for the better. Regardless of whether it’s a man or woman. Those in the Philippines who decide to settle down with the same sex, however, face bigger social problems: no way to marry, no way to insure their future family, no recognition from the big dumb machines that run our government. I hope this changes, however, and that people like me, for whom love knows no gender, have a chance at a normal life.
