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Oops, I Forgot to Come Out: On Bisexuality and Carrie Brownstein

I admit that I can’t claim to have been influenced or shaped by Sleater-Kinney or riot grrrl overall. I’m a little young and a little not cool enough-but I was aware of The Woods in 2005 as a sophomore in high school and the song “Modern Girl.” So something like nostalgia struck me when I saw Carrie Brownstein‘s memoir, Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl, and I knew I needed to devour it immediately.

What I was expecting was standard memoir fare: childhood tribulations, riot grrrl retrospectives, girl band ups and downs, stories of touring and concerts and hookups and drugs. What you get from Carrie is some of that, yes-the way she writes about her mother’s anorexia is particularly raw, and her experience in Olympia during the riot grrrl movement and the Pacific Northwest overall deserves its own space in a cultural anthropology reader. What I wasn’t expecting was her endearing neuroses, the way she wrote about disappearing through music, finding her family in Sleater-Kinney and how the band became a living, breathing entity.

But the pages that Carrie dedicates to her Spin magazine outing hit me hardest. At the time, Spin was the largest national publication to have covered Sleater-Kinney, and an exciting music photoshoot and interview turned into a public outing before Carrie had the chance to even explore what she would even come out as.

After the Spin article was published, Carrie received an awkward phone call from her father (who would come out himself years later). He asked if she had something to tell him, referring to Spin’s spilling of Carrie’s brief relationship with her bandmate, Sleater-Kinney frontwoman Corin Tucker. Carrie was at the young and experimental age of 22.

“I felt like the ground had been pulled from underneath me… If you haven’t spent any time deliberately and intentionally shaping your narrative, if you’re unprepared, like I was then, then one will be written for you. And if you already feel like a fractured self, you will start to feel like a broken one. That’s how I felt the day I was outed: splintered and smashed. I had not yet figured out who I was, and now I was robbed of the opportunity to publically do so, to be in flux.”

Sleater-Kinney in 2002Photo by Anthony Pidgeon/Redferns

The bi coming out experience is its own kind of unique, mostly because the bi experience is one that is often shrugged off by both the straight and the queer community. In a 2013 study from the University of Pittsburgh School of the Health Sciences, researchers found that “Overall, respondents were generally negative in terms of their attitudes toward bisexual men and women, with almost 15 percent of the sample in disagreement that bisexuality is a legitimate sexual orientation…Of note, respondents who identified as gay or lesbian responded significantly less positively toward bisexuality than those identifying as bisexual, indicating that even within the sexual minority community, bisexuals face profound stigma.”

The chief researcher on the study said that “Having hard data to back up why a bisexual person might feel the need to be secretive about sexual orientation, something that can lead to higher depression and many other negative health outcomes, is very useful to people trying to fight stigma and marginalization.” The stigma against the bi experience makes the process of coming out that much more complicated. So I felt my heart break when I read that Carrie was forced to confront her sexuality and claim it after it had already been confronted and claimed for her.

This is where I’m lucky: I have a handful of really great friends who, after I started hooking up with women, were supportive, unsurprised, curious, excited for me. I have understanding and funny siblings who also don’t care who I have sex with as long as I’m treated well. I have progressive parents. I have every reason to have had a safe and pleasant coming out experience; only I never let myself have it.

There are myriad reasons for this, enough to be their own essay. I chose to go to college in London, a city that—in my personal experience—serves as a queer-friendly mecca where I could and did spend weekends at a bar called GAY, where my sexual orientation could be introduced as quickly as my first name, where I would meet strangers who would become best friends who never knew me any other way. In those London years, one of my best friends, a lesbian, would correct me when I identified as bisexual. “I’d actually say that maybe you’re just bi-curious.” A perfectly fine label, but inaccurate for me.

In my last job working as study abroad program coordinator at the University of California, I wrote and received a $5,000 grant for marketing and outreach to LGBT+ students. Upon leaving the job, I asked my colleague, a gay-identified man, to take the project over. The first thing he asked me was, “Why are you so interested in LGBT+ activism?” His intentions were good-he’d recently moved to California from a small, conservative town on the east coast, and was excited about living in a more progressive place and was curious about how I became so invested in “the cause.”

Intentions aside, both of these experiences illustrate what members of the bi community are often coming up against-an assumption of being either straight or gay, a need to validate their role in the greater LGBT+ community, a need to prove their place in it. A lot of the time, when I identify as bi, the first question is, “Well have you been in love with a woman?” I know plenty of straight people whose love lives are a goddamn mess, for whom “love” is a tricky pursuit and whose sexuality is not validated by the success of their romantic relationships, but as a bi person, you are often expected to pass this test.

Even the label of being “bi” has its limitations-bisexual implies a sort of acknowledgment of gender binary. Perhaps pansexual is a label that makes more sense. Or, perhaps labels are destructive. In Carrie’s case, a label was prematurely smacked onto her forehead in a national print magazine, and for Corin Tucker, too, whose mother, “felt sick” upon reading the news of her daughter’s sexuality. The labeling of their sexuality was more destructive than their actual same-sex relationship, which, from what I gather from Carrie’s memoir, was mostly darling and young and sweet.

So I never felt compelled to make the grand coming out gesture, rather I chose instead to enjoy the flux, to tell friends and family members when it made sense to me, in a series of small coming out conversations, about, for example, the stunning broadness of Mary’s shoulders and softness of her collarbone, or the black waterfall of Brittany’s hair and warm chocolate of her eyes. Sometimes I worry that I’ve betrayed myself in doing this, that I should claim it louder, but the bi experience is so unique, and the bi coming out experience should be unique to the individual as well. As unique as the women I’ve been in love with, in case you didn’t believe me.

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