I Came Out to Myself at 40

The Biversary Mini-Series

Ground Zero on Day One; author photo, 1/26/2021

Three years ago last Friday, I first said “I’m bisexual” out loud. I was in a Subaru Forester, since sold off as the one asset in my second marriage worth any note. Unlike last Friday, it was frigidly cold in Chicago, and my breath frosted on the inside of the windshield. It was my parenting day, and I had gotten into the car to go to Costco for their taco platter for dinner, just like any other Tuesday, except I came out to myself instead.

It was, of course, not nearly that simple, and simplified nothing. I was in a miserable, near-sexless straight marriage, with kids from my violently abusive first marriage. At that point, I hadn’t even admitted to myself that my first marriage was abusive, or that it had left me severely traumatized with recurring panic attacks. My job, essentially a freelance political consultant digging up dirt for attack ads, was wildly unstable, and every new election cycle I’d made less money going all the way back to 2008. As the words tumbled out of my mouth, they seemed incredibly strange, and for all of the reasons above, I wondered if I’d gone mad.

And yet: strange as the words sounded, they were not wrong. As mad as I had gone, I was not incorrect. In classic autistic form, I lost focus on saying “I’m bisexual” over and over as the windshield frosted over, grasping at any possible falsification or fallacy. But there weren’t any, and after something like a dozen times of saying it, I conceded that if it wasn’t incorrect, then it must be correct.

There are as many ways to come out to oneself as people coming out to themselves. Coming out to myself at 40, in the early days of 2021, puts me in a generational limbo of sorts. I’m younger than the lost generation of queer people nearly wiped out by Reagan-era HIV. I’m also older than the Zoomers, and most Millennials, who repopulated queerness amid states recognizing civil unions and eventually federal marriage equality, medical breakthroughs leading to Undetectable HIV positivity and the protection of Truvada, debating the specific level of queerness in Taylor Swift’s double entendres. 

I’m young enough to know hope, but old enough to remember fear.

My first memory of queerness is when I asked my father what exactly “gay” meant. With an angry look, he told it was when men have sex with each other, that it was disgusting, sinful, and an abomination. My father had exactly one sex talk with me and my next younger brother. He was driving us to school down a winding country road, from the rural house where my parents had moved to protect us from the “sinful city” of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I don’t really remember anything past how he opened, glowering at both of us:

“Have either you boys ever had homosexual thoughts about men? Have you ever masturbated?”

We both insisted we had not; our father was a violent alcoholic. He would eventually molest me on a trip overseas, when I was in middle school. His present to me for my fifteenth birthday was briefly showing up at my mother’s house so I could shoot his Sig Sauer nine millimeter. A year later, he drunkenly swung a chair at me and put me in a mental hospital when I came close to talking about what he’d done to me. For as long as I can remember, I knew that the less I said to him, the better.

I was already terrified the first time I remember having feelings for a boy. His name was Josh, and we were in fifth grade, at a Catholic school in northern Baton Rouge. It was cold for Louisiana, which is to say it was in the fifties, and we were in short sleeved uniforms, without sweatshirts or jackets.

“It’s really cold,” I mentioned.

“Yeah, it is,” he agreed. “Let’s warm up together.” And he pressed his bare arm against mine.

It was an instant that flash froze in my brain. His arm was so warm. More than warm. It was in my arm, my head, all of me. I wanted it, and wanted more, and didn’t even know what more was. Then I realized exactly what more was. Fear lanced through me, and I shoved him away, calling him sick and gay, and probably a few other worse things. 

But it stayed buried with me, to the point that when my new, queer therapist asked me if I remembered the first time I had feelings for another man, I replied in seconds: “Josh. It was Josh.”

My parents’ divorce put me into a majority-minority public school a few blocks outside Louisiana State University. My mouth stayed mostly shut, but when it wasn’t, I joined the drama club, and made friends with every out queer student (there were three). I became best friends with a boy who painted his nails, dyed his hair pastel, and said he was attracted to me. I briefly considered taking dance as an elective. 

I was also, in my estimation, completely straight.

My undergrad was in Los Angeles, to get as far away from my family as possible. I never set foot in a frat house, but by my sophomore year, I somehow found myself in a lot of gay house parties. I outright dated my best friend: we dressed up in suits, went to candlelit dinners, and drank fancy wine. I thought to myself “this is almost like dating.” Once I was convinced he was about to kiss me, and I was terrified and thrilled, but then the moment passed. My former work study supervisor talked me into a threesome with his girlfriend, and when it happened, I was crushed and heartbroken that it turned out to be his cuck fantasy and not him having sex with me.

Again, in my own head this was entirely, completely straight.

When I got into professional politics after grad school, I was just about the worst Democrat paid to be one. I gleefully laughed at Democratic scandals just as much as Republican ones, and wondered why there weren’t any bipartisan opposition researchers. I asked why I kept writing “[Republican] voted to raise their own pay but against raising the minimum wage,” because one had absolutely nothing to do with the other, and poorly paid legislators are usually either corrupt, or crazy, or both. I’ve forgotten how many times I’ve been gently (and not so gently) told that perhaps professional politics just isn’t for me (and in fairness, it definitely is not).

But there was one exception: LGBTQ issues. If I knew an elected official was queer, I helped them. I did it for money, and I did it for free. I condemned outing closeted Republicans, because for all the moralizing about hypocrisy, I knew that behind closed doors my colleagues just wanted a safe way to gay bash. I helped start a super PAC to threaten Democrats and Republicans in their own primaries who opposed marriage equality.

There was also that time I “accidentally” almost had a one night stand with a man. It was election night 2006, and Democrats had just retaken both chambers of Congress. I was in the bar of the Drake Hotel in Chicago, buying coworkers drinks with my boss’s credit card. They eventually all filed out, and there I was, talking and laughing and drinking with a slightly portly man with rosy cheeks and a cute smile. I suggested a walk, and we ended up at my apartment tower in the Chicago Loop, my (I reiterate, violently abusive) first wife being out of town on business. I suggested we go up to my place for a drink. In between pouring the first and second glass of champagne in my cramped marital one-bedroom, it occurred to me that I had just invited a total stranger to my place for “drinks,” and he was definitely not there to talk about Democratic politics.

“Um…no,” I said suddenly. “No, man.” He blinked, then shrugged, and let himself out.

You know, a totally straight misunderstanding.

The final threads of my straightness frayed to the breaking point with the COVID quarantine. Shut in an apartment with my (I reiterate, miserable and sexless) second wife, I sullenly watched a lot of porn. One night it occurred to me that threesome porn was tedious and unappealing because it was obviously fraught with straightness, and three people fucking should all fuck each other. Then I was watching bisexual threesome porn, and it was just clearly the way sex should be.

And then the January 6, 2021 insurrection happened. With several friends in DC and a few who worked on Capitol Hill, I smoked weed into a stupor for two weeks. Heading into the third week, it occurred to me that I was constantly daydreaming about fucking, specifically, men. All men, all the time. I had it on pretty good authority that weed does not make one gay, so I talked to a trans friend of mine about it. After I laid out about a quarter of the above history, she texted a snickering emoji and “dude…you are NOT straight.”

And then on January 26 in the godless year of 2021, I told the interior of a Subaru Forester that I’m bisexual.

Three years later, I have learned many things. Some of them are about dating, others about trauma, others about nothing in particular besides myself. The second marriage is gone; I just signed the last papers for Karen’s amusingly irate attorney. I have slept with I forget how many men and women, fallen in love twice, and careened from near-destitution to actually decent job prospects for the first time in about 18 years. So my biversary gift to my subscribers will be this: I’m taking stock of myself and lessons learned for the past three years, starting this godless Tuesday.

And just to be clear: don’t do it this way. I’m not even a professional.