Was just checking out the website of the Human Rights Campaign (which if one is concerned with gay rights issues of any stripe is the place to look) and reading their material on the subject of coming out. Made me think how it finally hit me consciously what I am.

I was at work on a Saturday night, listening to one of these uber-conservative talk shows. June 20th, 2004. One of the topics was gay marriage. The talk show guy was really ripping into it. Then at one point he says, "Homosexuals are the ultimate perversion of nature." I don't know what it was about that statement, maybe it was the tone of absolute hatred this guy had in his voice, but that one sentence just slammed into me like I'd been shot. The rest of his rant sort of slid off like the proverbial water and the duck's back but that one sentence for some reason just hit me all at once.

I got off early that night -- good thing. I was about three-quarters of the way home when I couldn't keep it in anymore. There I was, sobbing at the wheel of my truck, driving down Cloud Springs Road, tears just pouring down my face, because I realized that guy had been talking about me.

That someone who doesn't know me, wouldn't know me, and wouldn't care if he did was so blithely saying that I'm a perversion of nature simply because I love people and don't care what form they happen to inhabit. I go to work, I pay my taxes, I obey the laws, I vote, I have two of everything I'm supposed to have and I was born in the usual way from two parents in a hospital right here in Chattanowhere, but because I'm capable of loving someone who happens to have identical plumbing I'm a perversion of nature. I'm not human.

Not human.

I'd always tacitly accepted that I was bisexual. It had always lurked somewhere in the back of my mind. That one moment, that once hate-filled sentence, pulled it right out into the light. This is what I am.

Kind of funny, really. Realizing you're bisexual when you haven't had sex with anything but yourself in over seven years. I went past the truly desperate phase several years ago. But it gets kind of obvious something's amiss when you're consciously stopping yourself from staring at some few particular people and later find yourself fantasizing about them. And they're not male.

I had to face it straight on that night.

It hurt. It fraggin' hurt.

It took a while to get used to it, but I've never once been sorry to be what I am. I am not going to apologize for this.

Truth be told I'm a little scared to tell people I don't know that well. That includes my family. But I guess someday it will have to come out and then I guess that'll be it for me. My cousins would understand, but my mom and her sisters and brother and my grandmother wouldn't. So that would be it. I'm just not strong enough for that yet.

Anyway.