This was the only thing I knew: I wanted Cate to like me more than she liked anyone else. Even before she fully converted me to evangelicalism, before the night we sat in our dorm and she coached me through accepting Jesus via a track booklet, I found myself wanting to be like her so that I could always have a piece of her with me. I was jealous when she hung out with other women—what if she started to like them more? The idea was haunting, that I’d see her less and be demoted on her list of most preferred people.
I wanted her attention, and I wasn’t sure why. The idea crossed my mind. Did I have a crush on Cate?
No. No, I couldn’t. I wasn’t gay. I liked guys too much.
It had been going on like this in my mind for more than just that year, a source of confusion since my earliest memories. I was 5-years old when I developed my first two crushes—Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future and my babysitter, Rebecca. I was 5-years old when I began to get the message that liking other girls was unnatural, because girls were supposed to like boys. (See: any form of media entertainment in the 90s, suburban heteronormativity, etc, etc.)
The solution felt easy enough. My crushes on boys were just as intense, just as genuine, as my crushes on girls.
Pick one, society told me. For my own safety, I picked boys.
And so I was able to bury it for a long, long while—my attraction to women seemingly relegated to watching a sex scene in a movie, to the time a bunch of friends in high school turned HBO porn on at a sleep over. We laughed at the movies, at the porn. “Isn’t this hilarious?”
It wasn’t until I met Cate that my unprocessed bisexuality emerged, and it hurt me in all the ways I hadn’t admitted it to myself.
*
If I knew that I was bisexual, perhaps I would have understood that this was an attraction to a person, and not to Jesus. Perhaps I would have been able to process the complexity of that, instead of feeling like she somehow held my future in her hands.
But I did not understand that I was bisexual, so I hung on to her words and tried to decode them—like she had the secret to becoming the person I wanted to be, and I only had to be around her to discover it.
To Cate, the word “gay” was a slur. If someone said that they heard an actor was gay, it upset her. “How could you say that about someone?”
After I prayed the prayer of salvation with her and became wholly indoctrinated, she made it clear that anything other than complete straightness was wrong.
“Homosexuality is a sin because it falls outside of God’s order,” she said. While it didn’t make sense in my heart, I had been getting this message my entire life by the world around me—that heterosexuality was the only real sexuality. Whatever the hell I was, this strange amalgamation of gender attractions, wasn’t real.
And besides, the church was teaching me how to stop listening to my heart.
I was relieved that I was at least attracted to men. I was relieved that I had the ability to pick one, and, by proxy, hide the part of myself that I was most ashamed of. As an evangelical, doing so had never been more critical.
*
I felt forced to admit it two years later, when I was applying for a summer mission trip. There was a question on the application about my sexual history, and I had been warned against lying. God would know and withhold his blessings, all the Christians in my life said.
Please list your sexual history (including any homosexual thoughts.)
My strange sexuality had been emerging, despite all the ways I tried to stomp it out. I had been watching porn in the dorm bathroom, dreaming about having sex with both women and men. My sins were of the mind—what was happening inside my head was compromising my purity.
I went to Cate first and foremost, the person I trusted and admired more than anyone.
“I’ve had homosexual thoughts and feelings. I’m attracted to men, but I’m also attracted to women.”
After the initial shock of speaking those words wore off, Cate comforted me from across the room.
“I can see you helping so many other women with your experience,” she said. “I see you speaking at a conference and helping other women deal with this.”
Other women? There were other women like me?
“There are so many other women! And they need to know how you’re handing it.”
She wanted me to tell them how I had picked one, how I stayed strong in my pursuit of heterosexuality. She wanted me to use my vulnerability to incite the vulnerability of others, and then mold their thinking and processing into an evangelical context.
In saying all this, Cate was doing what she had been taught to do, and now she was teaching me. And how ripe I was for the teaching, not even knowing my own sexual identity—having no example of how to live with it out in the world. Through her vision for my life, Cate offered the only example I felt safe following.
It’s taken me a long time to see how much I needed bivisibility at that moment. My lack of exposure to others like me was being used to control me, and one day, Cate hoped, it would control others through me.
*
Likewise, it took me longer than I wish it did to let go of my compulsive heterosexuality, and even longer to understand how my conversion to evangelicalism happened. The millions of little characteristics that made me ripe for fundamentalist picking were buoyed by those around me who said bisexuality didn’t exist—by the message that I should pick a side and keep the rest of it a secret.
Binary thinking harmed me, because it didn’t allow me to account for all of me. And the less we know ourselves, the less defenses we’ll have towards others who want to tell us who we are.