I Hid From Myself for Decades, Now I'm Ready to Be Seen

I’m sure this must sound like the most clichéd Gen Z bi origin story, but my first bi inkling was when I was seven years old watching Pirates of the Caribbean in the 2000s. I was absolutely in love with Kiera Knightly and Orlando Bloom. When I tried to talk to my friends or other girls, I couldn’t understand how they didn’t share my feelings. I mean, how can you not think Elizabeth Swann (Knightly) is hot? That was the first time I noticed that something different was going on with me.

In middle school, I was tall for my age and very into sports. That doesn’t mean anything in itself, of course, but kids repeat the stereotypes they hear from adults. Because I was tall and sporty, my classmates teased me, that I must be gay. I remember being so, so scared that they were right. I carried that insecurity with me through high school and projected it onto this girl in my class I swore I hated. As awful as it sounds, I considered her almost my mortal enemy. We were in constant competition, both academically and in athletics, but it’s so clear now in hindsight that I was just a little too into that rivalry. The truth is, I found her attractive, a fact I tried to deny, in true adolescent fashion, by making her into my arch nemesis.

I was in college when I finally came out as bi. My family was wonderful. My mother, who raised me as a single parent, and my uncle, who came out as gay during the height of the AIDS crisis, were my biggest supporters. It took my grandparents a minute to adjust, but they came around too.

In those early days of being out, when everything felt so new and exciting, I had this urge to “quantify” my bisexuality. Were my attractions split “50/50” men and women? Were they 60/40? After a number of conversations with my mom about it — she’s always been there for me every step of the way — I realized that it wasn’t really a productive avenue to go down. To me, being bi is a flexible, fluid thing that gets cheapened and kind of set up to be misunderstood if you try to box it in with numbers and ratios.

As a writer, educator, and theater artist living in Memphis, Tennessee, being bi informs everything I do. Even when my writing doesn’t contain overtly bi themes, it always explores queerness in its broadest sense — the feeling of otherness and of being different that I think a lot of queer people pick up on and relate to.

I’ve found full acceptance in the workplace, but that hasn’t always been the case. I worked for a while as a public school seventh-grade English teacher. In US public schools, there are all sorts of rules about what you can and can’t say as a teacher with regard to your personal life, and that’s come under more scrutiny in recent years. But, of course, those rules only seem to apply to queer folks. A lot of the straight teachers in the school had pictures of their husbands or wives displayed on their desks. I couldn’t have anything, really. I was dating a woman at the time, and it had to be totally hush-hush. There could be no evidence that I had a romantic life outside of my job.

I had a small Pride flag in my classroom, and boy was that a fight. It was the only signal I had to let students know that if they needed to talk to me, I was there for them. The students had no problem with it, but I got a lot of pushback from the administrators and some of the other teachers. The situation became untenable. It’s always a great privilege to be able to help kids, but as a workplace it was a toxic environment I’m glad to have moved on from. Now I’m in a job where all parts of me are accepted and valued. I work for a nonprofit in the childhood development space. I’m also a writer — everything from plays and poetry to journalism and academic journal articles. I also run workshops for drama and theater writing.

I’ve dated men, women, and folks who identify as non-binary. Something I’ve faced, as many bi people do, is that your sexuality gets judged by whichever partner you’re with at the time. My current partner is a man, and I’m put into a position in social situations, including around my queer friends, where I have to re-assert that I am, in fact, bi. Even people who know me well just kind of slide into seeing me as straight, or in some sense not authentically queer, when they see me with a man. My best friend is a lesbian, and when she first heard that I was bi, her reaction was to ask me, “But have you dated women?” By that point, I had, but it wouldn’t have made me any less bi if I hadn’t.

It’s kind of funny. I spent the first couple of decades of my life running away from who I was. Now my fight isn’t with myself, it’s trying to get others to see the real me. I’ve learned that at the end of the day, you can’t control other people, but you can control yourself. And I’m out, free, and leading by example.

Savannah Miller is an educator, writer, and poet based out of Memphis, Tennessee. If you'd like to share your own bi story, please email us at [email protected].