Out: Finally Free to Be the Real Me

Me, myself and I: the one in which I come out publicly as bisexual.

Hey there,

My name is Jonathan, and I am

Bisexual. 

I’m queer!

And I’m proud!

GOD it feels good to say this out loud. 

Freely! For all to hear!

To fully embrace and celebrate who I am and who I have always been!

If you’ve known me for a while and this hits as a surprise, that’s okay. You haven’t missed anything. 

Actually, I take that back. You HAVE missed out on a lot of me - everyone has…

Especially me.

This is my coming out. And it’s been a long, long, long often painful and confusing journey to get here… until the last couple of years.

But NOW it’s just really freaking beautiful and exciting!

I finally feel whole, and known and loved and free!

If you’ve been following my writing here recently, I’ve been sharing about the journey of simultaneously losing and finding myself all at once, living through trauma, and learning to love and embrace who I am.

The journey has been about truth-telling. And how telling the truth sets us free.

Thus far, I have been sharing with you my truth about the sexual abuse I experienced at the hand of my grandfather as a child, and the lasting impacts that made on my life.

However, when my mind and body brought this childhood trauma back into my consciousness, it set off an obsession and passion in me for telling the truth… 

About everything…

Because the truth has set me free. 

In the course of all the healing and deep therapy and trauma work around THAT part of my childhood, I found myself in a space where I have been able to access and finally tell the truth about my sexual orientation as well. 

I am a cis-gender, bi-sexual man. 

And I’m happy, and excited, and celebrating my identity.

Here’s my story. 

(Grab a tasty bev and a munchable snack. Brevity isn’t my forte, and also, I don’t give a shit, because I've been longing to say all this for a long damn time.)

When I began developing attraction to others in my youth, I discovered in myself attractions to both guys and girls. 

But I was scared about that. 

Real scared.

I was ashamed. I KNEW I wasn’t gay, because I didn’t only like guys. I liked girls a lot! But not ONLY girls…

At this time and headspace in my youth, I had no concept that both of those things could exist very naturally in a person. I believed I was bad. Broken. Disgusting. I was ashamed of how I felt. 

I was confused. 

And scared. 

Certainly no one could ever find out. I was certain my feelings would be completely rejected and scorned by everyone I knew and loved.

So I hid this. 

Suppressed it. Never, ever spoke of it in my youth… though it was always with me. 

I chose to live and express myself exclusively as straight, from my youth and on into adulthood. And, in full honesty, because I’m not gay, I truly and honestly enjoyed the girls I dated coming up, and am fully and completely in love with and have cherished every moment that I have been married to my wife, LeAnndra. I love LeAnndra! She is my love and my life through and through!

One reason for that, however, is that she was the first person I ever told about my same sex attractions…

It was about two years into our marriage, and I was carrying an enormous amount of shame. Here’s my wife, the woman I love dearly and fiercely, but she doesn’t know the truth about me… 

No one does.

So through intense tears and shame and fear one night, I finally broke down and told her. I told her I’d never spoken of this but that I just couldn’t live with any ‘secrets’ in our marriage. We didn’t have any secrets, we always talked about everything, and I knew I couldn’t hold this weight and pain it was causing in my body any longer. 

So I confided in her. Assured her that I wasn’t attracted to anyone else or needing or looking for anything or anyone else…

And she received me so tenderly, so beautifully, so fully. It was the love and assurance I’d always needed so badly. That I was okay. 

I was safe. 

And I was known.

And at that time, as long as SHE knew, and she loved me and all was okay, that was all I needed. 

Then we really never spoke about it again until maybe a year or so ago… 

My wife and I both - for a very long time - have been open and affirming and supportive of the LGBTQ+ community, learning for years even what it means to be allies for our queer friends and for queer people in general. We’ve raised our kids with this very open and affirming spirit and worldview, and in all of this learning we’ve done together over the years, it really helped us come to understand just how beautifully complex and diverse human sexuality truly is, and even how truly unique every single one of us is in the way we are put together and find ourselves drawn to others. 

So, naturally, out of this deep learning and years long transformation of our hearts and minds in all of this, I began to finally arrive at a place where I was comfortable starting to ask questions about myself, and my experiences.

In my own process, I came to a belief long ago that a person being gay or having same-sex attraction was completely natural and beautiful and wonderful, and should be celebrated. This was both a discovery from friends I knew and learned personally from, as well as an evolution of my mind and beliefs as a result of ongoing reading, listening and learning from queer voices. 

However, for quite some time, all of this was still a binary in my mind, meaning that a person was either gay or straight. That either orientation could be their natural born experience. But my mind was still understanding it all in an either/or way. And thus, 

I still didn’t have any way to understand myself. 

It didn’t make sense to me that I had experienced attraction to both guys and girls. I wasn’t either or. 

I didn’t fit the binary.

But as my learning has continued and deepened over the years, it became quite clear to me that human sexuality is anything but binary, that 

Human attraction is fluid 

And can change, or that people can also very naturally just be attracted to more than one sex. 

Not only that, but that there’s even so much beautiful nuance within all this - that attraction can and often does change throughout our lives and our changing circumstances - and that’s also completely normal and good and beautiful!

In all of this learning and healing that my mind and body have come to experience, what I know now to be true of me - that I haven’t known before, but that has always been true nonetheless - is that

I’m bi-sexual. 

(Whoot!)

But before I say anymore, I’d like you to read these two statements that really, really helped me understand me, and begin to understand what it means to experience bisexual identity.  These statements come from the website, bi.org, which has been a profoundly helpful resource to me as I’ve been seeking out understanding of my experience and for language about how to describe it to others:

“A bi person has a capacity for romantic and/or sexual attraction that is not limited to one sex. If you think about the people you’ve attracted to sexually or romantically, and you find that both women and men are among them, you are likely bi. As a bi person, you do NOT have to feel the same kind or intensity of attraction to both women and men. Many people experience sexual fluidity -- bisexual attractions that shift over time, often over years or decades. In any case, there is no threshold or litmus test to meet in order to be bi other than having attractions that are not limited to one sex. There is nothing for you to prove, nothing to consummate, no requirement to “maintain” your bisexuality. Understanding and acknowledging your own sexuality is a personal process and is about living with integrity and being true to yourself.” 

And statement two, which answers the question, “If I’m married and monogamous, why does it matter that I’m bi?”

“Relationship status does not change a person’s sexuality. While it may be more obvious to others that someone is bi if they are actively dating both men and women, that is most certainly not a requirement of bisexuality. Bisexuality, like all sexual orientations, is about much more than what one does with one’s genitals. It encompasses not merely one’s relationships and sexual activity, but also their sexual and romantic attractions. A person can be in a long-term monogamous relationship with a woman but still be attracted to men as well. Sexual orientation doesn’t go away just because it’s not acted upon. 

…While a monogamous marriage would still strictly limit a person’s current sexual behavior, it would not affect a person’s attractions, fantasies, emotional preferences, social preference, nor would it have to change a person’s self-identification…

Also, I just want to share this handy little graphic with you…

I share these statements with you, as well as the graphic, as a way to try to explain why this is SO huge for me. 

These statements were profoundly liberating for me. They helped unlock my understanding of ME, and gave me language - for the first time - to explain MY experience of my body and my story.

Learning that it’s not only perfectly normal, but also extremely common, for bisexual persons to fall in love and find themselves fully fulfilled and content in a straight, monogamous marriage was SO affirming and liberating for me!

I’m SO normal!

I’m not weird! 

There’s nothing I have to prove. 

I love who I love, because I love who I love, but it doesn’t mean I can’t be true to myself and tell the truth about myself and my story - 

I’ve got nothing to hide anymore!

Processing all of this with my wife in recent months has been unbelievably beautiful. To open the conversation back up and begin to really and truly explore my identity this way with her was obviously risky. It was scary.

But my God, she’s been absolutely beautifully supportive! 

She has so fully embraced me and celebrated me! It’s actually turned out to be this wonderful new spark between us, as it has been such a breakthrough and so liberating for me. She is experiencing me being free and being me and happy and confident and at peace in ways I’ve never been before. She’s been saying there’s this exciting and noticeable difference and beauty that has come out of me in these recent months. A new spark.

And it’s because I finally feel fully free and fully known and fully celebrated! 

Nothing left to hide. No confusion left around my identity. 

I’m bisexual, baby.

I’m queer. 

And I’m so happy! So proud!

“I’m in love, I’m in love and I don’t care who knows it!”

And that’s beautiful and lovely and good. And this truth - that has always been true of me, but dormant and suppressed all these years - 

Has set me free. 

I’m coming out to you all here and now for two reasons. (I’m bi-reasonable.)

Firstly, I feel like a special part of me that I have felt shame and confusion about since my youth has come into the light, and I’m just so damn excited to fully embrace this part of myself after shutting it out all my life in fear and shame. I believe I owe that to myself, and it is also something I truly want others to know about me so that I no longer feel any reason to hold any part of myself back. I want to truly be me and talk about and celebrate myself with no shame or guilt for the rest of my days!

Secondly tho, I believe queer visibility in all its forms, is so important. 

It’s important for others like me, who have never really known what to make of themselves or that have lived in shame or fear or judgment to see someone like myself open about who I truly am and NORMALIZING that publicly. Because all of this truly is NORMAL and good and beautiful even though culturally there is still considerable stigma and shunning from many angles. To borrow a phrase, I want to 

Let my light shine 

So that others may be able to be set free and come to embrace their own truth and experiences as well, knowing that they are not alone and are fully loved no matter who it is they have loved or been drawn to.

So friend, if you’re like me, if you’ve been hiding this wonderful truth about yourself, I hope you can hear me and understand that 

You are beautiful and lovely and SO very normal,

AND, that there are SO MANY of us out here that as so excited to love on and celebrate you, and want you to be

FREE.

You deserve to be free. We all do!

And I want that for you desperately.

My hope in sharing my story here on Finding Jonathan is to create another safe space, another island for us misfit toys. There are so many of us out here, SO many who have inspired me and paved the way for me to share my own story freely here, and lean into my deep passion and desire to create a safe space for us all to learn from each other and chat on the real. 

Coming out here to you all is both an exciting new beginning, as well as a culmination of so much deep work in the dark recesses of my heart and mind over the years. I’m absolutely STOKED for where the journey will take us all from here, and ECSTATIC to now be writing as my full self!

I can’t wait to share more of myself and my story with you. And can’t wait for the beauty we will experience together as we endeavor to build a more beautiful, inclusive, safe and loving world for all!

Much love, friends.

P.S. Yes… the shirt… DA.I.S.Y Age, baby.