National Coming Out Day 2004 Presentation
My Story: Coming Out As a Bi Believer
National Coming Out Day, 2004
Mountain View Community Church, Aurora, CO
By Ben Roe
I once presented a workshop on heterosexism to the adult church school class at Warren United Methodist, where I am a member. At one point, someone asked me what my personal interest was in the subject. I answered simply, "I have been aware of and have affirmed my same-gender attractions for a long time." It had taken me a long time to be able to say this.
My partner Maggie and I have been married over 35 years now, but in our 8th year, I found myself very unsettled as I read Don Clark's Loving Someone Gay. I was unsettled because I recognized myself in his (broad) definition of Being Gay. I realized at that moment the significance of some feelings I had had for a seminary classmate.
That was the start of my coming out journey. It took me a bit longer to understand myself as "bisexual."
Maggie and I did some very helpful therapy in those early years around communication, intimacy, commitment, fidelity, and how to integrate my bisexuality into our marriage as we built a new understanding of ourselves and our relationship.
We became active in the gay and lesbian communities as one way to express our new relationship. We helped start a welcoming house church, a PFLAG chapter, and participated in political support for Lesbian and Gay civil rights, because we felt this would help make the world a better place for lesbians and gay men, as well as bisexual folks. Maggie often tells how being introduced to the gay community has helped her own coming out as a powerful advocate for the marginalized and how she has found a community of wonderful friends.
My coming out bi was made more difficult at first because I was stuck in the common either-or dichotomy of gay/straight. The Kinsey scale was a great revelation to me because it helped me begin to move away from dichotomous thinking to continuum-thinking. The Klein Grid and its derivatives from Keppel and Hamilton were even more helpful.
My coming out bi was more difficult because most churches have actively fought against a more full understanding of sexuality and because the gay and lesbian communities also have been slow to come to a fuller understanding of sexuality.
Faith has always been an important part of my life, so I found the gay Methodist caucus and attended my first meeting soon after I first self-identified as bi. I identified as bi at one point and was told that bisexuality was not their agenda. But because we were committed to an agenda larger than ourselves and working towards greater inclusiveness and openness to the diversity of sexuality within our church, we worked locally and didn't put much energy into that group for several years. Fourteen years later, I helped lead a workshop on bisexuality for them and the outcome was much better.
My coming out bi was helped by The Experience, a workshop that grew out of the gay community and helps participants live with increased personal power, integrity and love. Working as an ally in the gay and lesbian and now Gay, Lesbian, Bi, and Transgender movement is a simple matter of justice and a matter of working toward a more healthy understanding of sexuality.
My coming out bi was helped by the church as well, because I had heard the word of inclusion and grace all my life and because the church provided the sexuality education experiences which included principles that allowed me to grow into a new self-understanding.
I've chosen to work for inclusiveness within the church because I identify also as a follower of Jesus and because the church has been such a negative and persecuting force regarding sexuality.
Acknowledging my bisexuality has allowed me to become more free to celebrate the gifts I have received from life. My experience of being bi has been in some ways another experience of "exile" like my experiences of polio as a young child, of sexual abuse, and of growing up as a preacher's kid. John Fortunato's book Embracing the Exile: Healing Journeys of Gay Christians spoke deeply to me. Being in exile has given me, like it did John Fortunato and the Hebrew people, a deeper faith. It has also given me a deeper sense of compassion for others.
Being bi has also given me perhaps a more direct appreciation of the truth of James B. Nelson's definition of sexuality in his book Embodiment: sexuality is a sign, a symbol, and a means of our call to communication and communion. My ability to fully love individuals regardless of gender and to transcend gender roles usually has been a delightful source of personal and spiritual enrichment. My ability to see a range of options in many areas and my ability to think more in continua than in dichotomies has been another gift of being bi.
Perhaps discussion of bisexuality will help move us into a more accurate and deeper understanding of sexuality. The easy and false dichotomies of heterosexual-homosexual, male-female, and masculine-feminine will give way to models and paradigms of human sexuality that better match the realities of healthy, real-life sexuality. Perhaps we can move some day to "just sexuality," without worrying about the gender of the person to whom our affections and attractions are directed. Just as I hope we will come some day to a place where we emphasize ability and capability rather than disability.
I have found that when people deal openly with their sexuality, they become more free, more tolerant, and more fully human. I celebrate this time where all can deal more openly with sexuality and move towards greater freedom, acceptance, and wholeness.
Note: See later writings to see how my thinking has evolved.