Being in the closet is one of those things that some people have to be, I hate it. But growing up I was always very aware that my opening my mouth reflected on other people.
Well, by other people I mean my parents, my little sister. It may surprise you, dear readers, to learn that I’m open as shit about my life because I can be, and I relish every moment but there’s not much time that I don’t have that voice from my adolescence in the back of my head worrying that I’m going to get the people I care about into trouble simply by dint of my existing my own way in the world. By my own way I do mean specifically my being attracted to women, I like to flaunt literally everything else because that’s only going to get an eye roll not cause serious problems.
One of the benefits of my job is that I can take time off when I’m ill, the other one is that all the people currently employing me know that I’m bisexual and that I’m in polyamorous relationships. There’s no back of my mind calculations in case I’m going to lose my job due to kissing someone in front of the wrong person. More to the point I’m not going to lose someone else their job or friends or what have you.
Being in the closet is somewhere that I have to be sometimes for my relationships, but my entire life is this interplay of secrecy for the sake of other people’s comfort and I think it’s why I relish quite such over the top honesty when I can get it. I’m eternally grateful that I don’t have to be in the closet, that I can walk around town on a Pride March and just be myself in a way that I couldn’t twenty years ago. Every Pride I love to look at the places that threw me and my friends out for public displays of queer affection and now they’re flying a rainbow flag out of their windows.
Fuck closets and fuck the people that put us in them – I don’t mean our friends and family and people we try not to get into trouble I mean the people that would cause them hassle simply because we’re queer.
Fuck stupid secrecy and having to keep your mouth shut to fulfill other people’s notion of what normal is. I hate it.