“So who’s that guy you’re talking to?” she asked. When I was talking with Jason, which involved looking at our phones and showing each other things and smiling a lot, my friend Marie interrupted and pulled me aside. I felt really attracted to men again – like, I thought about sex with them when I masturbated – so why not make my fantasies a reality? Back in Chicago, I wasn’t interested in any other women. She was living in Santa Fe, where she was doing a postdoc in neuroscience, and though I visited sometimes and admitted to myself that I was still deeply in love with her, this long-distance thing wasn’t quite working. Things with Kristin, my lover of nearly three years, were off again. Did that mean I was a lesbian, even though I really cared for John and liked the sexual experiences I’d had with him, and probably would have kept dating him if he lived nearby? I did end up meeting my first-ever girlfriend at that group, and have since mostly been in relationships with women.īut that early bisexual identity marker lingered for years, and I was reminded of it when I met Jason at a party in Chicago a few years ago. But I worried that my experience with John, my first boyfriend, wasn’t real at all, because it wasn’t like the one I’d had with Eleanor. When I started attending a queer youth group at a church basement in Evanston, and sharing about my feelings of attraction and desire, it made sense to identify as bisexual. I did mention that the daughter of a family friend was bisexual, and that I was “also like her.” This was a strange new queer world to mom, and I felt like I needed to seek another support group aside from just my immediate family and one gay boy bestie at high school.

My mom had no idea about any of my sexual adventures and I didn’t tell her that day. I’d been fooling around with Eleanor since about age 13. But I felt like she must have known that something was going on with my best friend, Eleanor. She knew about John Turner, my boyfriend from our summer family vacation. We were driving around downtown Evanston, a suburb just north of Chicago, in a navy blue Ford station wagon.

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