Pop Culture Assignment

“Who are you to say what is natural? What is natural? Your hair certainly isn’t. Look at that piece. Looks like you picked it up off the road; midst rotting. Every week I come and listen to your madness, your hypocrisy, your hatred, discrimination, damnation! I’m sick of it! I’m not ashamed anymore! You can not change me!”

I was finally free from that awful place.

I’ve tried for over a year to make myself into something I’m not.

I’m bisexual.

It all began about a year ago, when I finally started to accept who I really was. I admitted it to myself and my friend. Now came the really hard part, my parents.

My father. He holds reads from his Book of Lies. What a hypocrite. What happened to the man I once knew? Ever since I admitted who I really was he began to preach what he used to damn. He invites over every teenage boy he knows. I’m not even allowed to have girl friends over unless we stay in the living room and he is home. I’m not a lesbian. I don’t want every girl I see. Same goes for guys.

I live in this small town everyday. My friends support me and love me no matter what. Why can’t my own father? My own flesh and blood. Why can’t he just love me for me? His own sister is a lesbian and he always told us to accept people for who they are.

My mother, she does. She accepts me, encourages me, and supports me. Of course she didn’t completely at first. She didn’t want to believe me at first. But once she began to get comfortable she hugged me and told me everything will be alright. It was such a relief too. I get enough stares at school. Enough condemnation from my peers who just do not understand.

When I told them that I was bi they both were shocked. Who wasn’t? I’ve had how many boyfriends? No one had ever even considered the possibility. Not even when I joined the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA). They thought it was just a phase, something I would grow out of. Until Teresa. Then it finally sunk in. At first they sent me to support groups. I was willing, naïve even at first, thinking “Ok a support group will support me”.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

It was at my church and all they did was tell us, myself and the other “troubled adolescence” that we were disgusting, vile, deemed unworthy by God and damned to Hell if we didn’t change our wicked ways.

I believed them. I cried. Said I wanted God back into my life. To lead me, to love me. I went to confession every time I saw a girl and thought that she was pretty. I tried. I tried so damn hard! But not all the love in the world, not all the penance could change me. There are not enough Hail Mary’s, Our Fathers, or Holy Water in the entire Vatican to change who someone is.

I know this now. Now I understand that this is who I am and I can not fight it. I am no longer that same weak little girl who bent to her fathers will. Now I decide for myself who I want and what I want.

We have not truly spoken in months.

When I told him I wouldn’t return to the Group, I’ve never seen him so mad, so ashamed. That’s what hurts so deeply. His disappointment. But I can’t let it get to me. Ever. If he can’t love me for whom I am, as I can for him….

I have a boyfriend that I love now. My mother is happy for me. As happy as she would have been if it was a girlfriend. My father, all he had to say was, “Does he know of your sin?” No, he does not know of my sin, because being who I am is not a sin. What he does know is who I am and loves me anyway.

Maybe one day so will my father.

....Don’t hold your breathe.