I used to masturbate to the underwear models in the Sears catalogue when I was 6. By eight I was nibbling the nipples of neighborhood girls while they played with their newly awakening pussies. I was wanting the taste of them, the slipperiness of them around my tongue but possessed a cultured knowledge way too old for my years that gliding from breast to cunt would cross some kind of unspoken boundary that would spurn me from the little piece of heaven I’d been welcomed in.
I played with boys too –
because I didn’t know
how to say “no”,
because somehow I’d been taught that’s what I was supposed to do,
silently suffering the sharp, impaling pain
each time they’d try to jam their fingers into my barricaded virgin cunt.
I moved after middle school
while the girls I’d played with stayed in my hometown five miles from
la frontera mexicana.
And,
eventually discovered
a cock was a wonderful thing
But
I didn’t stop wanting women
Again I moved,
to San Francisco this time
at 20 thinking for sure I’d find my way back to the girls I’d loved
But how could I call myself a lesbian when I was still fucking men,
because,
after all
a girl’s got to get laid every now and then.
So, though I never said it out loud, there was only one word for girls like me…
Bi
or if you’re a straight man
those nasty sluts who’ll fuck anyone
or if you’re a lesbian
those girls you wouldn’t touch because they were too confused to know what they wanted
as if bisexuals had the rights to confusion
as if
loving men somehow diminished my capacity for loving amazing, awe-inspiring
WOMAN
as if
being able to love men meant that I, somehow, couldn’t commit to a woman
At 27 my friend took pity on my frustration –
tried to hook me up with a lesbian friend of hers
who later told her
“your friend doesn’t look like a lesbian”
but, what the hell was a lesbian supposed to look like anyway?
I guess she couldn’t put my furry pits and painted lips into one of those boxes she had stacked in her head.
And anyway
I wasn’t a lesbian
I was
and am
Bi
But bi girls aren’t accepted in either world
because we “sit on the fence”
“can’t make up our minds”
as if there were a conscious decision-making process in the
quickening of breath,
the tingling of skin,
the wanting so bad it feels like pain,
the magic thing called chemistry that makes walls crumble to the earth
quicker than mango juice running down my chin
You’d think by now we’d have gotten over this bullshit judgment
now that there’s a LG BT “community”
But last month I read an article in The Advocate and the interviewer asked Ellen if she’d ever date a straight girl again.
Not surprisingly, Ellen said “no”
And I wanted to scream in their stupid faces
“Anne Heche is not straight!”
I’m pretty damn sure that straight girls don’t fuck women,
don’t love women,
don’t buy houses with women or contemplate having babies with them.
Anne is not straight,
she’s bi.
Of course, she’s also crazy, but that’s not the point.
I am so sick of having to explain and defend my right to the vast capacity I have to love
and love well.
Because for me, Bi means being open,
accepting love in all its variations
And limitless
in my capacity to fall in love with the soul, the spirit,
and the body too.
And no matter the shame they would so easily lay upon me
I am Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead
Patricia Ireland, Sophie B. Hawkins, Meshell Ndegeocello, Ani DiFranco, Frida Kahlo, and k.d. lang
all rolled into one proud-ass woman
to call myself
Bi
© Sabrina Santa Clara, 2001
About This Spoken Word Poem
I came up reading at open mics in San Francisco at the turn of the new millennium, when I was still working out my own gender and sexual fluidity — before there was much language for the gender part of it, and before bisexual was a word anyone said kindly.
I went back and forth about putting this one on the site. Should I, shouldn’t I, for days. It’s crass in places. It uses the language it uses.
In the end I decided I don’t need to censor myself. Art isn’t about speaking pretty — it’s sometimes grace and sometimes crass — and if I’m going to invite all the parts of me to the table, I have to be courageous enough to let them be seen. That’s the thing I say to everyone else: every part of you is welcome here. How do I preach that and then edit myself down to the presentable parts?