Rainbow Bridges

Rainbow Bridges: A True Story

Rated: PG-13

Summary: What started out as a tiny anecdote about an incident I suddenly remembered evolved into a choppy rant on gay rights.

six
Driving under an overpass. Busy people, obnoxious drivers, loud traffic. Honk honk.

Life in the city.

“Look,” Mother says, tapping her finger impatiently on the steering wheel, “see those two men in front of us?”

You look up. The Jeep in front of your Honda is a dusky green Wrangler, top lacking and all.

“See their shaved heads and the earrings in their right ears?”

You tilt your head to the side and squint. The driver’s diamond stud glints prettily in the sunlight.

“It means that they’re gay. Do you know what that means?”

“Yeah,” you lie. You like to pretend you’re the smartest little girl in the entire world.

“Gay is when two boys like each other and not girls. It’s a mental illness. Stay away from gay people, Elaine. They’re sick and abnormal and diseased.”

The Jeep turns onto the freeway ramp, and you get a better view of the two men. They’re laughing, and one man’s hand lies comfortably on the other man’s shoulder.

They don’t look ill at all.

They look happy.

*

nine
The house is dark but for the light next to the computer in the hallway. The clock reads 1:47 AM. You sit at the computer, staring at the screen.

You had just finished reading the strangest thing. Yaoi. The Kaiser kidnapping Daisuke and having his wicked way with him. Daisuke resisting but unable to deny the strong attraction between the two. Two boys. Kinky sex. (You’re no stranger to reading NC-17, but two boys together is something completely new and foreign.) Fascinated, you read it again. And again. And again.

You decide you rather like it.

And so your obsession with slash fanfiction begins.

*

nine and one-half
Michelle Winters is a Korean sixth grader. She is so pretty. She is lively, cheerful, and her smile makes her look like the prettiest girl in the world. You like to sneak peeks at her during assemblies. You wish that you could be that pretty.

At one of the assemblies you see her wearing a bright green tank top with a yellow butterfly on the front. You’re wearing the exact same shirt.

You smile secretly to yourself.

It is not until four years later that you realize you were attracted to her.

You find her Xanga, and read all the entries and look at all the pictures. Your heart leaps a little at the sight of her smile. Nothing’s changed. She’s still extremely cute.

And you still have that shirt.

*

eleven
“Are you bi?” Diana asks persistently on AIM late one night. You presume she’s joking, so you just laugh it off.

Are you bi?
Are you bi?
Are you bi?

You want to type “YES!” but you’ve heard too many horror stories about coming out to friends to risk it. You avoid the question and hopes she never finds out the truth.

You want to tell her so badly.

Lying by omission isn’t technically lying, right?

*

twelve
Bisexual bisexual bisexual

You like the word, and you like to advertise it all over the Internet. You relish in unconventionality. You’re dumb.

You show Diana a lovely layout you made for your blog, forgetting that you’d put your sexual orientation under your mini autobiography. You hope she was blinded by the vibrant blue on black and didn’t see anything.

“So you’re bi,” she states nonchalantly on AIM several nights later.

When you ask her why she thinks that, she says she saw it on your site.

Shit shit shit.

But she doesn’t reject you, or express disgust, or laugh at you. She only has three words to say.

“I knew it.”

*

thirteen
Maggie’s boyfriend tells everyone that you’re bisexual.

You want to brutally murder him.

It becomes the Most Exciting News of the Century. Apparently not much ever happened at Plaza Vista.

You look to your friends with apprehension—not all souls are as tolerant and welcoming as that of Diana.

*

thirteen and one-half
Christmas 2003 is the worst Christmas ever.

You tell your relatives that you dislike guy-girl romances, and that they make you uncomfortable. They laugh at you and say smugly, “Oh, well that's just now. In a few years, you'll change your mind.”

Your insides burn in fury and you tell them that they don’t understand. You tell them that your opinion will remain the same for the rest of your entire life. All you can think about is being anti-homophobic, and somehow your thirteen-year-old self finds it offensive to be thought of as straight. Your relatives tell you that in a few years, when you have a boyfriend, you’ll regret your words.

You bite your lip to restrain from shouting, or crying, or maybe both. They have no idea—boyfriend or not, you’re in love with a boy who will never look at you in the way you want him to.

Your uncle comments on the disease of homosexuality and how rampant gays were in San Francisco and its surrounding areas. He says he hates it, and laughs. You tell them that you’d love to go to San Fran, and they tell you that it’s disgusting up there. You really want to brutally hurt something, so you leave the room with your fists clenched so tightly that your knuckles are white.

When they call you back laughingly, you glare and yell, “Don’t you dare go homophobic on me.” They laugh some more, and tears flood your eyes. Mother yells at you for expressing your opinion and tells you that your uncle had every right to insult homosexuals. The tears begin to fall.

One aunt starts complaining about how disgusting and wrong it all was, while another aunt scolds you as if you are the homophobe. Through it all, Mother never ceases her lecture. You can’t take it anymore.

“I have every right to express my opinion! [Your uncle] has absolutely no right to say that it’s wrong!”

The room silences and you flee upstairs, sobs racking your entire body.

You rip your hand-drawn anti-homophobia poster to shreds and fall asleep in your clothes, angry yet sad tears staining your pillow.

*

thirteen and three-quarters
Your eyes like to wander.

Now, instead of calling your random attraction to girls “your bi side”, you’ve fully accepted it as a part of yourself.

“You think she’s hot, don’t you,” Diana smirks, eyes flickering to the most popular girl in school.

You frown and look the girl up and down.

“Maybe,” you say coyly. She laughs, and you feel the need to elaborate and explain. “It’s just that… You know how with most people, makeup looks great from far away but when you get up really close, it looks really ugly? Well…”

“And hers looks okay?” Diana finishes for you.

“Yeah, I guess you could say that.”

*

fourteen
You fall for The Girl, and you fall hard.

You ask for a sip of her drink even though you hate the taste of the soda--it is the closest you will ever get to kissing her and you know from experience to take whatever you can. (She is the first person you have ever truly wanted to kiss.) She gives you an odd look when you sigh contentedly but you just smile stupidly at her.

She is so beautiful to you.

*

fourteen and one-half
For your persuasive essay assignment in English, you give your class a speech on gay marriage.

You stutter and stumble over your words and your hands fumble with the flashcards and you are so nervous that you forget to project your voice, like you had practiced at home.

Some people glance uncertainly at each other or raise their eyebrows when they hear the first sentence of your speech. (Talking about gay rights is so incredibly taboo, but you’re not afraid to express your opinions on a subject you are so passionate about.) Some people frown throughout the entire presentation. When you finish, the polite clapping is weak and hesitant and strained.

Honestly, you couldn’t care less.

*

fifteen
Sometimes, you dream about marrying the perfect girl in Canada, or the Netherlands, or maybe even Massachusetts. She’d be shy but flirty, serious but fun, and you’d make love to her in the Boston moonlight. You’d have to be quiet in order to avoid waking up your three-year-old son, and be sure to listen for the telltale wails of your newborn.

Or maybe she’d be a complete tomboy, refusing to don skirts to your office parties and constantly making you pick up after her messes. But you’d love her anyway, even if she sometimes yelled at you and made you cry, even if she embarrassed you in public with her lack of manners and terrible mood swings, and even if she sometimes forgot your birthdays, anniversaries, and hell, even Christmas.

Maybe she would be a regular performer at a strip club, one you fell in love with and had to battle an attractive man for. She would end up choosing you, and the two of you would move to Amsterdam. Maybe you would hate it there, and when you caught her cheating on you three times (two men, one woman), you would regret having anything to do with her at all. Maybe you would move back to America and try to start a completely new life. And then maybe seven years later, you would run into her at the nearest McDonald’s, and she’d fall into tears, telling you of her six-year quest to find you.

It doesn’t matter, as long as you love her more than anything else in the world. As long as the two of you face your obstacles together and prevail.

But then you remember your pledge to never marry, and you slump with regret.

Maybe promises were made to be broken.

*

infinity and beyond
You’re unique and you’re okay with it. Isn’t that what all your elementary school teachers advocated?

“It’s all right to be different,” they said.

“What other people think doesn’t matter.”

“Everyone is special in their own unique way.”

But you don’t understand.

If it’s okay to diverge from the status quo, then why did you decide when you were twelve that you would never come out to your family? Why were you terrified when the school caught wind of your sexuality? Why do you feel like you have to pretend to be someone else, whenever someone at school uses homophobic slang or mocks gays and lesbians with their friends? Why do you refuse to let yourself tell anyone about The Girl and how much you love her?

If it’s okay to refuse to conform to society, why isn’t gay marriage legal in America? Why is Britney Spears allowed to marry someone for forty-eight hours while a couple that has been together for thirty years has to rally at protests advocating gay marriage because they want to the right to be lawfully wedded? Why is the act of loving someone who shares your gender punishable by death in Sudan? Why was Matthew Shepard and so many others the victim of terrible gay and lesbian hate crimes?

How can people live with themselves, knowing that somewhere out there, there exists someone who has to protest for even a chance to show the world how much she loves her significant other; someone who has to hide his love because his feelings are a crime in his country; someone who denies who he is for his entire life because his religion looks down upon homosexuality as a sin?

Marriage is love.

Gender is irrelevant.

You think of those men in the Jeep. Maybe they're still together. Maybe they've stayed together throughout all those years. Maybe they're happily married and raising a family in Canada. You sigh wistfully.

You want to be happy, too.