why I say I'm bisexual

Originally published at Huffington Post Gay Voices. 

I say I'm bisexual because I am. Because when I move through the world, I see people and parts and hearts and eyes and hair, and I recognize the potential in myself to love all those things.

I say I'm bisexual because queer is in my heart, and for my friends and family, but queer can be slippery and unnamable. Queer can slide away around the corner before you pin it down, can turn into something else. Bisexual is in your face, demands attention, refuses to turn into anything else, stands on its own.

I say I'm bisexual because I can. Because I have privilege and safety and loving friends and family, and if someone needs to be an example, then make an example of me, because I can take it.

I say I'm bisexual so that others don't have to. So that those who disagree with labels have the safety of knowing they can call themselves (or not) whatever they wish. But also, so that they have the comfort of knowing that we are out there. Without us (the loud, the proud, the labeled bisexuals), it would be so easy to pretend we don't exist. That sexuality is binary (ironic, that). So I say I'm bisexual so that NO ONE can forget we exist. So that no one can forget we have higher risk for negative health consequences, domestic violence, poverty. So that when the counters count, they have to count me!

I say I'm bisexual so that Tom Daley and Maria Bello don't have to. I say I'm bisexual so that every time someone comes out as having a relationship with someone of the same gender after having relationships with people of a different gender (or vice versa), and the press rush to say that person is "gay," they remember me and take a step back.

I say I'm bisexual so that I can be googled. So that someone alone, someone far away, someone scared can look on the internet and find me. And see my life, and my pride, and my fear, and my love, and my label.

I say I'm bisexual so that I can never deny it. Because denying love is too hard. And once you've said it on the internet, it never goes away. And I never have to hide again. I never can hide again.

I say I'm bisexual so that someday I won't have to. So that when we get better at recognizing that sexual orientation is just another piece of a person; I can just be another person.

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offbeat home: from sci-fi and russian horror, to sherlock holmes fan fic and tear-jerkers: a lady writer reading list for the new year

Darlings, as usual, my reading list for 2013 is a study in contradictions. Four Horsemen smut, to Man Booker Nominee. Magnum opi, to video game popular fiction. But as I review my Goodreads list, I see that 2013 was really the year of the ladieeeez. 

I'm late to the party for some of these authors, long-time follower of others, and excited to discover a few more…

Late to the party

Octavia Butler: The Xenogenesis Trilogy

I am super ashamed to have only jumped on the Butler bandwagon this late, but dear Gaia in heaven, this is the most gorgeous, heartbreaking hard scifi series I have ever read. Butler is a female writer of color and she writes with all of her being. Her futures are believable and terrifying because they are grounded in our present, in our complex cultural identity.

Marilynne Robinson: Housekeeping

One of my friend's favorite books in the world, Housekeeping came into my life at an odd time. Robinson's writing is lush and claustrophobic, filling your brain with a world of melancholy and confusion. I read the climax of the book on the night of the Boston Marathon Bombings and lay in bed afterwards, not crying, simply letting my eyes rid themselves of the tears that had been building up all day. Housekeeping doesn't let you escape its influence. While some may enjoy the sensation of bathing in rich prose, I found it too emotionally enveloping.

Long-time reader

J.K. Rowling: A Casual Vacancy

With time, it will get easier to stop comparing everything Rowling writes to Harry Potter, but while reading A Casual Vacancy, I recognized her intricate voice, her well drawn and conspiratorial teenagers, her flawed and regretful adults, her fully-fleshed micro communities, her tightly woven plots. This was a sad book. Life is sad and death is inevitable and those that die are wiped of their sin. So were Harry's parents, so was Sirius, and so was Barry Fairbrother. And those of us who live struggle in the shadow of their reputation, torn between the false memory of their life and the horrible knowledge that we will never live up to it.

Laurie R. King: Garment of Shadows: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

I've been reading the Mary Russell series for 15 years; it's my first Sherlock fanfic, when I really think about it. Mary is smart and funny and everything a 15-year old girl could imagine herself to be. Sherlock loves her for all her ugly quirks and together they trot around the globe in the 1920s solving mysteries.

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New Discoveries

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya: There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby

Petrushevskaya has been writing and publishing in Russia for 30 years and this collection of her short stories became a NY Times Best Seller when it was published in the US in 2009. Reading like the Russian, grown-up version of Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark, these short ultra-creepy tales are everything good about Russian fairy tales, with terrifying modern twists. War, poverty, political dissent, jealousy, grief are contrasted with love and duty. To country, to family, to neighbors.

Linda Olsson: Astrid and Veronika

I read this right after Housekeeping, which probably wasn't great for my mood or my empathy for grieving white ladies. Astrid and Veronika is a gorgeous peek into one year of these women's lives. As they share and mourn together, we share and mourn with them. I found the style a little demonstrative — sometimes I felt as if Linda Olsson was telling, not showing me the story. But I came away knowing the characters and pondering Veronika's future, hoping for the best for her.

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Bonus book by a dude

Kenji Yoshino: Covering: The Hidden assault on American Civil Rights

I wrote a law review article on the 10th anniversary of Yoshino's famous article on bisexual invisibility, but only this year got around to reading his seminal book. Covering is an argument for a new direction of civil rights advocacy: protecting individuals' ability to live their full selves in our society. Yoshino argues that as much as we should protect minority populations from facing discrimination because of the color of their skin or who they love, we should not require individuals to "cover" the characteristics that align them with their minority population — traditional African-American hairdos, for example, or lack of makeup for a less stereotypically feminine woman. Yoshino weaves his argument with threads from his own lived experience as a gay man and an Asian-American man. He describes his own journey from conversion (hoping and pretending to be straight), through passing (recognizing his own identity, but never sharing), to covering (being out, but acting as "straight" as he feels society requires him to act).

As a bisexual, less stereotypically feminine woman, I can identity all three phases in the journeys of many of my myriad identifies. But what I will take away from this book and treasure in my heart is Yoshino's unapologetic demand for justice. He quotes Justice Brennan's dissent to the Supreme Court in a death penalty case: when the majority spurned the use of studies showing racial bias in criminal sentencing for fear that it would lead to challenges to all dimensions of criminal sentencing, Brennan offered that this argument seemed "to suggest a fear of too much justice." Yoshino analogizes to civil rights, proposing that the same could be said about too much protection against discrimination.

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My wish list

I am always super inspired by the Brain Pickings blog, for which I have to thank many books on my 2014 wishlist:

• Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
• Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
• Valerie Young's The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women: Why Capable People Suffer from the Impostor Syndrome and How to Thrive in Spite of It
• I also have a commitment to get some more June Jordan in my life

Got some classics on my list:

• Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time
• The Derrick Bell Reader

As well as some new hotness:

• Toby Barlow's Sharp Teeth
• The Speculative Grammarian Essential Guide to Linguistics

So how about you? What did y'all read in 2013 and what are you looking forward to in 2014? What should I add to my must-read list and what did I TOTALLY get wrong?

Read the original post at OffBeat Home.

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feministing

These posts are from the feministing community. It's been interesting to reflect on past passions and face some deep flaws. 

shining, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen (8.13.08)

Reading QFinder’s post, 100 Stereotypes is more like it, I began to think a little more deeply of my own current hair dilemna. I am a law student, going into my second year. August 18th marks the beginning of the dreaded "Fall Recruitment", 8 weeks of hell during which all the second-year students compete for spots at interviews with the law firms looking for summer associates.

health care, gay marriage, domestic partnerships, and millions of billions of dollars (8.14.08)

Beyond the debate of same-sex marriage lies the greater problem of true rights for all partnerships, and not just rights that exist, like my school’s health insurance, but rights that are realistically obtainable.

why do you hate wiw (women in wheelchairs)? (9.17.08)

This afternoon, during rush hour, I took a bus I don’t normally take – a bus that runs rarely and is often very crowded.  On this particular afternoon, as we pulled up to this particular bus stop, there were people standing on the bus, but we weren’t yet at the in-each-other’s-armpits stage yet.  So we pull up to the bus stop and there is a woman in a wheel chair waiting for the bus.  The driver opens the door…  

 casual dismissal and objectification of rape in quantum of solace (11.24.08)

This weekend I went to see Quantum of Solace, and thanks to my severely reduced expectations, rather enjoyed losing myself in the car, boat and plane chases.  One scene, however, snapped me from my suspended reality back to the misogynist world that Bond operates in.

double shot at love; or america’s crazy love affair with bisexualism (10.11.08)

The elephant in the room, of course, is the possibility that the twins will make out on national television, which brings me to the crux of the post.  America’s homophobia combines awkwardly with its misogyny to create an exception for women making out.  Essentially, while LGBT people are marginalized by society, women making out (I do not use the term lesbian or bisexual here for a reason) are tolerated for the supposed turn-on factor that they provide for some straight men.

the (mis)education of cathy young (3.20.09)

On Wednesday, May 18, the Washington College of Law Federalist Society hosted libertarian columnist Cathy Young to present a talk which she titled "Presumed Guilty? Rape, Feminism, and False Accusations."  

Ms. Young is not a lawyer.  She is a long-time columnist for The Boston Globe and Reason Magazine , libertarian publication extrodinare.  Ms. Young has written extensively on both feminism and false rape accusations:  here , here , here , here , HERE , here , etc.  Her general premise seems to be that First Wave Feminism was a boon to women, but now that we can all get jobs and stuff, shouldn’t we look out for the menz?  I realize I am oversimplifying her argument, but I will get to the substance of her speech in a moment.

prometheus, vaginas, and the a-word. (hint: it’s abortion) (7.2.12)

Let’s return to Prometheus. I will give you three guesses what the “medically correct term” is for the removal of a fetus from a woman’s body. Abortion.  It’s abortion. However Noomi’s character was impregnated, whatever the reason for her needing to remove the fetus, she needed an abortion.

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covering: the hidden assault on our civil rights, by kenji yoshino

Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights by Kenji Yoshino
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Covering is an argument for a new direction of civil rights advocacy: protecting individuals’ ability to live their full selves in our society. Yoshino argues that as much as we should protect minority populations from facing discrimination because of the color of their skin or who they love, we should not require individuals to “cover” the characteristics that align them with their minority population: traditional African-American hairdos, for example, or lack of makeup for a less stereotypically feminine woman. Yoshino weaves his argument with threads from his own lived experience as a gay man and an Asian-American man. He describes his own journey from conversion (hoping and pretending to be straight), through passing (recognizing his own identity, but never sharing), to covering (being out, but acting as “straight” as he feels society requires him to act).

As a bisexual, less stereotypically feminine woman, I can identity all three phases in the journeys of many of my myriad identifies. But what I will take away from this book and treasure in my heart is Yoshino’s unapologetic demand for justice. He quotes Justice Brennan’s dissent to the Supreme Court in a death penalty case: when the majority spurned the use of studies showing racial bias in criminal sentencing for fear that it would lead to challenges to al dimensions of criminal sentencing, Brennan offered that this argument seemed “to suggest a fear of too much justice.” Yoshino analogizes to civil rights, proposing that the same could be said about too much protection against discrimination.

Judicial efficacy and administration burdens aside, YES! We allow ourselves, as lawyers, to see the law as the blueprint, the walls of the house that we are allowed to decorate. Instead, we should see the law as the shelter we have built to protect ourselves, a shelter we can add to as our family grows larger. There is no restriction on the number of rooms. There is no such thing as "too much justice." Yoshino asked a mentor for advice as he stepped into the life of law professor. “He told me his only advice for the coming years was that I should be more myself, that instead of reasoning within the law as it existed, I should speak my truth and make the law shape itself around me.”


View all my reviews

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futile arguments

exerpt from Futile Arguments:Lawrence v. Texas and the Supreme Court Bar, published in the Modern American. 


The current consensus in the literature and among Supreme Court litigators themselves is that hiring specialized appellate counsel is generally a good thing. Michelle Lore wrote an excellent article for The Minnesota Lawyer in 2007, detailing all the reasons a trial lawyer should hand off an appeal to an appellate specialist. Among other advantages, she points out the specialized skill set, familiarity with appellate judges, and the objectivity that new appellate counsel can bring to a case. She also notes the prestige that attaches to specialized counsel, recognizing that clients view appellate work as “a distinct service.”

These clients may be correct in their view. According to Kevin McGuire and Joseph Swanson, specialized appellate counsel achieve much higher rates of being granted certiorari (also
known as “cert,” or review on appeal) in the Supreme Court and possibly reach higher rates of winning cases. In his article, Repeat Players, Mr. McGuire examined the lawyers in all Supreme
Court cases between 1977 to 1982 to determine that “lawyers who litigate in the high court more frequently than their opponents will prevail substantially more often.” Kevin McGuire proposes that the more an attorney appears before the Court, the higher the likelihood of his success. Joseph Swanson takes a micro look at the certiorari process by examining three particular members of the Supreme Court bar in three particular cases, but arrives at a conclusion similar to Mr. McGuire’s: “One can only conclude that hiring experienced Supreme Court counsel to petition the Justices for review may improve one’s chances considerably.”

One consequence of the rise of the elite Supreme Court bar is that judges may expect something different, if not better, of the parties appearing before them than they have in the
past. According to Jennifer S. Carroll, appellate judges expect a different level of legal argumentation than trial judges. The “emotional pleas” considered the norm at the trial level, she says, would be “inappropriate at the appellate level.” In fact, she argues that “[a]pellate practice has evolved into a specialized area of the law, and justifiably so. The fundamentals of appellate advocacy—writing a simple persuasive brief, making an effective oral argument, and having a command of the appellate procedure—necessarily reflect effort, skill, and at the highest level, art.”

Even the Supreme Court agrees. The American Bar Association Journal interviewed Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner about their coauthored book Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges. The book instructs appellate lawyers of at all levels on how best to write briefs, argue cases, and, ultimately, convince judges. When the Journal asked Justice Scalia his thoughts on the rise of the Supreme Court bar, the Justice said:

I think that there are a significantly larger number of lawyers who appear at least once a term and sometimes several times a term than when I first came on the court . . . . I think I can say that those who do it with great frequency and are paid a lot of money to do it because they are good at it are obviously going to be better—other things being equal—than a novice.

A litigator approaching her first argument in the Supreme Court may rightfully worry that this presumed level of competence creates an ethical duty to hire specialized appellate counsel.
Christine Macey compares the benefits of increased chances of being granted certiorari, more effective oral arguments, and the affordability of appellate specialists to the “novice lawyer’s”
obligations to educate her client and provide competent representation. Ms. Macey concludes that “although statistics show that experience matters at the High Court,” inexperienced attorneys may fulfill their ethical duties by comprehensively educating their clients and preparing adequately for trial. Moot courts, Supreme Court clinics, brief writing assistance, and online and print resources (including those coauthored by Justices themselves) are all resources attorneys may use to help them prepare.

Ms. Macey also discusses reasons that attorneys may prefer to not pass on their cases to appellate attorneys.

A lawyer may want to keep [a] case for legitimate reasons, such as client trust or superior knowledge of the facts. Alternatively, a lawyer may wish to keep [a] case for self-interested reasons. A Supreme Court argument is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for most attorneys. It could lead to television or newspaper coverage, as well as future business. Supreme Court advocacy is associated with prestige. . . . Legal fees may also motivate to keep the case to herself.

Some of these reasons may also be related to a lawyer’s connection with and passion for the particular cause implicated in the case. The lawyers involved in Lawrence v. Texas exemplify the way in which the rise of the Supreme Court bar can affect who argues which cases. To explore the rise of the Supreme Court bar, and specifically the role of Lawrence v. Texas
and impact litigation, in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement, I interviewed Paul Smith and Mitchell Katine and corresponded briefly with Suzanne Goldberg over email.

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drawing bisexuality back into the picture

excerpt from Drawing Bisexuality Back into the Picture: How Bisexuality Fits into LGBT Legal Structure Ten Years After Bisexual Erasure, published in the Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender.

[I]f I am not free and if I am not entitled equal to heterosexuals and homosexuals then homosexual men and women have joined with the dominant heterosexual culture in the tyrannical pursuit of E Pluribus Unum and I a bisexual woman committed to cultural pluralism and, therefore to sexual pluralism, can only say, you better watch your back!
- June Jordan, On Bisexuality and Cultural Pluralism, in Affirmative Acts

INTRODUCTION

In 2000, Kenji Yoshino published a paper exploring the social erasure of bisexuality. He introduced the paper by empirically proving that bisexuality was invisible through a quick survey of popular news sources that featured volumes more articles about homosexuality than bisexuality. Once he showed that bisexuality was invisible, he made sure to distinguish between the incidental invisibility of bisexuality, perhaps because of the low number of bisexuals, and its deliberate erasure. Yoshino theorized that monosexuals—individuals who are
attracted to only one gender, such as heterosexuals and homosexuals—created an epistemic contract to erase bisexuality in social culture. He argues that monosexuals erase bisexuals in three ways—class erasure, individual erasure, and delegitimization—and proposes that monosexuals have three reasons for participating in and encouraging this erasure: “1) an interest in the stability of sexual orientation categories; 2) an interest in the primacy of sex as a diacritical characteristic; and 3) an interest in the preservation of monogamy.”

My article, written on the tenth anniversary of Yoshino’s seminal piece, is not an update on whether bisexuality has gained social visibility in the last ten years or an examination of whether invisibility is still maintained by a contract among monosexuals. Rather, I begin from the position that bisexuality is invisible in legal culture, like in Yoshino’s social culture, and pose two hypotheses for this invisibility. First, I believe that while Yoshino’s analysis retains viability when
analogized to the legal context—which he explores within sexual harassment jurisprudence—I propose that bisexuality is inherently invisible to the law, beyond the reach of deliberate erasure. A plaintiff’s bisexuality is only at issue in the law where there has been an affirmative outing. That is, in cases where sexuality is at issue, plaintiffs are presumed monosexual, and must either declare their own bisexuality or have it found for them. I explore this legal invisibility in two contexts in Part I of this article.


Second, I argue that where bisexuality is legally relevant it has been erased within the legal culture because it is complicated and muddles legal arguments that depend upon the binary of sexuality. Yoshino addresses this reliance on the binary of sexuality as a fundamental part of homosexual investment in stabilizing sexual orientation by erasing bisexuality, but I argue that this factor is much more prominent in legal culture than the social context. In Part II of this article, I use the suspect class analysis under the Equal Protection Clause to show how bisexuality
complicates legal arguments, and propose two solutions through which bisexuality can be introduced into the Equal Protection analysis without compromising sexual orientation’s suspect classification.

The erasure of bisexuality, representative of all sexual identities between 100% homosexual and 100% heterosexual puts the fight recognition of sexual and gender minorities at a disadvantage. Not acknowledging sexualities along a continuum, weakens arguments for granting rights to and preventing discrimination against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. I conclude with the proposition that inclusion of bisexuality, and indeed of all non-binary identities, is crucial for the LGBT civil rights movement.

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frank ocean, being bi, and other continuums

from a service I gave at my unitarian universalist congregation. 

Last week, R&B singer Frank Ocean rippled the music industry and the LGBT community by posting a letter on his blog, sharing that his first love was a man. He published the letter in anticipation of the debut of his first full-length album; days later, he performed his single Bad Religion on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, singing lyrics about which we all now knew the background story.

Frank Ocean is the first major R&B singer to explicitly talk about being in a same-sex relationship. But I don't want to talk about the gendered politics of the R&B and hip-hop world. I'm not equipped to, nor would it benefit to add my voice to the thousands of voices in that arena after his announcement last week.  No, today I want to talk about what I talk about best: how Ocean's announcement made me feel. And hopefully, by talking about my feelings, I can explore a few things with you today about continuums of gender and sexuality.

I begin with a brief, but hopefully not dry historical framing. In the middle of the last century, Alfred Kinsey began releasing the findings of his extensive interviews with thousands of men and women who shared with him the details of their every sexual and romantic counter, every dream and fantasy. So surprising were the revelations uncovered by these interviews that Kinsey had to create a new platform from which to talk about human sexuality: the Kinsey scale. Refined and or rejected by hundreds of scholars, the Kinsey scale placed human sexuality on a seven-point continuum: from 0 to 6, 0 begin exclusively heterosexual, 6 being exclusively homosexual, and 3 being "equally heterosexual and homosexual, or bisexual."

Revelatory yet flawed, the Kinsey scale has become a ubiquitous measure of sexuality in the American LGBT movement. Further expansion and revision of the scale have produced the Storm Sexuality Axis, which plotted sexuality along two axes, and the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, which allowed for the dimension of time and compares sexual experience with emotional attraction and self identification.  

Aside from the famous Kinsey scale, Alfred Kinsey’s other most important contribution to the modern LGBT movement (and human sexuality in general) was the revelation that so many people were bisexual! According to Kinsey’s research, approximately half of the people he interviewed were exclusively heterosexual, another 3% were exclusively homosexual, meaning that almost half of his subjects could be identified as bisexual. His scale did not differentiate between sexual and emotional attraction versus experience, but the results were nonetheless shocking.  

The most modern study of bisexual invisibility, out of the LGBT Center in San Francisco, found that approximately three times as many women identified as bisexual than lesbian, and about half as many men identified as bisexual as gay. When the question was expanded to attraction as opposed to identification or experience, a 2005 study found that 20% of all respondents expressed having been attracted to people of more than one gender.

I have a personal stake in these findings, identifying as bisexual myself (and I suspect that many self-identified bisexuals would feel the same way) but clearly, the literature shows that WE ARE EVERYWHERE!

But back to my feelings. When Frank Ocean published his letter, I had two simultaneously deep and sharp stabs of emotion. The first was gratitude and I will return to my gratitude in a moment. The second emotion was fear: a dark and clouded fear that made me wince with sympathy. For though I do not know what Frank Ocean was thinking as he wrote his letter or the words to the songs that would necessitate the letter, I do know what I would have felt, for I have been there. The closet (for that is what we have chosen to call the state in which we are all assumed to be heterosexual, or zeroes on the Kinsey scale) is a stifling, but safe place to reside. Another term for the closet is "covering," erasing that part of you that makes you different from the expected norm, your sexuality, your gender, your race. Removing your cover, stepping out of the metaphorical closet - you are deliberately unveiling that which makes you different.

We are all different from the expected norm in some way, and some of us in many ways. We are all in the closet, we all "cover" something. We make the daily calculus whether the closet, the cover, is either safer or more stifling.  The math depends on our environment, our circumstances, our privilege, our community, our inner strength, our will-power, our resources.

Here is the other dimension to the sympathetic fear I felt when I read Frank Ocean's letter: when your distinction, your difference, what you cover, is invisible to the naked eye, you will be coming out of the closet, uncovering your differences, your entire life. As long as there are those who assume same-ness, there will come moments when we must assert difference, take off the cover.  And each uncovering requires the same calculus, the same strength, the same fear. I am sure that Frank Ocean’s letter was not the first time he told this story, nor will it be the last. And each telling, each uncovering, will be accompanied by fear, trust, relief, expectation.

And so I return to my gratitude for Frank Ocean, for taking off his cover for us in this moment. For trusting us to see one facet of his life. I am also grateful to Frank Ocean for what he didn’t say. He didn’t say “I am gay.” Instead, he told us a story about his life. He uncovered a piece of himself that was previously hidden and asked us to trust him, asked us to love this fuller version of himself. Asked us not to judge, not to label, but to love.

I wanted to talk about bisexuality today because I think we need to understand that we have a flawed view of human sexuality, one that can be made more whole by understanding sexuality along a continuum and understanding that many more of us are standing along the line than are standing on the endpoints. So too for gender identity and expression: there is no one standing in the end zones, no perfect specimens of “man” or “woman.” We are all on the field, expressing our gender identity as best we can, wearing jeans and baking cupcakes, reading love stories and collecting flowers, betting on races and having great table manners.
What Frank Ocean’s story really teaches us is to love. If we agree that many of us are “covering” something, our sexuality, our desires, our true gender expression, then we must always be open to the uncovering, the revealing, the revelation of someone’s true self.  In order to fully affirm the worth and dignity of every person, we must treasure the uncovering as a symbol of trust and return it with the love it deserves.

For indeed, we all experience our own uncovering. For many, it may be leaving the traditional closet. To friends, to family, to ones that we love, to the entire R&B community, to the entire internet.

For others, uncovering may start with finding a community like Bell Street, a community in which you don’t need to cover at all, or maybe just cover less than normal.

When I was 20 I came out to my two closest friends. I felt safe and loved and vulnerable and in a moment of spontanaeity, I lifted up my cover and let them see a truer, deeper me, a more whole me. In his letter, Frank Ocean talks of sitting in a car, telling this man he loved him, and feeling as if he were at the edge of a cliff.  I too sat in a car, those years ago. I too was at the edge of a cliff.

Frank Ocean's words: I sat there and told my friend how I felt. I wept as the words left my mouth. I grieved for them, knew I could never take them back for myself. He patted my back. He said kind things. He did his best. But he wouldn't admit the same. I felt like I'd only imagine reciprocity for years. Now imagine being thrown off a cliff.  No, I wasn't on a cliff. I was still in my car telling myself it was gonna be fine and to take deep breaths. I took the deep breaths and carried on.  UPDATE 5.16 - I've been meaning to add this article to the site. The giants whose shoulders Frank Ocean stands on: http://www.sfbg.com/noise/2013/02/13/beyond-frank-ocean-la-pe%C3%B1a-takes-deeper-look-hip-hop-inclusivity. 

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