I Was Always Out

Detroit nights have a feel about them. The temperature is always right. Our skin comes out, the music gets louder, and we find ourselves in familiar places. Rooms filled with beautiful Black people who eat, drink, laugh, dance, and tell stories. Body to body in low lit spaces, you can hear the motorcycles and cars in the background.

And one of those Detroit nights, out at Brix, the wine bar, we caught a vibe. Maybe I had missed it before, in her consistent phone calls. In her curiosity about me, in the way she stared at me. I could see her now, she had become clearer to me, and in our eyes, plenty was said. I still remember our first kiss. It was passionate and real and loving.

I should say now: I do not know what coming out should look like. If it even has a look. I do not know if I ever got to that part of the journey. When someone asks me, When did you know you liked women? I just refer to the time I fell for her.

From that day forward, we became something to each other. We played friends. Beyond her cheeky smile, things were complicated. I had just gotten out of a 3.5-year relationship with a man, and admittedly, she had a boyfriend.

She wanted us both, and one thing about it, we both did what she wanted. She was always so convincing, and I wanted her to be happy. I also wasn’t against the pleasure she promoted.

And as the story goes, jealousy and resentment grew in different directions.

She took that trip to Denver with him. She’d been saying she would leave him for months. While she was there, she sent flowers to my job. Flowers to my mother’s house. Asked my best friend, the only person who knew about us, to take me to dinner. My mother’s intuition arrived with the question: Are these from a woman?

She knew I was not out yet. She knew I was not ready to share with anyone explicitly. And still, I was being made visible in places where I had not chosen to be seen.

Eventually, she did leave him, and every day, it was just her and me. You know how the queer folk do. We were inseparable. We got on well and were very attracted to each other. We were similar in many ways, too—both switches, both bisexual—and I felt it was a good match for the first woman I ever cared for. We understood each other, and candor was always present. We debated a lot, too. She encouraged my work, loved my scar, and supported me. I was happy.

She was not.

She wanted to make it official. She wanted me to be hers, but between our recent breakups and all the drama that came with it, I didn’t want it. I adored her, but a title wasn’t necessary for me. I also hadn’t gotten over how she exposed me, and I was honest about all of it. She had my time and attention, but she could not possess me. And she did not take that lightly.

My non-desire to commit then brought my sexuality into question. Not in the way most would think. It wasn’t about me secretly wanting to be with men or anyone else, but it was about me not being able to admit I was a lesbian. She insisted I was in denial. These conversations began to take place frequently, began eroding our intimacy, and began chipping away at my own self-trust. It created a relationship between me and disbelief that had not been there before. Did I know who and what I was?

She was the first woman I had ever loved, not the first (or last) woman I had been with. My attraction to women grew at the same rate as my freedom in life did. I found uncharted territories of my sexuality after I turned 18, and I won’t apologize for that.

I think in the erotic—beyond sex, in feel, connection, mutuality, and resonance—this is where we find who and what we are, often undefined, but known through sensation, ease, and presence. And like a child, I wanted to be nurtured for that, not forced or judged into choosing solely women in this lifetime. I wanted my agency, in love.

Our relationship inevitably started to fall through the cracks. Daily conversations turned into arguments, and then cannot find profiles, blocking, and not speaking in public. This lasted months. As COVID hit, the distance grew even more. I grieved not just the lover, but the friend I thought I had in her.

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In the summer of 2020, Detroit nights didn’t exist. Friends would drop by the house, and we’d have conversations on the porch at a distance. My good friend and peer in wellness, who just so happens to own the gym my ex started working out at, stopped by. I was grieving the relationship and felt, for the first time, the courage to share about the breakup and about my orientation. I decided to confide in her, and before I could complete my full thoughts, before I’d let it leave my lips, she gently interrupted me. Sheepishly, she shook her head. I know, she told me.

I still remember the shock in my body. Followed by the freeze. My neck cocking back, my eyes blinking, my head shaking in confusion. How could she? This was my friend, my peer, and my story, my outing. She had told her version of a story before I’d even decided I had one.

I was wildly disappointed, the grief doubled in a way I still don’t have language for. I realized if she told my friend, someone, not close to her in that way, then I was outed entirely. I was outed without needing to know who knew, and in the closest community circles we shared.

After this, I steered clear of women. Some kind of shame came over me. A shame that was not my own, but one that was given to me. I felt wrong for the first time.

We didn’t speak for a while, and my peer wouldn’t be the last community member to ask if the rumor was true. Did I date so and so? Am I into women? I felt the need to explain myself to people who held no weight in my life. It felt like something I had to confess without knowing when.

People who know they are gay from a young age have more insight into themselves. For me, I did not fully understand my own desires, I simply allowed them to exist in my life. I hadn’t questioned myself until now.

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As time went on, she and I would see each other out, and the need to stay distant lessened. I felt the need to confront her, to talk, to reconnect, to understand why. We were friends before anything else, right?

Our reconnections were touch and go. Sometimes that passion returned. We didn’t always talk about the past. She resented me, I could see that. I didn’t trust her, she could feel that. She wanted me to agree with her that we were soulmates, that we should’ve never let it go. But I knew it had grown into something misaligned, some would even say harmful. I wish I had all the words in this moment to describe wanting her without the manipulation, without the ego, and without the need to define myself as lesbian.

One night in her new apartment, I found myself back in front of her. We sat in the kitchen talking, and the past finally came up in its fullness. The kitchen wasn’t as warm as the last, and the space in general was emptier. I sat at the counter, feeling the cold marble underneath my forearms. I stared back at her as she smirked and recounted history. We both reflected, but mine was more like deflection. I wanted to move on from the anger I felt beneath my sadness. Our love wasn’t here anymore, and we would never talk about it responsibly, with honesty and care.

She leaned in. I could tell she was going to share something she believed was a secret.

I outed you.

I knew. We knew.

But why?

I did it because I wanted to hurt you. I knew it would hurt you.

I paused, staring back at the same woman who used to hide her face, the same woman whose hips I used to hug. I pursed my lips, shook my head yes. Almost to show acceptance. I didn’t want her to know she could hurt me, so I responded: You did me a favor.

At that moment, I offered grace. I forgave her right then and there in my speech. I even thanked her. But I knew my brain would delay processing this conversation, and eventually, she would never be in my life again. I hadn’t gotten there yet, but something deep, deep, deep down told me, no. Years later, as I write this, I feel loss for whatever it is that was taken from me. I have felt its absence.

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I was out when I was close to her at the bar. When we were making love. I was out in LA, where we ran the Venice strip. I was out in the mirror when we saw each other, together.

I was always out in my own mind.

What she took from me, I cannot name for myself. It’s someone else’s now. And it was someone I loved, who was also struggling with their own identity when we were together.

For some time, I ruminated on my sexuality. I would reach out to my brother, who some would label a butch queen, to ask him questions, like: why do I have to choose whether I like men or women? Desperate to understand how I could fit into the very community I was harmed in. All he could reply was, some people need to put you in a box for their own safety. He gave me the word queer instead of bisexual so that I stopped doing it to myself.

Some years would pass, and I’d meet the next woman I was meant to love. I would learn again to break free from the need to define one’s sexuality as one thing. I would encourage her to explore her trans identity. I would love an emotionally immature man from Maryland next, and I would again refute the box made for me.

I would continue to open my heart to my own desires. Audre Lorde wrote about the erotic as a measure: the yes within ourselves. I follow my yes. I love who I love because it just feels right. I am enamored by my own strength, my ability to be more of a man than my own father. I am taken by my femininity, the way my body curves and hair curls. The way makeup feels on my skin and the baggy jeans sit off my waist. How I look at men, women, and nonbinary people in ways that transcend image. How I like my gender and everyone else’s.

Following my yes has led me to very human places. Places only I know. Queer, bisexual, pansexual, lesbian, straight—I am whatever you say I am because I cannot fit into just one. Someone benefits from my isolating myself in that way, and it is not me.

No one can regulate my erotic. I belong to me, and I love loving many in this lifetime. If I must be at odds with the world, well then, I’ll be that.

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