White Trash: Manifesting the Bisexual

Abstract

THIS IS WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO BE BISEXUAL. You're sixteen and your newest friend has brown hair and brown eyes and you don't know why but you hope she likes you more than your other friends do. She does. You glide through your sophomore year, writ ing notes and holding hands on dark buses after basketball games, and only once does the word lesbian flash through your mind-only once as you bent down to kiss her warm mouth-because you knew even then that what you were doing had nothing do with her gender. You loved someone and it so happened that she was female; you'd love her if she were a man, if there ever could be such a man with brown eyes like bark off a tree, such sweet breath, and the kind of skin that you want to touch. There was. Now you're 20 and your high school love is just a memory (she dumped you before prom for a swimmer named Champ)-no, not a memory, but an idea. What happened, you tell yourself, is something I'm going to have tofigure out one day. You throw it on the back burner because you're not dying for women-hell, you don't even like any of the feminists in your lit classes 'cuz they all have big mouths and seem, at all times, excessively miffed. You think feminism is unnecessary because you're here and you're bright and nothing has held you back baby. You yourself don't actually