Making Progress or Losing Ground: LGBT Asia

Being Bisexual: Navigating Invisibility & Practicality

Level 5 Function Room, Royal Festival Hall

Last weekend I spoke at this Alchemy Festival event in the Southbank Centre. Organised by Bobby Tiwana, it was a brief look at South Asian LGBT communities in the home countries and the diaspora through the perspectives of various speakers. It was an intimate affair attended by around 40 to 50 people, with short talks followed up with café-style discussions among the audience and facilitators. I am posting the text of my speech below, which touched upon both bisexuality and the wider environment faced by LGBTQ people in Bangladesh. 

"I didn’t know the Bengali word for bisexual until I Googled it while I was at university. I didn’t actually even know the English word 'bisexual' until I was thirteen or so. Before then, I’d thought I was the weird gay kid who liked girls on the side.

I thought it would be good to start with some humour, but honestly I’m telling you this because it sets the tone for the rest of what I’m going to say, about how bisexuality is often not discussed or mentioned, or misunderstood.

I think bisexuals make many heterosexual and homosexual people uncomfortable - often because they’re confused by us. Maybe to an external monosexual observer, it can look like I’m pursuing men one day, and then the next day I flick a switch, become straight, and am pursuing women. And I guess this can be quite disconcerting, especially for a group of people who’ve built their activism around the slogan that sexual minorities do not choose to be attracted to who they’re attracted to. 

আমার নিজের উভকামিতা বোঝা, ১ম অংশ

আমার লেখার বিষয় হবে বিভিন্ন মানুষকে আমার যৌন আবেদনের কথা খুলে বলা এবং তাদের এ বিষয়ের প্রতি প্রতিক্রিয়া নিয়ে। কিন্তু মানুষের সাথে এভাবে কথা বলা আমি কেবল মাত্র কয়েক মাস হল শুরু করেছি। আমার মতে আমার জীবনের এ পর্যায় পৌছানোর অভিজ্ঞতা নিয়েও আমার কিছু কথা বলা উচিত। এই কারনে আমার এই পোস্ট আর এর পরের কয়েকটি পোস্ট লিখব আমার ছোটবেলা নিয়ে, এবং আমি আমার নিজের উভকামিতা কিভাবে গ্রহন করলাম তা নিয়ে।

আমি বারো বা তের বছর বয়সে বুঝতে পারি যে আমার যৌন আকর্ষণ অন্য সবার মতন না। আমার এ বাস্তবতার মুখো মুখি হতে হয় দুঃখজনক ভাবে ইন্টারনেট ও পর্ণগ্রাফির কারনে। আমরা তখন থাকি এশিয়ার এক দেশে, এবং ওই বয়সে আমাদের বাসায় প্রথম ইন্টারনেট নেয়া হয়। তবে তখন ছিল ডায়েল আপ কানেকশনের যুগ, এবং ইন্টারনেট আশা মানে এই না যে আমি শব সময় পর্ণগ্রাফি দেখে বেরাতাম। তাও আবার কম্পিউটার টি ছিল আব্বু-আম্মুর ঘরে, এবং সুধু কেউ না থাকা অবস্থায় আমি মাঝে মাঝে সেটা পর্ণগ্রাফি দেখার জন্য ব্যবহার করতে পারতাম।

Coming to Terms with My Bisexuality, Part 1

Realisation

Most of my writing will centre on the theme of coming out, my experiences of doing so and people’s reactions to it. But coming out for me has been a journey that started fairly recently, and I feel the need to explain how I actually came to this point. My next few posts will deal with how my life had been before I decided to come out, and how I came to terms with my bisexuality during this time internally at least.

I've known I wasn’t straight from around the time I was twelve or thirteen. Unfortunately, it all started with the Internet and porn, rather than something sweet like falling in love with the boy next door. We were living in Asia, and if I remember correctly, I was twelve when we got an Internet connection in our house for the first time. I want to be clear – it wasn’t like my life was suddenly saturated with porn. We had a dial up connection (which in itself should tell you how much porn I could've gotten my hands on...), and the computer was kept in my parents’ bedroom.

But still, sometimes I managed to sneak in when no one else was there and used the computer to look up porn. I already knew about heterosexual sex from school and from friends. It was actually the only kind of sex we knew about: homosexuality didn't really exist for us then. And while the word gay had on rare occasions been used as a slur at my previous school in Europe, its meaning never completely registered in my head. So at first, all I looked at was straight porn, and it didn't even occur to me that there might be anything else out there. But at some point, I decided I quite liked the men, and I’d quite like to see more of the men. It was never a fully articulated thought, even within my own mind. Consequently it never occurred to me this was a gay thought, let alone a wrong thought. So I saw more of the men. Then I saw the men together. It wasn’t some kind of revelation. I just thought hmm, that’s interesting, I would have never thought that you could or would do that.

Then my imagination took over. And that was the true revelation.