Inter LGBT phobia , distrust & segregation
I'm a bisexual who volunteers at the LGBT resource center at my college and I attended a safe space training session yesterday. If you're not familiar with what that is I'm not sure I'm that great at explaining but...it's a session for - generally speaking - college staff members that teaches them how to talk to and deal with issues that might come up with students in the LGBT community of their college.

Apparently there's quite a common issue in the LGBT community of people who are coming out, not knowing who to turn to, and turning to authority figures within their school who are ill equip to deal with those issues. "Advisors" and class "counselors" get it particularly bad because of their helpful professional titles. But when you think about it they're there to advise your classes, your degree program, not your sexual awakening.

However because I'm a peer helper at the center that is my job. And since I "work" at a college space for LGBTs I decided I needed this.

The sessions are appropriately confidential, in fact we've had some issues with the school newspaper trying to "sit in" on the sessions which are basically like sensitivity training & therapy centered... so some pretty sensitive things are being said and explored. To make a long and painful story short we here at the center were quite pissed when the paper sent photographers to try and take pictures and writers to go in and write down what people were saying after we told them no a hundred times. The key word is TRY here. They didn't succeed, but they made the day pretty shitty even calling us with the audacity to complain that it was very secretive that the windows of the room the meeting happened to take place in were frosted with fake paper sticker frosting. Oooh, high tech! Stickers are so evasive! Those sneaky gays!


But the point of this whole rant is that something in particular struck me about the meeting yesterday so hard that I came out to four strangers as bisexual in some strange attempt to assist their understanding of gay life. The thing was...straight people think that all of us bi's, gays, lesbians and trans people know love and understand each other as part of the LGBT movement. NO. We don't.

It's funny, especially here in the bible belt...the fact that straight people never even think, maybe LGBT people don't all get along with each other. We didn't even barely touch on things like inter-LGBT discrimination though and I wished we had. It took 3.5 hours for this session and it still wasn't long enough to talk about all the issues. I really wish we would have talked more about the fact that it's not one big happy rainbow. There's bi phobia, trans phobia and more, all within the LGBT community. Not to mention internalized homophobia!

We don't all just love and accept all non straight people because we're not.

We grew up in a homophobic world just like them. We even hate ourselves sometimes for being gay.

I didn't want to really have to come out to this room of strangers especially because I'm not "out"... but when they started talking about this i felt obligated to chime in because everyone in the room with me was an older heterosexual person coming there to learn how to deal with students in crisis. That was, of course, also the reason that I was there...but I was different because at least I had a couple things in common with the people they'll hypothetically be working with. Also, instead of hypothetically working with people like this or maybe meeting student sexual identities face to face I already have, not to mention my own.
So I chimed in...
"I'm bisexual and I volunteer at the center and I feel weird sometimes when I mention my boyfriend."
Why?
"Because they might hear that and assume I'm heterosexual" - which they have and they have asked...even the nicest people...why are you here if you have a boyfriend? "Or they might assume that I don't know what they're going through so I can't help them, which is what i'm there to do."

Does that not even dawn on heterosexual people?
That even if you are gay friendly you might be considered untrustworthy or unable to help because you're straight?
Why is that?
Because straight is so "NORMAL"?
Because you're a grown up with a nice smile painted on so of course you know how to help?
It's just weird, because they know there's a kind of war going on, and they feel for the hate crime casualties, they even pick a political side of it and decide...i want to help "the gays" but they don't seem to realize that they're wearing the other sides uniform wherever they go.
At least they have the safe space sticker now.
One little patch on their heterosexual lives that says
"I actually can help you".

Still, I can't help but think that a lot of students would rather get help from someone gay and knows what they're going through from more than a couple games in a room for 3.5 hours...which is why I'm so worried about what orientation the next director of the center will be.

Because it might be this bisexual married guy and I'm sad to say, even I, a bisexual person, trust him less to be able to help the LGBT students because he's "only" bi - and because we can "choose sides", our pain is less and therefore our experience is less valuable to the gay community - theoretically speaking.

Which brings me back around full circle. We don't all love each other, we don't all love ourselves. Just look at the Lesbian/Gay rainbow...all the bars carefully separated by perfect lines...and bisexuals and pansexuals have their own flags. They may lump us into one unified movement, but we certainly haven't done ourselves that honor.