Bi As I Wanna Be (with apologies to Dennis Rodman)
Tikkun Magazine, July 1997

A couple of years ago I decided to make some friends who weren’t white. Why? The same reasons most progressive white people would like to have some friends who aren’t white. My world was sweet and safe; easy to move through, but monocultural, like a forest full of one kind of tree. My politics situated me on the ‘solution’ side of the racial divide, but my segregated social life made me feel like part of the problem.

Thanks to my ten years of living and raising children in Oakland, and my activist network, my mission was fairly easily accomplished. It wasn’t so much a matter of meeting new people as selectively cultivating relationships with folks I already knew. Instead of calling only the (white) people I was closest to when I wanted a date for a movie or a demonstration, I made a point of calling someone I wanted to be close to instead. When I threw a party I expanded the guest list beyond the usual (mostly white) suspects. When I went to a party I sought out conversations with people (of color) I didn’t yet know.

I was running my own little affirmative action campaign, and I was learning the same lesson law schools and corporations have learned: no sacrifice, no lowering of standards was required. Quite the contrary. As my life became populated with people who were culturally different from me, it become much richer, much more interesting.

And much less comfortable.

I’d expected that growing close to people of color would bring me face-to-face with the prejudices and intolerance that arose along the way: mine toward them, and possibly, theirs toward me. What I wasn’t prepared for was the profound intolerance I discovered in myself–toward myself.

With my white friends I never questioned the language I used; the amount of money I made or how I spent it; my Sixties-style, loosey-goosey child-rearing practices. I was only mildly embarrassed about the Mexican woman who cleaned my house; the $300 a month I spent on therapy; my funky but fabulous country cabin. But when I was talking to my new friend Michael, an East Oakland basketball coach; or Leticia, a junior college jobs counselor; or Brenda, an African-American writer, everything I was saying suddenly seemed horribly middle-class. Horribly privileged. Horribly...white. I found myself–normally the world’s biggest talker–afraid to speak. Afraid to reveal myself as the boring, bourgeois, black wanna-be, (and oh yes, did I mention?) bisexual I am.

In the early days of my new friendships I disclosed fragments of my life and my self bit by bit. If the cabin seemed acceptable, I’d mention the therapy. If the big fat book contract didn’t end the friendship, I’d risk an encounter with my (undisciplined, big-mouthed) kids. Gradually I stopped trying to sound and act like my black and Latina friends, and started sounding and acting like my white, Jewish self. Gradually I stopped seeing my new friends’ ethnicity–and my own–as the most significant thing about them, and me, and our relationship.

But still I dodged the final frontier: the bisexuality barrier. Until the day Michael told me he’d run across, and bought, and read, my first book–the one that described, in great and glowing detail, my twelve-year relationship with a woman. "You’ve been holding out on me," he said, and I knew he wasn’t hurt only because I’d never mentioned publishing a book. "Did you think I’d judge you if I knew the whole story?"

"Yes" was the truth, and that was what I finally gave Michael, who went right on being my son’s coach and my good friend. And that’s what I finally gave Leticia, who hugged me and told me about her favorite gay uncle in Amarillo. And that’s what I finally gave Brenda, who turned out to have a rather active bisexual streak herself.

Big surprise: stereotypes notwithstanding, my ethnic minority friends accepted me as a sexual minority as gracefully as most of my white friends did–more gracefully than some. Big surprise: the more I revealed myself to Michael and Leticia and Brenda, the closer I got to them, and to myself.

When my sons were in junior high, the age of mimicry, they suddenly started talking like the black kids they’d been friends with all their lives. They’d call me on the phone and I’d have to ask who I was talking to; that’s how unlike themselves they sounded. When they got to high school they still had black friends, but they started sounding like Peter and Jesse again. I was greatly relieved; proud of them for being proud of themselves.

My sons tell me that growing up as minorities among people of color, learning to like themselves despite being members of the least-liked ethnic group, has made them stronger, more aware of themselves and other people. Like my children, I’ve waged my sharpest struggle for self-definition in my relationships with people of color. Like my children, I’ve learned that the hardest thing–and the greatest thing–about embracing people who aren’t exactly like me is that it forces me to face, and embrace, what makes each of us exactly who we are.