Co-President article from London Student. - http://www.london-student.net/2010/01/19/coming-in-from-outside/

“Come on in, from the outside” the cast of Boy George’s musical Taboo, implores the audience during the finale of the gayest thing to hit the stage since, well, musical theatre. My name is Art, and I’m a giggling, make-up wearing theatre-queen who often misses out on entire conversations because the soundtrack of Evita is blaring far too loudly in my head

Someone once described me as, not just gay, but the gay, the gay to which all other homosexuals are measured. I came out to my friends, my parents, grandparents and my hamster “Britney (after the tragic Ms Spears)”, to a chorus of, “yes, we already know Art” in my early teens. And, although at the time, I probably wasn’t gay, I was too innocent to even know what gay was, I was evidently too camp to be straight, and so, as a result, I came out.

And then it happened. I fell in love. Maxxie and I both emerged from a tiny homophobic town, and together we listened to musicals, watched every gay-film (however bad) that I could lay my chipped nail-varnished hands on and through each other we mapped out our sexual identity and our sexual tastes through porn, fooling around and drunken conversations over the cheapest cider we could find. Maxxie made me who I am today.

Despite the fact I left the north to study in London, I have never forgotten about Maxxie. I think about him every hour, of every day without fail, and have never been able to feel the intensity I continue to feel for him. To all intents and purpose to everyone, I was and am, as gay as you could ever get. Although, slowly but surely, a creeping suspicion took over my mind in its quieter moments, that I may just be sexually attracted to girls.

A chance encounter with a holidaying beautiful and audacious girl who decided to kiss me in June of last year, led to a long distance relationship. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute I spent with her and although it eventually ended because of a number of reasons, I suspect my “homosexuality” played a part in its cessation. The seeds of doubt however were planted, and I suddenly began to see women in a new way. Such as when I recently developed a massive giggling school-girl crush on a girl, who of course in the typical melodrama which is my life, was a lesbian and once again continues to pain my already crumpled heart.

When I stood in front of my grandma, struck a pose, and defiantly labelled myself with that 3-letter ‘g’ word, things began to happen. As many gay men will attest to, straight men become really uncomfortable, women become overly comfortable, (I have now seen so many women undressing in front of me, because I am gay, and “it doesn’t matter”) and once defined, that label sticks. My grandma cried, not because I am gay, but because I recently informed her that I was bisexual, and she didn’t like that I was not ‘one or t’other’, my mother who merely shakes her head whilst proclaiming ‘I just don’t understand it’, and my friends, to whom the idea of me and woman together is potentially the most abstract and existentialist idea that I or Sartre could ever have come up with. It’s an interesting void to find myself in.

As the beautiful and iconic SuBo sings in her uplifting song, Who I Was Born to Be, “Though I may not know the answers, I can finally say I am free, and if the questions led me here, then, I am who I was born to me”. If I am honest, this void I have found myself in is rather liberating.

Part of me fears that this re-discovery is moving me away from the “me” that Maxxie helped create, or that what people like about me, the bubbly, bouncing cabaret act that is my life will be lost. As such, the rest of my identity, which is admittedly almost entirely based on my sexuality, will irretrievably crumble. Its not a heterophobic or biphobic fear, but a fear of having a lack of identity. For now, I will sit quietly pining for the lesbian-love of my life, and/or Maxxie, and try to decide where on the spectrum of these two figures I will stake my brand-spanking new, self-defined identity for all to see.

Whilst writing this, I’m put on another layer of lippie and dashing out the door to go see a matinee of La Cage Aux Folles. At this performance, nestled in amongst the countless queens and their faghags, will be me, wondering how many people realise the closet doors can swing both ways, and that people can “come on in, from the outside.”