Being Bisexual

By the second year of secondary school, the bullying about my sexuality started to subside a little. Everyone had forgotten about me calling one of the boys from my year group 'too pretty'. However, undertones of it still existed. Some of the boys would just refer to me as "batty boy". Some would just call me "gay boy". I had more female friends than male, which didn't help matters. All the boys all played football and played Rush in the playground while I tended to stay in the music hut or chill on the bench in the playground. I wasn't feminine nor masculine, I was interested in the opposite sex but not with the enthusiasm everyone else had. Again, this didn't work in my favour as all the boys thought I fancied them. As if being bisexual was contagious and they would be turn gay. I fought hard to solidify my "heterosexuality" that after a while, I just stopped. I was tired of defending myself. After primary school and understanding my body changes, my sexual arousal plateaued. In my first few weeks of secondary school a really pretty girl Shanice, asked me out. We started 'dating', I was the talk of the year, popularity was coming back to me quicker than I thought. Then a week a later, I got dumped for a 'manly' man as she put it. Apparently, he was better looking than me, and had a better personality. At first, these words didn't resonate with me at all. I was nonplussed hearing it, mainly because I didn't understand how my personality was considered bad, and I already thought I was ugly. He ended up messing her about, and I couldn't help but feel like karma was coming to bite her in the arse, it never did. Not properly anyway. Year 8 (sophomore year) I thought I'd try again. I'm more mature, had the summer holiday to grow up and I still thought she was gorgeous. I remember asking my nan to take me to Argos to buy her bracelet and I wrote a letter explaining why we should make another go of things. I gave it to her at the start of French class. Mid way through as we were trying to identify propositions, publicly, she cut the bracelet up in pieces using a protractor in front of the whole class and read my letter aloud to her friends. Saying my heart broke and the pain I felt was excruciating, doesn't cut it. My heart was beating in my chest so hard, my eye's pulsated. I wanted to cry; wells of tears threatening to pour down my cheeks every time my heart struck a beat. I wanted to weep and wail in the corner of the French classroom, knees to chest, head on knees, rocking back and forth to soothe the pain. I wanted to bawl and howl like my mother had just passed away. I wanted to die; as if my first year of this god forsaken place wasn't bad enough, I now have to endue the social ridicule of exposing my heart and being vulnerable. I was exposed without my permission. This person robbed me of my dignity for her own personal pleasure, for no good reason. Her actions were evil, manipulative and plain disgusting. Lunch was directly after this class.

I forget my French teacher's name, but she was a kind woman. She held me back after class. I'd rather she didn't because this only made my lunch hall entrance even more awkward. She explained that girls can be really harsh and that in years to come, I would understand that what I did for her was mature beyond my years and really brave. Again, hearing these words didn't really have an impact on me. It does now, but then, all I wanted to do was kill this thing like Jon Venables did to Jamie Bulger. I walked out of the classroom to shaking legs. I took the left staircase and headed down to the lunch hall. I didn't know which of my friends I could even talk to about this. It was this point that Henrietta came up to me, with lunch she already bought for me and escorted me down to the Isolation Unit.

The Isolation Unit or IU, was a classroom you were sent to if you were excluded from class for bad behaviour. The teachers allowed you to sit in there at lunch time provided you were good, which was ironic. "Aaron, everyone knows what happened", she said. I felt my eyes welling up again. I had to lift my glasses to soak the tears up with a tissue. "Look, that was a bitch move if you ask me. You don't have to talk to her again, just forget about it", Henrietta said. I still had no words. I was shocked that anyone could make another person feel like this. I'd rather break my femur and have the weeks upon weeks of recovery than this. It was this moment though, Henrietta and I became really good friends. She would later become my girlfriend. She had a group of friends that I already knew, I just didn't hang out with. Once we all started hanging out, I found my place in secondary school, my confidence came back because I was friends with people who accepted me for who I am.

Year 8 was half way through, it was spring time which meant PE was outside. I remembered my kit this week, something I don't usually do. I had to get changed in the locker room. To avoid anymore name calling, I found a corner, changed at lightning speed and sat in the gym waiting for everyone else. My PE teacher was a six-foot tall man with a stocky, muscled physique. He had dusty blonde/brown hair, his chest hair was visible from under his gym shirt. He also wore shorts, the lower half of his thigh down to his ankle was always visible. Hairy, sturdy, thick pins. I liked looking at him. I liked looking at him a lot. I also liked looking at my English teacher, she had a petite frame about 5'5 in height with dark brow hair, cut in to a cute bob and brown eyes to match. She had an accent, a British one, but I'm not sure from where exactly. She spoke really softly, but it commanded attention. I remember once she asked us to write an assignment for class about autumn; I wrote a poem, and it was definitely about her. I recited it to the class and got an A. I liked her eyes, they were kind and loving. You'd think after recent events I'd refrain from writing about I felt about people let alone my teacher. For some reason, I was able to disguise this poem really well, only I knew the true meaning.

I felt sick thinking about my PE teacher they way that I did though. Having gone to school in Jamaica, I was brought up with Christian faith. Coupled with that, Jamaica is also a very homophobic country. My childhood memories of ragga music was of Buju Banton singing: Boom bye bye/Inna batty bwoy head/Rude bwoy no promote no nasty man/Dem haffi dead. Often, if a man was caught with another man, they'd end up dead. It was posted on the evening news sometimes. I got the impression that these murders remained purposefully unsolved. After all, Jamaica holds homosexuality between two men illegal as of this post. Plus my first year of secondary school was hell, I was determined not to let this follow me throughout my time here. I did everything I could to bottle up how I felt about anyone in fear of what people would think about me. I didn't want anyone to have an opinion about me. At all. This still rings true now. I give people no reason to. I started to erase my personality, becoming popular and likeable. Socially I was exhibiting machiavellianism, wearing the right shoes, going to the right places, liking the right music, saying the right colloquialisms, taking the right classes. I was wearing Jeffrey-West shoes to school. No one was doing that. I found the edge and I was playing it.

(When I was about maybe eight or nine-years-old. I was at watching Eastenders with my parents. On the show were two lesbians, one black and one white. I remember they were kissing. I wasn't repulsed. I thought it was quite nice. It looked like there was feeling behind that kiss. But I had a question. "Why are two girls kissing mum?". My dad replied: "It's wrong son, they shouldn't be doing that". "Aaron, there's nothing wrong with it, they like each other and that's how they show it", my mum concluded. They continued to argue about that whilst I got back to colouring in. That stuck with me, influencing my behaviour into early adulthood).

When I was much younger growing up in Jamaica, I sung the lyrics to all the homophobic songs. I liked the songs, I understood the lyrics. Now as a teenager the underpinnings of my upbringing were confusing me. I felt like I was being tested by God to make the right decision. He made me like my PE teacher, to see if my faith stayed strong to word of God. I was equally and conversely confused, because here was this sweet, kind, beautiful English teacher I wrote a poem for. I liked looking at her, and wanted to interact with her, the same way I felt about my PE teacher. But one was a man and one was a woman. I didn't know anything about bisexuality until Sisqo sung 'The Thong Song". Rumours about his sexuality started to circulate and I remember all the popular boys vehemently refusing to accept it saying: "the song was a mask for him actually being gay". Others would say, he's being greedy and the rest would be confused. They didn't get how the guy in the video with all the beautiful, voluptuous, curvy women dropping at his feet, could really like the look of and sleep with men. Secretly, I understood it. I was living it, caged up, in the closet; that was me they were describing. One question kept shouting loud in mind: Are you being greedy?

I wasn't into sports; I'd do track and field but nothing else. 100m spirit, 200m hurdles and high jump were my events. I tried to skip PE as often as I could though, not for wanting to participate, but I didn't want to get caught staring at my PE teacher. Plus a few of the boys in my year, I really liked the look of. It doesn't take much to arouse me and I needed to minimise the chance of that happening and being found out. I thought I was broken. I liked girls. I liked it when they wore skirts in the summer with no tights. Legs glisteningly smooth. But I liked boys too. The rough, rugged, banter, play-fighting, body-odour-smelling boys. It probably didn't help that I was being bullied for being gay shortly after starting secondary school. I didn't think I made anything obvious but apparently my mannerisms weren't 'masculine'. A boy called Duncan was in my year group. I thought we'd be best friends. We liked the same music, liked dressing good, we joked together, produced music in the music hut at lunch time. He actually started the rumour. I was hurt, really hurt. But I told no one. I kept it to myself, bottled it all up. I had girls interested in me, and me interested in them. But the boys were on my mind too. The difference here was, I could only imagine a reciprocated interest from one of the boys. In secondary school, at eleven-years-old admitting you were gay was social suicide. Kiss goodbye to the next five years, it would be hell!

I was felt trapped. I felt alone, isolated and an outcast. All of these thoughts ruminated, round and round it actually started making me vomit. Frequently, for about two years I suffered from this. I had all the feels. I love the way my heart raced when I saw someone I thought was attractive. With boys, this was a two fold feeling: love and hate. I hated that I liked looking at boys and the way it felt. But I loved they way they looked. I was constantly hard and panic-stricken. Afraid of being caught with an erection, but wanting to be caught. Loving what I saw, but, feeling guilty, disgusted, paranoid everyone knew my thoughts, yet really wanting to act out my imaginations.

The boys had spoken about masturbation and of course, it was a disgusting thing to do. If they found out you did it, you'd be ridiculed. I didn't have my first wank until I was 16. At this age, I had already been having sex for two years. Masturbation and sex before marriage was a no-no. Reinforced by the comments the boys at school made, when they were probably bashing their dicks into oblivion, scared me from doing it. I had a lot sexual frustration bottled up. It would be another 5 years before I gave in to the temptation again.

Sexually repressed, emotionally confused, I was facing college with a lot of unanswered questions, feelings and fears. I started to lose my identity.