In OprahMag.com's series Coming Out, LGBTQ change-makers reflect on their journey toward self-acceptance. While it's beautiful to bravely share your identity with the world, choosing to do so is entirely up to you—period.
R.O. Kwon's scintillating debut novel, The Incendiaries (published last year by Riverhead and now available in paperback), examines the ways that faith can be both a balm and a blight. The book's beating heart is the stormy relationship between Will and Phoebe, two college freshmen who seem to seek solace from their sorrows in one another. It's a bad romance that's by turns mangled and magical; Kwon writes dazzlingly about the bewilderment of desire.
In this personal essay, Kwon—typically a private person—applies her incisive pen to her own life. Happily married to a man, and having grown up deeply religious, she now reveals why she decided to come out as bisexual on Twitter last year. Here, she shares what the reaction has been both online and IRL.
I’m a private person. As a novelist, I’m most alive, most utterly myself, when I’m spending the majority of my waking hours making up people who don’t exist. Fiction lets me write about my secrets behind a scrim of plausible deniability—I can get as autobiographical as I want without anyone quite being able to accuse me of divulging a single fact about myself. Fiction is a weird magic: it hides, even as it reveals.
I’m a bisexual woman, and I’m married to my first boyfriend. I met him while we were both in college. We were the first of our friends to wed, not long after we’d graduated, in a chapel at the school that housed so many of our shared memories. Before that, I’d had a handful of short-lived, drunken collegiate encounters with other men. I’ve never had sex with a woman. I’ve kissed a few. But those were quick kisses with close friends in the spirit of fun, not sex.
In part because of my upbringing, it took until years after college for me to understand who and what I’m drawn to, and that my attraction to some people—including women—can go beyond the limits of platonic connection. I grew up so religious that, until I left the faith in high school, I thought I’d be a pastor, perhaps a missionary. Eros was not a priority. In conversations with friends, I was more likely to rhapsodize about my passion for God. I’ve fled the faith, but not that reticence; even now, attraction isn’t something I’m able to talk much about, especially not in public.
So last fall, when I started speaking online about being bisexual, some confusion ensued. It was November. Several months beforehand, in July, I’d published my debut novel, The Incendiaries. With the publication of this book there came a gradual, bewildered realization that in some ways I was becoming—or at least being seen as—a more public person, one whose visibility could have an effect on others.
At readings and other events, people thanked me for existing. Korean people thanked me, Asian women thanked me. “There aren’t a lot of public examples of us” is a viewpoint I often heard. What’s more, people showed interest in parts of my life that had nothing to do with my novel—which hand sanitizer I used, for instance. My skin-care habits. Increasingly, and especially as a marginalized writer, I found I wanted to be more transparent about not just my favorite sheet masks, but also the central aspects of who I am...and who I hope to be.
First, I made sure to share my bisexual identity with a handful of close friends in person; I wanted them to hear it directly from me. Then, in the early morning, just before I had to catch an early-morning flight from San Francisco to Seattle to talk about The Incendiaries, I opened my laptop. I imagined I’d tweet about it, and maybe a hundred people, a couple hundred people, would like the tweet, and that would be that. “Hi, all, I’m bisexual,” I wrote. “Haven’t really talked publicly about it, I think in part because I married my first boyfriend, & in part because this could be hard on my parents & family. But there aren’t many publicly queer Korean American writers, & I just want to say hi, we’re here.”
I then had to get on my flight. By the time I landed, the tweets had over a thousand replies, with quickly climbing numbers. My inboxes, both on social media and email, were full of messages, mostly from other queer people. And the bulk of these messages were, to an overwhelming extent, loving, joyful, and supportive.
I spent a lot of time, over the next several days, smiling while tearing up. I tried to reply to everyone; I hope I did. So many people—strangers—told me they’d never previously spoken with anyone about being bisexual. I tried to cause no harm: "Thank you for telling me this," I'd say. "I’m not a therapist, I have no training, but here are places where there are people trained to talk, and listen." "You’ve helped me feel less alone," they said. I felt less alone, too. I wished I’d started talking about this part of my life a lot earlier than I had.
But I hadn’t, and why? After all, I live in San Francisco, which, for all its wild dystopian inequities, still qualifies as a queer haven. So many of my friends are queer that I’m mildly surprised when a new person turns out to be straight. It’s also true, though, that I’m Korean American, and my people are not, by and large, especially accepting of sexual difference. We’re coming along, but slowly.
I’ve heard it said, here and there, particularly among first-generation immigrants, that Korean people can’t be gay—other ethnicities, sure, the thinking goes, but not us. The current president of South Korea, though progressive in other ways, has said he’s “opposed” to homosexuality and gay marriage. I attended a public high school in L.A. so predominantly Korean that the language was offered as an elective, and even people who weren’t Korean took the class, hoping to understand us when we gossiped in our household language. And until I left my hometown, I didn’t know one person who was queer and out. I still haven’t told my only living grandparent, my halmoni, about any of this.
When I did, at last, come out—on social media, as well as in real life—some responses weren’t the least bit loving. One relative, upon hearing of this news, emailed my in-laws to ask if I was still in a relationship with my husband. This relative thought that, since I was saying I was bisexual, I must have cheated on him. “What else could have inspired her to start talking about this now?” she’d wondered. She also expressed concern about my novel. People, she said, could be deterred from picking up my book.
A white woman friend who’s married to a man complained, angrily, about the marginalization that comes with being queer, “You don’t get this, too.” As though being marginalized is something you "get"—a prize to work toward. Then there was the literary event at which another woman writer and I both touched on being bisexual while being married to men. When the discussion opened up to questions from the audience, a man in the first row raised his hand to ask, “Does this mean you ladies each keep a piece on the side?”
I bring this up because it startled me, the small chorus of intrusive hostility, of ignorance. This chorus played its old, hurtful song even though I’m a writer, in San Francisco, with mostly artist friends; if you’re queer, it might happen to you, and if it does, it’s not your fault. I want to say this: It’s not your fault. Because, for a while, I was afraid it was my fault, that I’d gone about all this the wrong way, a suspicion that presupposes the existence of a single right way—which, of course, there isn’t. There are so many ways of being queer, so many ways to shine.
Including being bisexual. I’m used to hearing the abiding message that I shouldn’t exist—as a woman, a person of color, an immigrant, and an artist, I’m oh so conscious that large swaths of this country don’t want me here, alive. But, in being bisexual, it’s the first time I keep hearing the idea not just that I shouldn’t exist, but that I don’t.
The most common lie about bisexual people is that we’re not real; the second is that, as the man at the literary event insinuated, we’re unusually promiscuous, sexually greedy, incapable of monogamy. None of this is true. And as far as I can tell, straight people have never demonstrated any particular expertise in, let alone monopoly over, sexual fidelity. I hope to stay with my husband until I die, or he does. Ideally, we’d die at the same time. It’s hard for me to even talk directly about him—it’s risking peril, it might be a profound sacrilege, to name that which I love most. Notice I’m not giving you his name.
If I have no plans whatsoever to split up with my husband, and if I’ve never dated, nor had sex, with a woman, then why am I even talking about being queer? What right do I have? I think I’m doing it, on the one hand, because I can now—because, with the city I live in, the friends I have, the work I do, I’ve been so lucky. And since I can, I feel as though I should. I’m not going to lose any literary jobs—none I’d want, at least—for being queer; I won’t lose friends, and my family members, deeply Christian though they might be, won’t disown me. What extravagant luck. What a joy to get to try to pass along some of that luck.
There are, truly, so few people like me who are out. Queer, living Korean American writers who’ve published books, as far as I know, include Alexander Chee, Franny Choi, Patty Yumi Cottrell, and James Han Mattson. I wanted to add to this slim, ferocious list of names, to make it that much easier for people, especially any Korean American and Asian American queers, to disregard the loud, bigoted message that they shouldn’t, or don’t, exist.
I wanted, in this small way, for me and people like me to help make a world in which it could be less taxing to be myself. Private as I’m inclined to be, I’m trying, increasingly, to hide less. I think of the messages from people who said they felt a little less alone, and how each note extended the borders of my own solitude.
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