Hiding In Plain Sight
A special guest blog by Cat Theresa for the LGBTQIA+ and Adopted Series and Bisexual awareness week.
Introduction
My experience of being bisexual has similarities with my experience of being adopted. I know this is a big stretch, so hang in here with me. Both are hidden and that gives them particular issues around visibility and disclosure. In our hetero-normative, kept-normative society, people assume heterosexuality and biological family connection unless there is evidence to the contrary. There comes a time when you have to decide whether to ‘Come Out’ as adopted and as bisexual.
Disclosure dilemmas
The ‘coming out’ issue affects me particularly when developing new friendships. I have a running commentary going on in my head over whether, and when, I should mention either thing. Should I say I’m adopted? How will it be received? Will I get ‘the look’? The wide-eyed, surprised look which quickly turns to a glorified “wow, your parents are amazing to have adopted you”, as though the person has some psychic insight into what an unloveable baby I must have been.
Telling people I’m bisexual is also an awkward one. I’m in a monogamous, heterosexual marriage so it doesn’t crop up in conversation in the way it would if I were dating. It’s less an awkward truth I’m hiding and more an irrelevance.
Revealing personal things like adoption and sexuality too early on in friendships, feels like attention-seeking, like jumping up and down saying “look at me, I’m special”. But the danger of not revealing personal things as you develop closeness, is it becomes harder to casually drop in to conversation and you start feeling ‘unseen’. There’s a comfy, familiar feeling being with people who know the whole you. There’s also a danger of hiding adoption and bisexuality, as though there’s something shameful about them. Coming out, being loud and proud about being a bisexual adoptee has got to be better than hiding in plain sight. But that takes a degree of security and could lead to feeling very exposed. For example, I don’t share either fact about myself with work colleagues or on my public/work social media accounts – not due to shame (I hope) but due to a wish for privacy and to protect myself from judgement from people I don’t know and can’t respond to. My personal twitter account is anonymous specifically so that I can express my views on adoption without censure and without worry over whether I might hurt the feelings of my adoptive and birth families with my honest views on adoption.
The issue of when you tell your children you’re adopted is a dilemma every adopted parent faces. When I told mine, both at around 4-5 years old, I felt vulnerable, knowing that they might make an innocent comment which I would find hurtful. There was one comment of “so you don’t have a proper Mummy?” which I calmly corrected and then went away and cried about because it touched a nerve. As they’ve grown there have been many challenging conversations as they explored their place within the extended family and their personal genetic make-up. My own emotional struggles with adoption have prevented this being an easy part of parenting for me. I reflected long and hard on when to share my sexuality with them. I did so fairly recently because I wanted to be honest and thought it was important for them to be aware of the genetics side – my birth father was also bisexual.
The hidden nature of both means that you could go through your whole life with your family and friends not knowing, unless you chose to share.
Belonging
The notion of belonging is something that adoptees often struggle with. Growing up as one of two adopted children in a large extended family of ‘kepts’ felt isolating to me. There was enough openness within the family so everyone knew we were adopted, but not enough for it to be mentioned without awkward embarrassment. I remember hushed silence descending over the tea-table when my Granny and Aunty were chatting about who my cousins looked like - which one had their Dad’s nose or their Mum’s temperament. When they reached me there was a sudden silence and a rapid change of subject. No one was brave enough to say “I wonder who you might look like” as though by not mentioning it, they were protecting me from having that thought – perhaps they didn’t realise it was on my mind constantly. Who am I like? Who do I belong to? Who left me?
The notion of belonging is equally challenging within birth family. Being kept a secret by my birth mother left a bitter taste to our reunion and she seemed so indifferent to me that it was painful to keep seeking her time, approval or affection. She set the tone for a lack of belonging within her family and my subsequent reunions with my half-sisters were adversely impacted by this. I have birth family on my father’s side whom I have no connection with; they haven’t ghosted me, but unless I reach out we have no contact and when we do it is cursory. This is fairly common amongst adoptees after reunion.
Likewise I have no sense of belonging to the LGBT+ community. I feel I don’t have enough gay credibility because my only relationships with women were before I married 22 years ago. I don’t feel entitled to claim LGBT+ membership, feeling like to do so would be some sort of appropriation. But I recognize how weird that is as you don’t stop being bisexual when you enter into a monogamous relationship – a bisexual woman isn’t suddenly a lesbian when they’re with a woman, in the same way they’re not straight when with a man (unless that’s how they choose to identify). Otherwise bisexuality would be completely erased by monogamous relationships! Bisexual erasure (the overlooking and dismissal of bisexual identities) is a very real phenomenon in society though and there are significant negative views around bisexuality. Bisexual people are often seen as “hypersexual, sex-crazed, promiscuous and incapable of committing to a relationship with one person” amongst other negative perceptions (Hayfield et al 2014). Only recently in the States, Tucker Carlton, a Fox news reporter expressed confusion about how someone could be both bisexual and married. He was referring to Kate Brown, a Governor of Oregon who is openly bisexual. He stated that while it was “fine” that her husband “was a dude”, it “was also a little confusing” because it supposedly flew in the face of her claim to be bisexual: “How does having a groom at her wedding make Kate Brown an official member of the LGBTQ community?”
Historically there has been an erasure of adoptee voices. Media portrayal of the adoptee story tends to be focused on the Long Lost Family type narrative where the adoptee achieves a wonderful reunion experience and is welcomed into the arms of their ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad’. This is so far from the painful reality of sometimes slow, often failed searches; the very real experiences of adoptees being kept a secret or rejected by birth family; or of being welcomed initially only to hit up against problems once a honeymoon period is over and then ghosted. These more complex stories, despite being more common than the fairytale LLF reunion, are buried and rarely heard.
The worst form of adoptee erasure comes in the lack of research and follow-up within adoption. Whether a person is an adoptee or not is rarely captured in surveys or health questionnaires - neither the NHS nor the Office for National Statistics (ONS) collect data on this for example. How then can support services be developed when we have no idea of numbers and issues that adult adoptees face?
Being different
Something that strikes me as amusing is that only 1.1% of the UK population reported being bisexual (ONS report 2019), less than 2% are adopted and less than 10% are left handed - I have all three and I’m a person who absolutely hates being different!
I have in my 50’s begun to accept that being different in these ways makes me ‘me’ and is not something to be hidden. I’d certainly like for younger adoptees and bisexuals to feel that self-acceptance much earlier in their lives and feel less of a sense of disconnect from family and society.
I am full of admiration and love for those supporting adoptees with websites, support groups and blogs promoting adoptee voices.
Many thanks to the awesome @adopteefutures for hosting this LGBT+ series
Cat Theresa can be contacted on Twitter at @Cat TheresaUK and email JeffriesCT@protonmail.com
1. Hayfield, N., Clarke, V., & Halliwell, E. (2014) Bisexual women’s understanding of social marginalization: “The heterosexuals don’t understand us but nor do the lesbians”. Feminism & Psychology, 24 (3), 352-372. 2014
2. Justin Baragona, Aug 25 2021 The Daily Beast.com
3. Office for National Statistics (ONS) report 2019