By Julia Barnes-Brown
When I sat down to write this piece, I started by thinking through my (still-ongoing) journey as a bi+ woman for the millionth time and tripping over what the first step in that journey might have been, because even now that step still feels unclear.
I keep getting stuck on The Fellowship of the Ring, with Liv Tyler as Arwen and Cate Blanchett as Galadriel.
Or maybe it was Bend It Like Beckham—the movie as a whole, with its intense friendship between two girls united by a shared interest, but also just Keira Knightley.
Or maybe it’s both. Both? Both is good. (There’s a reason why that meme from The Road to El Dorado, a movie which, in my opinion, contains copious bisexual energy, has become something of a bi+ emblem.)
My father read both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in their entirety to me (and my twin brother) when I was younger, so by the time the Fellowship movie came out I was a tween moderate Tolkien fan. I got attached to female characters at the drop of a hat, often simply by sharing their gender, and all the more so if they were capable of feats too fantastical or physically daunting for me as a disabled person to perform.
In the theater, watching a movie can be magnified in any number of ways. Sometimes I identified with characters or moments on that towering screen only to feel differently upon watching it at home. But one thing held true in the theater and on DVD: the dazed, disbelieving reverence on Frodo’s face when Arwen first appears, matched my own emotions. My first thought upon seeing Liv Tyler was that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life, a thought that echoed whenever I saw her elsewhere. Even the memory summons the same physical reaction, briefly—the catch in my breath and the ache in my chest. I truly had trouble breathing when she was on screen, afraid of missing a single word she spoke. Her romance with Aragorn was an instant obsession for me, and though I often imagined myself in the woman’s place in romances I got invested in, this was different. I almost couldn’t decide which of the two I’d rather be. I was soon swept away by the rest of the spectacle and Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel, though, so this indecision never registered as unusual.
Galadriel. Oh, Galadriel. Cate Blanchett’s voice opens the movie, and its hypnotic tone sealed my fate: when I, a dyed-in-the-wool lover of fairies, elves, and magic in general, was introduced to Ms. Blanchett as an actual elf queen, it now seems inevitable that I’d be in love with her for the rest of my life. Her moment with Frodo and the One Ring—“all shall love me and despair”—is tattooed in my mind to this day.
Of course, I had none of this clarity around my thoughts and emotions at the time. Despite the fact that I had had similar reactions to most of my male celebrity crushes, despite the fact that by that time I knew there were men who loved men and women who loved women, my brain didn’t connect the dots.
Bend It Like Beckham came out a year after Fellowship, and with it the emergence of my first self-admitted girl crush. It tells the story of Jess, a British Indian teenager whose dream is to get on the local girls’ soccer team, where she meets Keira Knightley’s Jules.
I went through a period of living vicariously through sports media of all sorts; having cerebral palsy meant balance and coordination issues that made most sports frustratingly difficult or injurious to play. Soccer, next to ice skating, was my favorite to watch, and so my fantasies of playing alongside Jules and Jess were safely contained in the sports fandom box—except my heart skipped whenever Jules smiled. And I absolutely detested the love triangle between them and a young male soccer coach.
Fast forward to me similarly detesting Keira’s storyline in Love Actually, yet swooning over Pirates of the Caribbean and Pride & Prejudice, the latter an adaptation I so loved that I received the DVD as a Christmas present and felt oddly embarrassed when I considered why I liked it so much—I was keenly aware it was because of Keira, and that my feelings extended beyond admiration into a nebulous new realm.
Still: the dots? Not connecting.
In parallel to these experiences, meanwhile, I’d discovered fanfiction. This was where I started exploring, through both reading and writing, romantic relationships between women. I’d been shipping* for years at that point, and while most of them were male/female ships due to their media dominance, I found the genders of the characters involved didn’t matter much to me; I’d latch onto a pair (and eventually trios, quartets, and so on) because their interactions caught my eye, and sometimes just because they looked really good together. Through my unabashed, seemingly gender-blind “they’re meant to be together” passion over many non-canon queer ships in anime, books, and cartoons, I began to sift through my own feelings toward girls unencumbered by the heart-racing admiration I experienced toward characters in the live-action sphere. Indeed, I never wrote for any fandoms featuring actresses or characters I had crushes on, and also rarely read in those fandoms. I still couldn’t even call the feelings crushes.
Maybe this was a defense mechanism for my baby bi+ self until the bramble of insecurities and internalized biphobia began to wither, or maybe those fandoms didn’t hook me in as deeply as others. Maybe both.
Both is good.
As I channeled some of that girl-crush energy into running my fleet of ships, contemplating my sexuality suddenly became an option. Jumping headlong into the trenches of yaoi** taught me that shipping queer ships didn’t necessarily mean the shipper was queer; I hung onto this idea, I realize now, like a life raft, while reading and writing stories where girls fell in love with each other, confessed dramatically, and kissed. Because even though my immediate family were queer allies and made sure I was too, I was hardly immune to the wider societal stigma surrounding queerness that permeated everything outside my fandom and family bubbles. With baby steps, I ventured into consuming slightly more inclusive queer culture, encountering the idea of people being attracted to “both” genders (the concept of trans and non-binary people was yet to enter my brain) and the stereotypes surrounding them. My lack of dating experience at the traditional age complicated things; would I be greedy wanting to date boys and girls? Did I actually like girls or just admire them? As a shy introverted homeschooler, I didn’t have many friends of any gender, so maybe I was only attracted by my crushes’ celebrity. Never mind that I hadn’t dated boys, but knew unequivocally that I was attracted to them and never questioned those celebrity crushes.
Even though most of my subconscious was invested in veiling my queerness, I think some other part of my subconscious, a part that wasn’t hiding in that cozy closet, held iron-clad certainty in my bi+ identity, certainty in the fact that I would realize when I was ready. When I finally began calling myself bisexual in my early thirties, it wasn’t because of a huge revelation, but rather a quiet, “Yep, that’s me,” pieced together through years of fandom passion and thousands of words of fanfic. It was a realization, after much self-reflection, that I was indeed queer enough, that it wasn’t just a phase, that I’m capable of being attracted to men, women, and the myriad people that relate to gender in all sorts of ways.
I’m forever grateful for fandom and fanfic allowing me to consider my identity at my own pace, and for the friends I have made and continue to make through them. I continue to closely follow Cate Blanchett and Keira Knightley’s careers and have acquired many more crushes along the way. I’ve become rather the disaster “everyone is hot” bi+ lady, but that’s one stereotype I don’t mind being labeled with; the vast human experience of gender is beautiful, and I refuse to be ashamed of my admirations anymore.
* “Shipping a relationship” means to actively support or wish for a romantic connection between two people, either real or fictional characters.
**Yaoi is a term for media created in Japan that focuses on the homoerotic relationships between male characters and has heavy sexual content.
Julia Barnes-Brown lives in the U.S., in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. She is a disabled, left-handed omnigeek who breathes books, eats words, and has a massive gaming backlog.