Happy Pride Month! by CJane Elliott

 

I’m bisexual. Welcome to my official coming out party!

Looking back, it’s kind of obvious I was bisexual, but it took me decades to get it. In fact, I was still introducing myself as straight on LGBTQ panels and at LGBTQ book signing events just a few years ago. Now I wonder how I remained so clueless for so long.

I’ve always been drawn to queer people. I loved the few out gay guys and lesbians in my high school and liked reading books with queer characters. My best friends in college were two gay men and a bisexual woman. We were members of the GSA at our university, and on breaks from school we’d go out dancing at the gay and lesbian clubs in DC. I had my first kiss with a woman in one of them. During graduate school I went to the DC Pride event with my friend and fellow grad student Denise. It’s safe (now) to say I was in love with her and totally attracted to her. But I never did anything about it.

I still remember a dream I had after I’d gone to an “outfest” at a gay bar with my college friends. In it, I was standing in a closet. I believe my unconscious was trying to tell me something! I didn’t listen at the time or for years after.

Source: www.sbs.com.au

Part of the problem with embracing my bisexuality was it lived for me like either/or. Either you were straight or you were gay/lesbian. And I was always into men so I couldn’t be a lesbian. Talk about bi erasure! Bisexuality was not a part of my reality even though my love of all things LGBTQ continued. I lived in San Francisco for four years and felt right at home. I got married to a great guy in my thirties, had a career leading courses and then as a social worker, and had a kid a few months shy of age forty.

Fast forward to my fifties. When I turned fifty I decided I officially no longer gave a fuck what people thought. I quit my high-paced job, our family moved to Oregon, and I started writing gay romance. Writing m/m books centered me in the LGBTQ world that I’d always loved. I live in a queer city (Eugene), write queer books, and have a queer kid. And when I asked a queer friend and fellow LGBTQ author Charley Descouteaux to define bisexuality, I finally got that I’m queer, and not just the greatest LGBTQ ally ever.

I’m here, I’m queer, and I’m proud of it!

In honor of Pride Month, Dreamspinner is offering my novella Wild and Precious at 99 cents in the month of June. 

Thanks for reading. Happy Pride, everyone, and talk to you next month.

Bio: After years of hearing characters chatting away in her head, CJane Elliott finally decided to put them on paper and hasn’t looked back since. A psychotherapist by training, CJane enjoys writing sexy, passionate stories that also explore the human psyche. CJane has traveled all over North America for work and her characters are travelers, too, traveling down into their own depths to find what they need to get to the happy ending.

CJane is an ardent supporter of LGBTQ equality and is particularly fond of coming out stories. In her spare time, CJane can be found dancing, listening to music, or watching old movies. Her husband and son support her writing habit by staying out of the way when they see her hunched over, staring intensely at her laptop.

CJane is the author of the award-winning Serpentine Series, New Adult contemporary novels set at the University of Virginia. Serpentine Walls was a 2014 Rainbow Awards finalist, Aidan’s Journey was a 2015 EPIC Awards finalist, and Sex, Love, and Videogames won first place in the New Adult category in the 2016 Swirl Awards and first place in Contemporary Fiction in the 2017 EPIC eBook Awards.

E-mail: cjaneelliott@gmail.com
Website: http://www.cjaneelliott.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CJaneElliott
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cjane.elliott
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/CJane-Elliott/e/B00LPIJDM2/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
Dreamspinner: https://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/authors/cjane-elliott-124