The following is an excerpt from Arielle Egozi’s memoir, Being Bad. The book uses frameworks cultivated from years of writing, speaking, and educating on sex, relationships, and identity through a queer and decolonizing lens. Egozi offers questions, practices, and tools to help readers dream far beyond what family, society, or capitalist culture expects. It’s about being “bad” in a world that keeps trying to force you to be “good.” Being Bad, published by Chronicle Prism, is out on September 17.
Ten years ago I tried coming out to my mom at a sushi restaurant. She immediately started crying. “Why would you choose this?” Her tears fell into her soy sauce cup as she pleaded with me, “You like men. Stay with men. Don’t make your life so hard.” When I told my dad a few weeks later, he didn’t even blink. He just looked at me and said, “You’re not a lesbian.” I believed him.
Related:
For years, I continued dating men with brown skin and big muscles, like I thought I was supposed to. I was living in New York with Hector when I flew to LA to record pilot episodes of a podcast that never aired. As I sat across from my subject of the morning, her hair spilling out of the topknot on her head, she stopped speaking and smirked at me. “Here,” she said. “Let me fix this.” Her fingernails were short and her fingers long and slender. They moved quickly. Must be all that drumming, I thought. She took the mic I had rigged and moved it, changing all the settings I’d so carefully prepared. I blushed. “Yeah, I guess you’re the musician, huh?” I told her, my eyes cast down at my hands. She just smiled at me and kept talking, answering my questions. I felt exposed, like I was the one being interviewed.
Never Miss a Beat
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay ahead of the latest LGBTQ+ political news and insights.
After it was over and I was wrapping up my equipment, she asked, “What’s your deal in New York?”
I didn’t want to talk about New York. My boyfriend was in New York. I didn’t want her to know I had a boyfriend. I didn’t want her to think I only liked boys. I answered honestly. I hated how it felt. I walked out of her apartment and took a last look at the bed. I wondered what happened there.
The next morning, I woke up in a tepee. It was raining outside and the wet had seeped in. I heard a bird chirping, and wondered where the bird was keeping dry, until I remembered the tepee was the “room” I’d rented, a canvas tent plopped on some guy’s West Hollywood backyard, Los Angeles traffic blaring in the background. The chirp wasn’t a bird, it was someone’s alarm.
I FaceTimed Hector from bed, and the entire call was a fight, just like every call recently. Hector and I were fraying. It had been a whole year of conversations between us. A whole year of no sex, no intimacy, no common ground to connect over. I asked him to go to therapy, but he didn’t want to.
I needed more from him, he felt hurt by me, I was a burden, and he was the problem. I hung up. I thought about the drummer in her yellow apartment, all brown fingers and strands of bleached curls. I missed the calm I felt with her.
I took a cab to Venice to get some air, and found myself walking into that celebrity-dusted place where they have affir-mations on the menu instead of food. I ordered some mushroom-enhanced purple latte that cost ten dollars and drank it as I walked, palm trees dotting the sidewalks like stiletto heels stepping on sky. I didn’t know what it was about the aesthetic playground of Hollywood, or the splash of relief being away from my relationship’s merry-go-round of fighting, but I realized I needed something to change. Immediately.
I saw a salon with a sign in the front: First Haircut Free. I walked in and told them I wanted bangs. As I sat in the chair, the stylist running her hands through my hair, I thought about the first time I kissed a girl. She was tall with brown slender fingers, like the drummer. Her eyes looked like almonds, if they could grow in the Amazon, where she was from. I fell in love with her, but I thought those were just the kinds of things that happen when you live somewhere else, somewhere far away. It’d been five years since that brief romance while living in Rio, and here I was, still not wanting anyone to know I had a boyfriend. I realized in that moment that what I felt was not a phase. On the red-eye back to New York I couldn’t sleep.
I climbed the five flights of steps to our Park Slope apartment and waited for Hector to wake up. His eyes were still groggy when I said it. “I’m queer.” He looked back at me, blinking. “I don’t know what it means yet. I don’t need to do anything about it right now, but I just needed to say it.”
Tears came out as I spoke, but ones that made sense. I felt like I made sense now. He looked at me confused, then laughed uncomfortably. Three days after I came home, with my new bangs and the word “queer” still unsure and shivering on my tongue, Hector finally went to therapy. When he came back from his session in the late afternoon, the March sun setting over the East River, we had the last big Conversation.
He cited my new “queer bangs” as an argument point. I cited his refusal to read any of the feminist texts I’d sent him over three years. He didn’t want kids. I thought I might. Even so, the care we had for each other was clear. So was our future.
We broke up.
On that work trip to LA, I realized my dad had been right all those years ago: I wasn’t a lesbian — I was bisexual.
