So… (Coming Out at 30.)
I have a few things to tell you.
I’ve changed.
In a pandemic, two things happen to you, if you’re lucky enough to live through it, and if you have a lot of time to think, like I do.
The first is the realisation of just how little you actually control in your life; how your job, your home, your prospects and your circumstances are at the mercy of something — a disease — as ludicrous and cruel as it is entirely natural to the globe we walk on, or else something — say, the late-capitalist systems we move within every single day — as ludicrous and cruel as they are wholly invented and entirely mad. You understand, very clearly, how little say you have in these things, and this can bring on a despair you scarcely believe you can endure.
The second is understanding (with your mind thus concentrated by the first horrible piece of knowledge) of that which you do have control — the final say — over, of what’s yours and no-one else’s. These things are your body, your self, and your being. They belong solely to you; they are yours to defend, understand and declare.
Neither of these are particularly original observations, mind you. But they were long overdue for me, and it really did take a pandemic, and the presence of people in my life who probably have little notion of how they’ve helped me, to make me really look at myself and see what I am, have always been, and will go forward as from now on.
So, with that in mind, I am obliged to say hello, as the person I actually am.
Hello! My name is Sam Iona Burgess, and I’m genderfluid, and I’m bisexual.
What’s your name?
I was born Samuel Ian, but ‘Samuel’ is not my name, and certainly not the name I propose to go by any longer. My relationship with this stern and stately forename has been a little grudging, and I suspect played a small part in the identity I wore for much of the 2010s — reserved, distant, separated from others and viewed as a good deal smarter than I most assuredly actually am. A blessing, then, that ‘Sam’ is a very different kind of name indeed. Sam is fluid. Sam moves between. Sam is both and neither at once. Sam is happy wherever it goes.
If ‘Samuel’ was always an uncertain thing, I have (with apologies to parents who gave me a middle name in good faith) always hated ‘Ian’. I have never been comfortable with it, and I do not exaggerate when I say I can trace that feeling back to when I was an infant. It did not fit. It’s a superfluous iamb before another iamb that cuts dead the rhythm of my name. And it’s gone.
‘Iona’ is also a Scots-Gaelic name, but it’s a much more beautiful word. A word for a place, and a place full of many strange and beautiful and wonderful stories, and it is just perfectly right for me. It is a magical name, of bleak hills and black roses, and no absolutely agreed-upon meaning. Happily, it lets me keep my pen name, which I’ve loved for a decade now.
I’ll always be Sam. So I’m Sam. I hope you’ll be comfortable calling me that from now.
Sam Iona Burgess. Lovely to meet you.
Bi, you say?
I do indeed fly the pink, purple and blue flag. I came out only halfway, half my lifetime ago, when I got a boyfriend whilst still in secondary school and quickly became the walking curiosity, living punching bag (and in two cases the object of secret desire) of that establishment. I haven’t been with many people, male, female or otherwise, and one of those people has been my companion, partner and best friend for 14 years, and will, I hope, marry me, when we finally get around to that silly business. She’s a fierce and wonderful human, and she’s listened to and read every word of all of this, well before you got round to reading it now, and she read it with a smile that made me so, so happy.
I love her.
So what do I call you? And what do you mean, genderfluid?
Call me Sam. ❤
Otherwise, you can call me he/him, they/them, she/her. Whatever you think is best for what I present to you at the time. It’s all good. That’s the joy of fluidity, of queerness — the joy of shifting presentation and expression, the two things that matter most to me in writing this.
I am genderfluid, or genderqueer if you prefer, and those words, to me, mean to shift between and to combine the many ways of presenting oneself to the world. It means to move between masculine and feminine, and it means to think and to appear in many modes.
It is me.
And more importantly, it is what I have always been. I have always been pushed and pulled by these ways of being, and delighted in them. I just never allowed myself to openly love them before. I have taken prescribed roles and put on ready-made costumes, and worn them all down to nothing, because none have fit me quite like this does.
Why are you telling me this now?
I’ve worn the identity I’ve talked about in this post, but I haven’t owned it.
I have thought about everything I’m saying now for over half of my life. Most of that was working from a feeling, a something about myself I did not have the language, the means, to articulate and understand. In the last five years, though, I have read about and known and spoken to and befriended and cared for and simply seen people who have, without even meaning to, helped me find the words to say this. They have given me that language. It’s an incredible gift.
I am truly and sincerely sorry to any family members who read this and who realise that I have not been truthful to you about myself for so long. I never really stood up and said what I am to the world before. Friends knew, and accepted, but friends so often come and go, and are only one half of your life.
When I knew I was bi, at 15, I was outed as only teenagers can be; entirely thoughtlessly. Every peer and contemporary knew, but no-one outside the immediate family was told directly. At the time this was considered in some way sensible. 2005 was different from 2020 (though I suspect not so much as we pretend it to be). You kept this sort of thing hush-hush, because other people feared what would happen to you, and what would be said about them, if you were forthright. I was verbally and physically assaulted enough to at least sympathise with the first fear, and I understand the latter, up to a point. It can be dangerous to say what you really are, but somehow even worse is that it can be embarrassing — it reminds us that the commonplace of humans being locked into one of two modes, with nothing outside or between that being possible, is a poisonous lie.
So it has to be said, and in full. And I’ve said it. You must do with it what you can, and what you will.
I hope you’ll understand, and be happy for me. I’m happy to talk to you if you’re curious to understand a little better, and god knows, I’ll recommend you some good books on the subject if you are curious, in which case I love you all the more. It is always good to seek out the stories of others, to be curious about the great variety of peoples, and to want to understand them, to see them for what they actually are.
Because the world’s on fire, and unremarkable as this story may be nowadays, it needs to be told. In a pandemic, all you own is yourself, and your story.
I love you all.
❤ ~ S. I. Burgess
