Lindley thinks the biphobia she experienced after coming out has contributed to her current and past struggles with anxiety and depression. She didn’t know where she fit in, or how she should define herself. She felt like her queerness alienated her from her straight friends, and her relationships with men prevented her from fully relating to her gay friends. “My anxiety was always so high, because I was like, ‘I don’t understand, I don’t understand,’” she said. High school friends who had come out to her as gay didn’t believe her when she told them that she was bisexual, citing her past relationships with men. She would print bisexual fan fiction and read it at night, thinking to herself, “This is totally me.” Still, she said, her father told her she was just confused. Lindley did get a boyfriend, but she found she was still also attracted to women.
“Just wait ’til you get a boyfriend,” she remembered her mother saying.Ī few years later, Ms. When Brooke Lindley was 13 and first came out to her family as being attracted to both boys and girls, she didn’t even know the term “bisexual.” It was 2003, and her parents responded dubiously.
