Does being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender make these things more difficult?

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Following the uproar a lesbian couple caused by publically kissing in Sainsbury’s a few weeks ago, a movement seems to have been sparked in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community as well as the heterosexual. There was a ‘kiss-in’, held in the Sainsbury’s; where the girls were rudely dismissed, in which protesters flocked to flaunt their right to kiss whoever they want, wherever they want, with no discrimination attached.

However, a week later a London bus driver hurled a gay couple from ‘his’ vehicle for allegedly kissing and disrupting fellow passengers. While I think it is just to have such primordial discrimination reported and dealt with, it inevitably increases the idea of ‘the other among us’.

It is true; people are afraid of homosexuality because they cannot perceive what it is about the same sex that is attractive. But surely then that boils down to how the individual self perceives and projects themselves into the world. For those who perceive themselves and others around them as human beings, removing or prescribing another gender, their lives aren’t simplified, as they should be, by such incredible self-awareness.

I put forward the following question to all heterosexual individuals who have the luxury of fornicating with whoever they choose of the opposite sex: can you remember way back to your first crush? That funny feeling of wanting to hurl all over them when they make eye contact with you or how your ears would boil and stew away at the sides of your head when they spoke to you.

Nerves are a universal experience, felt by everyone and anyone who finds themselves attracted to another. To a man, women are an ancient mystery, controlled by forces that dictate her body in such ways that cannot be rationalised, and to women, men are the life force that bring vitality to her at the small cost of an uncertain period of massive self re-evaluation and slightly obsessive tendencies.

But when those primitive informalities are overcome and the brain can rationalise such attraction and stutter out “can I get your number?” More often than not you are either met by a “sorry I’m taken,” “no,” or “yeah it’d be really nice to get your number.” Then the future glistens with a trillion rhinestones that could be the relationship you have just semi-cemented.

Sadly though, this over complicated ritual actually becomes more complex for the LGBT community. I am bisexual and very proud of that self-discovery but I can’t deny that it has made my romantic life stop growing naturally. How?

Well whenever I can pluck the courage up to drag myself over to the idol of my attention and after paying tribute disguised as a compliment (which is much more effective than a pick up line) I have, every time, been met with a judgment that starts from the creasing of her brow, to a twitching nose and a sympathetic tilt of the head; “sorry I’m not gay.”

Neither am I, I’d like to reply: I am bisexual, but I don’t let that infringe the way I feel about other people’s bodies. Had half of these girls stepped back out of their heterosexual bubble to see me for me, I am fairly certain in saying I would have aroused their attentions enough to at least consider it.

With such a worldly stigmatisation enveloping the LGBT community, it will always be a struggle to encourage people to explore sexuality and what it means to them. DMU’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Dominic Shellard became the first honorary president of Leicester’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender (LGBT) centre last month.

5,026 people visited the centre for help and advice regarding their sexuality, and the centre received 5,100 calls in total last year. Professor Shellard told DMU website, “The dedicated volunteers, staff and board members not only provide a voice to these communities in every aspect of city life, but also give essential support to thousands of people who can often be at their most vulnerable, purely on the grounds of their sexuality.”

I have spoken to a number of girls and boys on campus asking them how they feel about the word sexuality and what they understood of it. Aside from the sweeping generalisation that “it needs to be explored more,” one answer stood out and made me question the fibres of my own sexuality:

“Sexuality? It’s basically whatever you get off on. To me, the conscious and unconscious mind have a big role to play, but the very fact that we have an unconscious means that true sexuality will not be achieved by many- it will be by those who understand there’s more to life than the conventional way of making a baby.”

In a world that has becoming increasingly more susceptible to emerging oddities, one would have thought there to be a wider network of LGBT’s that is not digitised but out frolicking in the open, letting others know that they are part of society as well. That they are not just a spare block that has been glued on, but an internal mystery that has unconsciously ruled over humans since the dawning of sex.

#TheCWord @TheDemonPaper