“I felt like I should pick up the check,” he says. “It was all this weird stuff, but it’s not even based on any real example of a straight relationship I’ve seen in my life. It was just like, ‘This is what straight people do in movies, so that’s what I’m going to do so that people accept me in this straight relationship.’ It was very strange, and that relationship ended up not working out just because I was like, I can’t pretend to be this person the whole time, but I feel bad I’ve been pretending and acting really different the whole time we’ve been together.”
Rose says he struggles to be himself while dating, but admits he’s “dramatic” by nature.
“A lot of times when things in my current relationship aren’t working, my brain will be like, ‘It’s because you’re not masculine enough’ or ‘It’s because you’re not traditional enough,'” he says.
Currently, Rose is dating a girl he says had a Christian upbringing and “a very traditional life.”
“I have my own identity problems, and then I’m like, ‘I’m so different from her, I have to make things good for her.’ So I have my little cry about it every now. I ask her, ‘Do you actually like me?’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah!’ And I’m like, okay. And then I’m over it, you know?” he says. “But she’s nice and she lets me go through my stuff.”
This fall, Rose will be a theater major at Southern Oregon University, a small state school in Ashland known for its annual Shakespeare festival. He says he’s nervous to leave Eugene, but he took a campus tour where students assured him, “Everyone’s a little bit queer here, so you’ll be fine.” He spoke with other queer students at the Queer Resource Center.
“They were like, ‘If you want to participate, that’s cool and if you want to just stop by, that’s cool, too,'” Rose says. “They weren’t super pushy, which was nice.”
He says he left his high school a little queerer than he found it. By the time he graduated, the GSA had grown, and thirty people participated in their school’s last Day of Silence, as opposed to a handful two years prior.
“I think the general perspective at my school shifted a lot — or at least the queer people there got a lot louder since I started,” Rose says. “When I graduated, a lot of the staff said they felt like I helped. It was me and a couple of my classmates in my grade who helped normalize queer identity, more because we actually had lives outside of being queer. It’s shifted a lot, but it was not great when I started.”
When Rose starts college, he says he’ll feel more comfortable telling people he’s bisexual. He says he’s found comfort in one thing he’s figured out: there’s no right way to be bi.
“I feel like many sexual identities have really strong stereotypes attached to them, but I don’t think that you have to meet personality qualifications to identify as bisexual, and I definitely thought that for a while,” Rose says. “I thought my relationships had to be different depending on who I was with. But I think as long as you’re happy in them, that’s more important than your actual identifier. And if a bisexual label is what makes me happy and safe in my identity, that’s more important than meeting a standard.”
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