Reflection on being a confused, then proud, bisexual

For Pride, kind of. Are bisexuals canonically late? Probably.

Every June I’m like “I should do something for Pride this year”, and every June I somehow don’t get round to it. Anyway, I thought, in belated honour of Pride Month, I might write about my journey into bisexualdom. A bi-ography, if you will. As the saying goes, “Some are born bi, some become bi, and some have bisexuality thrust upon them”. Let’s begin.

Until I was about 27, I had romantic and sexual attractions to women sometimes, but I considered myself straight. I suspect this is common among bi women. Why was this?

I think one factor was that bisexuality just wasn’t a salient category to me. I grew up in a liberal household and my uncle is gay, so I was always aware that being gay was a thing, and that it was just as valid as being straight. But in my teens and early 20s, I don’t remember considering the possibility that I might be bi.¹ I remember once having a short but intense crush on a girl in my year. Was I gay, I wondered? No, I couldn’t be; I was attracted to so many men.

In turn, since I believed that I must be straight, I framed any feelings for women as non-romantic or non-sexual. In my secret fantasies, I often imagined beautiful women, or imagined myself as a beautiful woman; but surely everyone did that. My relationship with a school friend was maybe weirdly intense, but that couldn’t be romantic. Boobs were alluring, but like, boobs are just objectively great! I think typical-minding of this sort is particularly common when it comes to sexuality, because people don’t always talk about their fleeting attractions or their sexual fantasies.

To be fair to myself, I was predominantly romantically attracted to men at the time, though there was a certain queerness even in this. I was passionately into a certain variety of sensitive, intellectual, artistic gay man: Oscar Wilde, Stephen Fry, Plato, Rufus Wainwright. I avidly consumed stories of gay male love. (I have since discovered that ‘teenage girls being into gay male romance’ is very much a thing, but I sadly was not aware at the time of the massive online cultures dedicated to this, and my adolescent yearnings remained lonely). This sort of highly intellectual, minimally sexual, upwardly-aspiring desire also characterised my attraction to boys at school, some of whom were straight or at least of undefined sexuality. Of course I never said anything to these guys. That would have “ruined our friendship” (i.e. exposed me to mild social awkwardness).

Between mainly fancying asexual and/or dead gay men, never hitting on the gynophilic men I did fancy, and being Not That Hot, my sexual experimentation phase came later than average. I discovered I was bi by hooking up with a woman and being like ‘well, that was extremely great and fun, I guess I’m bi now’. It was a pretty easy, non-tortured realisation.

Since then, I’ve been much more ‘evenly’ bisexual than I was when I was growing up. This could have been due to some actual change in my sexuality, a shift a couple of notches down the Kinsey scale. My attractions did broaden around that time. In my early 20s I had a specific ‘type’; more recently the types of people I’ve been into have varied a lot more, both in physical appearance and personality, even just among cis men. But I also think that when I started identifying as bisexual, it seemed natural to ‘count’ bi experiences that before I had rounded down, explained away. Seeing myself as bisexual was like wearing new rose-, purple- and blue-tinted glasses. Whereas before I would have thought ‘that lady is so cool, I really want her to like me’, I’d wonder whether I had a crush on her. Whereas before I might have thought ‘well, she’s incredibly pretty and nice to look at’, I would now think of myself as being attracted.

My bisexuality feels very related to my polyamorous orientation. This is partly because I discovered I was bi in the same context that I discovered I was poly. But there are also more philosophical reasons. I think that one reason that bisexuals are ‘invisible’ is: we tend to assume that people are straight, gay or lesbian depending on the gender of their current partner—I find myself doing this too. This might be because mainstream culture values monogamy and marriage til-death-do-us-part. There’s an unconscious assumption that, if you’re partnered to (one) other, only your desire and love for them can and should ‘matter’; any potential you have to desire people of other genders is irrelevant. I have actually heard a monogamous friend play down their bisexuality for exactly this reason.

This in turn might explain why some people are sceptical about bisexuality, framing bisexuals as straight people trying to be trendy or gay people in denial. If the (assumed) end goal is to settle down with one person, forever, then bisexuality, understood as the potential to bond romantically with people of any gender, will be a temporary state, until you find The One (assumed to be a binary man or woman, thus determining your ‘real’ sexuality). Of course, this isn’t How It Works: allosexual monogamous people of all orientations are usually still attracted to people other than their partner, and similarly, monogamous bi people are still attracted to people of other genders. But I think it’s maybe not an accident that the bi and poly communities have so much overlap.

1. It seems surprising that I hadn’t heard of it. Apart from anything else, I had seen Cabaret (the film) by the time I was 18.