Consider the bicurious.

(And also the bifurious.)

A while back, I saw someone say — maybe on one of those helpful online guides to the wild world of sexual orientation — that “bicurious” is an offensive term. As a one time 1990s teen, a girl who came out in the era of “bicurious” and “heteroflexible” and the like, this struck me as a little odd. I’d never really thought enough about the term bicurious to consider whether or not it was “offensive.” And now that I was presented with the possibility that it was, I — well, hmm.

When I think about the term bicurious these days, the person who comes to mind most immediately is Kevin Smith (yes Chasing Amy Kevin Smith), who famously once referred to himself as “bicurious but not brave enough to commit.” There’s a lot to unpack in the phrase: to me it communicates a person who experiences some level of same gender attraction but also battles internalized homophobia — or, perhaps, just the fear of external homophobic forces — and thus does not explore those attractions. I feel sympathetic to that person, that mindset, because what is being communicated is a longing, an experience of being on the outside looking in, a sense that you cannot claim queerness if you are not throwing your hat into the ring, so to speak.

And yet at the same time: to have that “curiosity” at all is to exist in a space of queerness. To feel a sexual attraction to people of your own gender — to be turned on by them in porn, to fantasize about sex with them, to desire — that’s not “curiosity,” that’s attraction. And attraction doesn’t need to be acted on to be a part of one’s identity — especially since when attraction is acted on, it can still be, well, fraught. I used to worry a lot that if a sexual experience with a woman was subpar for me that that meant that I wasn’t “really” bi — even as I felt no similar weight around a disappointing sexual experience with a man. But the desire for women, the attraction to women, was in me all the same, even if the fantasy didn’t necessarily pan out successfully in reality. And it’s that desire that makes me bi, full stop. Everything else is just life experience.

But me and Kevin Smith — those aren’t the people a lot of folks are imagining when they hear the phrase “bicurious.” I think most people imagine a young cis woman — probably white, mostly dating men — who’s curious about threesomes; who thinks girls are beautiful but would never, you know, date one; who seems mostly interested in sapphism to the extent it makes her more appealing to men. I think “bicurious” gets a bad rap because it’s so tied up with all of the stereotypes of women performing bisexuality for a male audience, of women commodifying their sexuality for men.

Except I don’t actually have a problem with that, not if the woman herself feels fulfilled and happy, not if everyone involved in the situation is consenting and feels respected. If two women like kissing each other for male attention, and neither of them feels manipulated, then what business is it of mine, you know?

Honestly the only time I’ve ever felt put off by anything in the neighborhood of bicuriousity was this time when I read an essay by a straight writer that documented her sexual experimentation with women. The way she framed it was that sapphic experiences were the kind of thing a sexually adventurous young women was supposed to engage in, like it was a box to check off as you made your way through life. She, herself, wasn’t particularly attracted to other women — getting eaten out was nice, sure, but there was no fire on her end, just a sense that this was a thing she was doing to make herself seem more worldly.

And that — I mean look, in my heart of hearts I’m sure part of my reaction was just jealousy, like, wow, it’s been so hard for me to find women I have mutual attraction with and you’re just walking into all these sexual experiences you don’t even want? What the fuck?

But it was also this frustration at the idea that a core part of my identity — a deep and abiding love of and attraction to women — was just an experience to experiment and toss aside, not even out of genuine drive but simply a sense of social obligation. I want to be clear here that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with trying out queer sex and deciding it’s not for you (sometimes you have to go there to know there). But this idea that queer — and specifically sapphic — sex is a thing one pursues, not out of personal desire, but because you’re chasing a fad… that is what got my hackles up. That is what I found offensive.

Yet I don't know that that is, at the end of the day, what bicuriousity actually is. Bicuriousity, to me, is still that Kevin Smith type feeling — that desire for same sex contact that’s partnered with a fear that one cannot claim it, not just yet. That, to me, isn’t offensive. It’s sad, perhaps, and it makes me want to give people hugs and tell them that they don’t have to hedge, that they don’t have to prove, that they can simply be bi.

But if they’re not ready, well, that’s okay too.

PS I feel like there’s a whole other essay to be written about bicuriosity from the other end — which is to say monosexual queers who find themselves experiencing hetero attractions, gasp! — but that will have to wait for another day.

The B+ Squad is for the bicurious.