As a general rule, most people do not deal well with change. Certainty is a valued quality. Even if something is foreign and confusing, there’s a comfort to the idea that it will remain fixed — that even if you never really understand it, it will remain exactly as incomprehensible tomorrow as it was today, without becoming a new and different kind of confusing.
I think, in part, the whole “born this way” ethos that dominated discussions of LGBT rights and identity a few years back was a sop to this idea. Yes, the queers might be different from the straights, but they have always been so, their difference coded into them since birth, the line argues. There’s a fixity to this idea of being born (and presumably staying) a certain way, in being roughly the same person today as you were yesterday.
This desire for constancy is, pretty obviously, one of the reasons why people are uncomfortable with gender fluidity — whether it comes in the form of transitioning genders once or having a gender identity itself that is permanently in flux — but I think that it’s also part of why people are so uncomfortable with bisexuality. Even as we know that “sexuality” and “gender” are separate and unrelated qualities, there’s still this belief that one’s own personal gender identity will correlate with one’s sexuality, that there will be a constancy, a through line, to the story of how you, personally, are gendered and how you fuck.
I’ve written before about the idea of the “real” bisexual man as a super horny straight guy who just isn’t particularly discriminating about where he sticks his dick; I think this image appeals to people in part because it offers up a vision of bisexual constancy. Yes, this man might fuck people of all genders, but the way he fucks remains the same: he is always dominant, always the top, always in pursuit of sexual pleasure, even if it comes from a variety of potential sources. The popular stereotype of a bisexual woman — the passive sexual plaything willing to give it up for anyone, and likely only interested in women to the extent it makes men more interested in her — is similarly afforded a gender fixity. We don’t have to imagine her being a different person with different partners, she is always just an amorphous blob of sexuality, absorbing the energy that other people thrust at her. I think it’s comforting to people — to monosexuals specifically — to imagine bisexuality within these limited frames; it allows them to comprehend attraction to multiple genders without having to think too deeply about how a person might shift, might change, in relation to the gender of their partners.
Indeed, I grew up hearing other bisexuals champion this idea that we are the same person no matter who we have sex or partner with, that we, ourselves, remain unchanged, that we don’t flip back and forth between our “gay side” and our “straight side.” On the one hand, I get where this is coming from; on the other, I must admit I think it smacks of a bisexual respectability politic, a buying in to the idea that fluidity, inconstancy, is somehow bad.
Also, I gotta be honest: this idea that fluidity is bad, that constancy is desirable? It kinda fucked me up. A lot. I don’t remember when exactly it fully took root, but at some point I began to buy into the idea that to be a “good” bisexual I must naturally be the same person with women that I was with men, that whatever I wanted from my boyfriends would also be what I wanted from my girlfriends. The main thing this did was cut me off from my own queerness, stunting my imagination and limiting my sense of the possibilities. If I enjoyed casual sex with men but not with women, that must mean I wasn’t really queer, right? The idea that my relationship to men and women might be different — that I might be a different person, with different needs, depending on the person I was going on a date with — was far too uncomfortable to examine further. It made me feel unserious, wholly unlike my firmly planted queer peers who could bust out childhood pictures demonstrating that they’d been exactly as queer then as they were now.
Backing away from this idea of the fixed self, on the other hand — well, it’s given me breathing room. What if I do have a “gay self” and a “straight self;” what if I do want different things from the men I date as opposed to the women? Twenty-year-old me was comfortable with this possibility, and she was far more confident in her queerness than her twenty-five or thirty-five-year-old counterparts. Giving up on the idea of a singular self, of the idea that I must be one relatively straightforward person who wants a specific thing from sex and dating regardless of who she’s partnered with, has been incredibly liberating.
And I mean, look: on some level, I am the same person regardless of who I’m dating. I’m just a person with complicated wants and desires, whose many angles aren’t always legible to the casual observer at any given point in time. And maybe that — the idea that there might be more to me, more to us, than meets the eye at any given moment — is the true thing that monosexuals find threatening. They don’t just want you to be unchanging, to be predictable. They want you to render your entire self visible for their observation, for their consumption.
I think you probably know what my response to that is, though. Seriously, fuck that.