When did you know you were bi?
And what does it matter?
Years ago, I was chatting with a heterosexual friend and she told me what I guess you could call her heterosexual origin story.
“Oh, I’ve known I was straight since I was a kid,” she said, going on to regale me with stories of her boy crazy youth. She was kissing boys under the slide all the way back in kindergarten, making plans for which of her classmates was going to be her future husband (or, potentially, husbands — I don’t think she felt the need to limit herself at that age).
On the one hand, it was refreshing to hear a straight person talk about their sexual identity as something that needed to be discovered, unlocked. But on the other hand — I have to admit that there was a part of the story that struck me as kind of odd. Because minus a few details here and there, that story probably could have been mine. I, too, had passionate childhood crushes on boys (I remember a first grade obsession with a boy named Sherman!). I was also fascinated by hetero romance very early on. And yet here I am: not straight. The presence of one set of gendered attractions did not preclude the presence of another.
I’ve long had this theory that bisexuals take longer to come out of the closet than our gay and lesbian peers — that, as an openly bi fourteen-year-old in 1997, I was something of an anomaly (at least in the sense that I was actually bi, and not bi as a stepping stone to coming out as lesbian or gay, which is a whole other journey entirely). The monocentric nature of our culture makes it harder to see one’s own bisexuality: if you genuinely experience cross gender attractions, it can be easy to assume that you are straight, especially if your same gender attractions have a different texture and feel. It’s also easy to overcommit in the other way: for some folks, the mere presence of same gender attractions means they must be gay, no two ways about it, to even consider the bi label would be wishy washy, a refusal to commit. To explain that previous parenthetical: I think bi feels easiest to claim when you’re a monosexual (or mostly monosexual) queer; when you wish you had cross gender attractions but do not actually have them. (Though, granted, actually being bi is less convenient than monosexual queers who had a “bi phase” seem to think it is.)
Who knows if my theory is true, but it does raise some interesting questions. If it’s harder to know that you are bi — if bisexuals are more likely to be secretly walking among us, unbeknownst even to themselves — then what exactly does that mean for our understanding of the importance, the relevance, of one’s sexuality in the first place?
It probably won't come as a surprise to learn that I think this says more about the failings of our cultural understanding of sexuality than it does about individual bi people themselves, or the “correct” time to know you are bi. So you didn’t piece it together until you were fifty, who cares? There is no timeline for this stuff, it’s all relative to who you are in any give moment and what is right for you at that time. What’s weird is the way we talk about this hyperpersonal thing, this thing that is often unknowable, even to the self, as though it is the defining factor of a person. What’s weird is we confuse the impact of living in a society that is structured to make things harder for openly queer people with some inborn quality, some hardcoded identity, that is “being queer.”
I realized I was bi when I was 14 (and even then, I only realized it because someone else pointed it out). Maybe for you that queer awakening happened when you were 10 or 12 or 25 or 50 or even right now, reading this, you’re realizing that you’re bi. Congrats! I’m happy for you. I’m even happy for you if you’re not bi, we can’t all be this amazing. But I think we should use those bi awakenings as a jumping off point, not for what being bi says about us, personally, but for what it says that society tells us it has to mean anything beyond just that, hey, we have an expansive palate when it comes to who we want to bang.
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It’s taken me a really long time to fully under myself as bi and to understand the different nature of the way I feel emotionally, romantically, sexually to different genders. I questioned myself for a long time - came out, went back in again as it were… I still am not fully open with everyone in my life as I have a partner who is a man and I am readily assumed to be straight. I had same sex attractions fairly early on and although I come from a liberal background I squashed it and didn’t feel I could be open about it to friends or family - I’ve never told my family, even though I had gay family and my parents have gay friends - I still think they’d be weird about it and it would be awkward. Probably because I definitely was always romantically interested in guys, hung around almost exclusively with straight people and I guess therefore largely culturally straight and with no place to feel comfortable to explore these issues. I often feel a bit of a fraud in gay bars or generally as a queer person - that I’m not queer enough, that I’m coded as straight. When I was in my late teens a lesbian friend told me bi girls were an HIV risk/various other negative tropes, and I fully realised that I’m not a dream partner for many lesbian women and that I maybe/probably wouldn’t be welcomed… it’s been a fraught identity for me until really quite recently in my 40s, still questioning. I wish I could’ve been more comfortable or knowledgeable earlier in my life and I could have explored more. I remember saying to a male friend in my 20s that I thought I was gay and he openly laughed at me and said no you’re not. People can be shit! This newsletter is fantastic and so much you say resonates for me. I hope there are people who can access this earlier in their lives than me - it might help the journey with less confusion and heartache along the way. Thank you!
It was a slow and gradual process. My first bi feelings were in middle school. My first sexual relationships with women were in my later teens, followed by a hellishly long strictly hetero phase. I have been either openly bi, or bi practing on and off since my late forties, but am currently in a monogamous relationship in my very much advanced 60 age. My attraction and appreciation of other bi and lesbian women abides. It's just so much softer and kinder. But I am monogamous, and a carer to a physically ill and vulnerable (male) partner now. Sometimes duty comes first.