Did I always know I was bisexual?

Reposted from my Dreamwidth blog

How long have I known I’m bisexual? A simple question with no simple answer. Someone passed a meme around on Facebook last week saying “It’s fine if you haven’t always known,” which prompted me to reflect.

I have accepted it for seven or eight years, I suppose. But was it a matter of learning something about myself I didn’t previously know? Or was it just that I started to be honest with myself about something I’d always known? Neither of those sits quite right with my memory.

I didn’t come out to anyone but my partner for several years after this realization. Even now, although I openly identify as bisexual online, you wouldn’t guess it from my life in physical space. Primarily, of course, my partner and I were and are in an exclusive relationship and already had been for years before, so I’m not seeking romantic or sexual partners of any gender and have no intention of doing so.

(This is something people sometimes misunderstand, so in case this concept is new to you: no, that doesn’t mean I’m not really bisexual or that I’ve “chosen a side”. I’ve chosen a person.)

But it took years for me to summon up the courage to come out at all, even online. I’ve never taken part in any Pride event, publicly or otherwise, nor any other LGBT-related social activity. Last year a friend invited me to a “coming out stories” session as part of a campus LGBT awareness week; I chickened out.

I grew up Evangelical, which in New Zealand isn’t quite as tightly bound to conservative politics as it is in the US, but on some issues there is definitely a Godly side and a Satanic side, and at least back in the ’80s and ’90s sexual orientation was one of those issues. Meanwhile in the secular culture which I encountered at school, to be gay was the very depth of loserdom, the nadir towards which lesser losers such as geeks and nerds and the arty-farty were presumed to be drawn.

Once I entered an environment where I had to justify moral positions with reasoning, I quickly accepted (intellectually) that there was no justification for opposing same-sex relationships. With a personal history shaped by Evangelicalism and Kiwi-bloke toxic masculinity, however, my emotional reactions took over a decade to catch up – and indeed, acknowledging my own bisexuality was a late stage in that very process.

Nowadays my only contact with the Evangelical community is through my family and some old friends, and if they’re any indication then the norm seems to be shifting. But that’s only a few people, and those few might just as easily be drifting away from the norm as drifting along with it.

Anyway, my single biggest reason for delaying coming out publicly was that I felt a bit presumptuous suddenly identifying as a member of a community which I knew very little about and had a history of being uncomfortable with.

There existed in my teenage years a movement which called itself “Gay” and “Queer” – yes, “Queer” – with its own symbols and aesthetics and its proprietary words, including “bisexual”. This movement seemed entirely alien to everything that was familiar to me, and of course both sides of my cultural background actively encouraged that alienation. I didn’t see any connection between the rainbow flags and the pink triangles and the fishnets and sequins, on the one hand, and my own developing sexuality on the other.

I certainly did like girls; there was so little education about sexuality in New Zealand high schools of the time that I would have thought that that precluded me from being anything but heterosexual, if I hadn’t already thought that being a faithful Christian would protect me from being anything but heterosexual.

I nursed unrequited crushes on two or three girls because I thought that was what love was. I looked at girls in swimsuits at the pool and felt happy in an excited kind of way and then guilty because that was Looking Upon a Woman to Lust After Her (Matthew 5:28). I vividly remember, early in my teenage, seeing a photo of a young woman topless with her breasts in full view, and suddenly getting, all in one go, what all the fuss was about breasts.

(Between my autism and my Evangelicalism I was so sheltered that this photo wasn’t in a brown-paper-wrapped magazine nor any remotely sexual context; it was in a little booklet on Māori culture in the Otago Museum gift-shop, the purpose being to demonstrate typical Māori dress prior to European colonization.)

But I didn’t only like girls, and this is where I feel like I’ve always known I was bisexual and that what changed in my mid-thirties was that I started to admit it to myself. As early as age eleven I used to undress in front of the mirror and look at my own body and get the same sort of happy feeling I got from the girls at the swimming-pool; I’ve much more recently learned that, back when homosexuality was treated as a mental health condition, that was the number one early-warning diagnostic symptom.

This had nothing to do with the fact that it was my body. It just happened, back then, to fall within the range of bodies I found attractive, with the added advantage that I could look at it as long as I wanted without bothering anybody. I had the same feelings about some of the guys in the changing-rooms after PE classes, although of course that environment was also where the toxic masculinity peaked and I had to be very, very careful about where my eyes went.

Actually... here’s something I’ve never told anyone, and you’ll soon see why not. When I was twelve, I think it was, there was one particular guy I remember; slim, muscular, blond and handsome. I felt drawn to him in a way I didn’t understand. I concluded, with all the enthusiasm of an adolescent Christian, that what I was feeling must be a call from the Lord to bring him to the faith.

That was mistake number one. Mistake number two was not far behind. When you had a call from the Lord to bring someone to the faith, according to the paradigm we got at church and youth group, what you did was approach them and talk to them about it, and you had to make sure to let God’s love for them shine out of you as you did it. God would help you, the Bible promised, with the words to say (Matthew 10:19–20). So I decided I had to do that.

Mistake number three, which I imagine someone without autism probably wouldn’t have made, was taking the opportunity when the two of us were in the changing-room of a swimming-pool and very nearly naked. The promised help with words did not come; I smiled at him and said his name in a tone intended to convey the compassion of God, and then my mind went blank.

I presume he concluded, perfectly reasonably in the circumstances and with rather better insight into my motivations than I myself had, that he was being hit on. I know that what followed was one of the worse beatings I endured at that most violent time in my life. Probably homophobia was part of it, but given how creepy I was being I can’t bring myself to blame him now.

Thankfully I never made quite that concatenation of mistakes again. But I did continue to have feelings for guys as well as girls, and to staunchly deny to myself that they were the same kind of feelings. The guy in my high school Latin classes who shared my interest in languages? Just a good friend and a nice person. Slim muscular guys with their shirts off? I’m just wishing I looked like that.

There did come a time when I was seventeen, walking through the Botanic Gardens with a friend – not the guy from Latin, another one – and I turned to look at him and out of the blue, I don’t know why, something about the angle of his face, I was suddenly seized with the urge to kiss him. Needless to say, I didn’t act on it, but I couldn’t deny to myself that I had felt it. Instead, I concluded that I had been tempted by Satan to commit an abominable sin.

Fortunately, it wasn’t long after that that I went to university and had to learn to reason about my beliefs properly, and the idea that it was wrong for a man to kiss a man was one of the first things to go (though I think the idea that there was such a person as Satan may have gone even earlier). But emotionally I stayed stuck at the point of “Same-sex attraction is not bad, but it would be bad if it happened to me.” In which illogical position I settled for a decade and a half.

During that time I continued to notice people in public spaces and have to quickly double-check their gender to see if I was allowed to be attracted to them, and to be struck occasionally by how handsome a few particular men’s faces were, and also to fill out online quizzes and insist that no I am absolutely 100% heterosexual not the least soupçon of same-sex attraction here not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I can remember reading a commentary on Harry Potter back when Livejournal was the big thing, and the commentator was arguing that Harry must be bisexual because he keeps noticing how handsome other male characters are, Tom Riddle in particular, and straight guys just don’t see things like that. Yes we do, I thought. I’m straight and I notice how handsome other guys are. It’s because, um, we’re gauging how much competition they pose when we’re trying to attract women. Yeah, that’s it, yeah.

Of course, as well as being a place where ideas are put through the wringer, university is also a place where young adults congregate in large numbers and the authorities, in sudden contrast to high school, couldn’t care less whether they’re having sex. (I gather they used to oppose mixed flatting, but that was all over by the ’90s.) Meanwhile, while homophobia was still active and pervasive, gay was no longer the worst thing you could possibly be or call someone.

At the time, graffiti at Otago University would take weeks rather than hours to disappear. In the men’s toilets, in amongst the toxic masculinity and the boring jokes, you could read messages proposing sexual encounters on the spot to any stranger with the inclination, followed by “Leave date and time.” Often these were followed by a date and time in someone else’s handwriting. Usually, this would be followed in turn by a message in the first handwriting along the lines of “Where were you? I waited half an hour!”

I would read these scrawls and I would think: ...hmmmm. Of course it would be disgusting to have sex with a stranger in a public toilet, and of course I had one set of social anxieties making it completely impossible to do that with a guy I didn’t know and another set of social anxieties making it equally impossible to do it if it turned out to be a guy I did know. It went without saying that such a thing would never happen. And of course it never did.

But still ...hmmmm.

I finally started to get a clue, I think, as a result of working on a Sex Issue of Otago Polytechnic’s monthly student magazine Gyro, now defunct, which I helped edit for four years. The previous year we had caused a bit of a scandal by printing a Sex Issue with a cover photo of a topless porn-star (whom we’d interviewed for the magazine); this had been modified from a design of mine by removing the male nudity that I had conscientiously put on for gender balance. I’m still a little cross about that.

This time, whilst my attitude towards feminism could still have been characterized as “favourable but clueless”, my co-editor for the first time was a woman. Mindful of the criticism from the previous year, I put some extra effort in to try and achieve wokeness in the illustrative as well as the textual side of things. But mine wasn’t the final say in graphics design, and I found when the magazine came back from the printer that a few things had been changed; and the changes showed a subtle but consistent trend away from the gender balance that I taken such trouble over.

In the page on LGBT acceptance, the photo of two topless women embracing on a bed was still there, but the photo of two naked men embracing in a shower had disappeared. Another page, I had headed with two vintage nude beach photos I’d Googled, one a woman and one a man, in remarkably symmetrical positions; in the printed version the man had had his colours inverted to turn him into a photographic negative.

Something bothered me about that, I realized, and it wasn’t just gender politics. My versions of the pages had held an appeal for me that was now missing. I wanted to see two men sharing a shower. I wanted to see a male model nude on a beach. I had inadvertently performed a controlled experiment, and the result was significant: I liked men.

Not long afterwards a new science book about sex got in the news: Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam’s A Billion Wicked Thoughts. I’ve since read it, and I’m only half impressed. They go off on all kinds of flights of evolutionary fancy that aren’t warranted by their research. But the research itself is legit. (I think. I may be biased by the fact that their depiction of male sexuality happens to capture my own to a T, which may not mirror the experience of other readers.)

And one finding that got into the media was that men all over the world like penises, as evidenced by their internet porn searches. Did that mean – could I – was I allowed—?

So I tried looking at myself without the “I am heterosexual” lens I’d been defensively clutching, and discovered that yes, everything fell neatly into place. I didn’t immediately leap to “I am bisexual”; I did what I think many starting self-explorers have done and coined a new term for myself.

That term was “sesquisexual”, from the Latin sesqui “one and a half”. I still felt that it would be presumptuous to claim a bisexual identity, for the reasons described above, and also because (despite the emphasis I’ve placed on them here) my attractions to men have never overshadowed my attractions to women, and I thought “bisexual” implied “roughly 50-50”.

(It doesn’t, by the way. If you have any attraction to more than one gender, you get to call yourself bisexual if that feels like it fits.)

I gave up “sesquisexual” without ever having tried to make it happen when I discovered that unfamiliar LGBT terms – dyadic, lunarian, quoiromantic, and the like – made me anxious. (“What if I’m not really bisexual after all and I’m one of these things instead and I’ve got it all wrong and made a fool of myself and blundered into spaces that aren’t mine to enter...?”) I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, so I decided not to add to the confusion.

I spent a few years dropping kind of awkward hints on this blog, because I kind of wanted people to know but jump over to the bit where they’d already accepted it. Then in October 2016 somebody had apparently decided it was Coming Out Day and a meme came down my Facebook feed saying “Hello, I Am Bisexual”, to look like a name-badge, and it had a Share button.

I sat looking at it for at least ten minutes, breathing deeply. But in the end I reasoned that there was not going to be a better time to come out, and I clicked Share before I could overthink it.

In the couple of years since, I’ve been getting more comfortable identifying as bisexual at least online. During that time I’ve come to realize that it was never about “Those strange bisexual people – I have to be one of them now.” It is and always was “These experiences that are so familiar to me – that’s what ‘bisexual’ always meant.”

Now I want to draw a couple of lessons to justify this long diversion into my personal life. If you’re in a similar situation, you are under no obligation to come out to anybody else if it would make you unsafe or disrupt your relationships or even if you’re just not comfortable with it. That’s your choice. But I want you to know that there is nothing whatever to be gained by trying to fool yourself. Be honest. Look yourself in the mirror and call yourself what you are. I wish I had done it ten years earlier than I did. That’s the first one.

And second, ignorance and misinformation on this topic do active harm to children and adolescents, far more than could plausibly accrue from whatever knowledge you might be trying to shield them from.