hi, i'm bi

(read in the voice of paul from nickelodeon)

Jan 29, 2022

So here’s my dilemma. I kind of write these every week without much of a plan, so as to keep things ~fresh~ and relevant to how I’m feeling at the time of publication. But what I’m finding is that I tend to cycle through the same three or four thoughts every week, which leads to a very repetitive newsletter.

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how creativity needs constraints and how guidelines or rules can actually be beneficial when trying to think of something outside the box, because they limit the possibilities and allow the thinker to focus on a specific set of parameters, instead of trying to grab a new and innovative idea out of a circling pool of concepts swarming the air around their head. I was going to write all about that today, but I happened to accidentally open an old issue of this newsletter while looking for a different old issue and was reminded that I actually already talked all about that in December, which is famously not that long ago.

This brings me to today’s topic, which I’ve been putting off writing for many moons because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do it justice. I know one of my friends has been waiting for me to write this issue after I asked her if she thought I should, and I’m sick of avoiding her calls and feeling like a disappointment for not having written it yet, so I’m just going to buckle up and do it.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the spectrum of sexuality, and how the born this way narrative is both empowering and limiting for the LGBTQ community, after speaking with a friend who is “21 and doesn’t have [her] sexuality figured out yet.” Said with a hint of melancholy, the statement seemed to imply that she was behind on some sort of important milestone. As though figure out sexuality was one on the checklist of life goals: finish swimming lessons, then middle school, crack the code of sexuality, graduate high school, then college, get married, buy a house, etc. Just another task to be ticked off the list. Something that is irreversible, lying dormant, waiting to be discovered like type 1 diabetes.

I think millennials in particular have held tightly onto the notion that, regardless of what one’s sexuality might be, sexuality is a lifelong affliction. To say “I was born this way” is affirming. It cements the idea that to be gay isn’t a choice, can’t be what the hard-core bible thumpers would consider a sin. I was born bisexual just like I was born with blue eyes; some things can’t be helped. But I think when we so staunchly assert that we were born this way, we eliminate room for growth, change, and exploration.

From personal experience, I’ve known I was bi for a long time. But I would go through waves where I would notice more attraction towards men and then waves of noticing more attraction towards women. These waves ended up delaying my coming out, because I didn’t know how to identify. It felt like I was breaking some sort of unspoken or unknown rule that I couldn’t be bisexual because I wasn’t equally attracted to men and women all the time. There’s also the concept of bi-erasure, the myth of the gender binary, and the fact that I’ve been in a relationship with the same man for nearly a decade — which could each easily be the subject of its own newsletter — that made coming out seem pointless at best, and dissident at worst.

Maybe sexuality is less like type 1 diabetes, and more like a food preference. I have never liked lima beans, and I doubt I ever will. Some things will remain constant. But, as a child, my favorite food was broccoli. I still like broccoli, but I prefer it to be roasted rather than steamed, and I would prefer a bowl of cereal to a plate of broccoli in most situations. I didn’t intentionally change my favorite food to cereal, it just sort of happened as I grew up.

An article I found a few months ago, on the AARP website of all things, elaborates on a few anectodes of sexual orientation suddenly shuffling around in midlife. People who had firmly identified as either gay or straight, for 50-60 years, suddenly found themself in love with someone of the opposite gender of those to whom they’d previously been attracted. They all noticed a shift not only in sexual attraction, but in romantic attraction as well.

A study published in the Journal of Sex Research found that not only does sexuality have the potential to shift into adolescence, it seems to continue developing well into early adulthood, sort of like the frontal lobe. Trying to pin down a sexuality in the teen years or even early twenties could prove unfruitful, simply because the fruit hasn’t had a chance to ripen yet.

Participants in the study who identified as straight seemed to undergo the fewest changes as they aged, but many of the people who identified with some other point on the sexuality spectrum reported shifts as the study progressed. It is also interesting to note that more men than women self-identified as straight, with roughly 90% of men reporting they were heterosexual.

We all know I love reducing complicated, subjective things like feelings down to hard data and facts, so reading this study was a field day for me. But it also left me wondering a few things. The study was based on participants self-reporting, which means there’s room for error or even dishonesty, whether conscious or unconscious. In lieu of some kind of emotion sensor (something I used to dream about as a child that unfortunately — to my knowledge— does not exist), self-reporting is the only metric we really have for tracking feelings. What I think the study fails to take into account is that people experience a vast range of other emotions, aside from physical or romantic attraction, on a day to day basis — one of the most powerful of those being embarrassment. I can’t help but wonder if internalized homophobia prevented some of the participants from identifying as anything other than heterosexual when the study began, and if it prevented some of the straight people from admitting to experiencing feelings toward members of their own gender later on in the study. I also wonder if the idea that we are born with a sexuality that we live and then die with was too intimidating an idea for some people to admit to experiencing a change, for fear that they would be exposed as having been “wrong” for identifying a different way previously.

Obviously we can’t prove that any of this was the case, but we also can’t prove that it’s not. I think the fact that we’re even studying this shows a huge step towards a more accepting society. Maybe we’re all born with fluidity about these things. Maybe the choice we have to make is whether we want to live authentically or stifle part of who we are.

And that’s my story.

I procrastinated writing this issue for many months because gender and sexuality are such nuanced topics, and I wanted to make sure I did them justice. It would be nearly impossible to write an entire piece on this without making generalizations here and there, since there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to love and attraction. If you think I missed something glaringly obvious or crucial to the conversation, please drop me a line in the comments or by replying to this email for a less public conversation (yes! it will really get to me and I really do read them).

Essays No One Asked For

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