Everyone Thinks Bisexual People Are Secretly Something Else, And I’m Tired of It

There’s been a lot of conversation online recently about bisexuality.

And by “conversation”, I mean people confidently explaining bisexuality to bisexual people.

Straight women are saying they wouldn’t date bisexual men because they’re worried those men are secretly gay. Gay women are saying they wouldn’t date bisexual women because they’re worried those women are secretly straight.

Which leaves bisexual people in the rather fascinating position of apparently being both secretly gay and secretly straight.

Schrödinger’s sexuality, if you will.

As someone who identifies as bisexual, or possibly pansexual, because frankly I’ve never felt particularly compelled to produce a PowerPoint presentation explaining exactly how my attraction works, I find human beings attractive.

And occasionally fictional monsters.

Hello, monster romance readers. I see you.

I’ve dated men. I’ve dated women. I’ve dated bisexual women, gay women, “straight” women, straight men and bisexual men.

I’m yet to date a gay man, admittedly, but if anyone needs me for a particularly convincing lavender marriage, I’m open to negotiations.

So I feel reasonably qualified to offer an opinion on bisexuality.

Namely: bisexual people are bisexual.

Groundbreaking, I know.

And yet we seem determined to treat bisexuality as a temporary administrative category until someone eventually picks a side.

A bisexual woman dating a man becomes straight.

A bisexual woman dating a woman becomes gay.

A bisexual man dating a woman is secretly gay but repressing it.

A bisexual man dating another man has apparently finally admitted that he was gay all along.

At no point, apparently, is anyone simply allowed to be bisexual.

We Really, Really Love a Binary

Human brains adore categories.

Right or wrong. Male or female. Gay or straight. Tea or coffee. Cats or dogs.

We like being able to put things into boxes because boxes make the world feel predictable.

Unfortunately, human sexuality has never been particularly interested in cooperating.

I think sexuality is far more fluid for many people than we like to admit.

That doesn’t mean everyone is secretly bisexual. Some people are completely and comfortably heterosexual. Some people are completely and comfortably homosexual. Some people know precisely who they’re attracted to and that attraction remains consistent throughout their entire lives.

Wonderful.

But there are also a hell of a lot of people living somewhere amongst the shades of grey.

People who have considered themselves straight their entire lives and then meet one person who completely throws that assumption out of the window.

People who have always been attracted primarily to women but occasionally find a man attractive.

People whose attraction changes over time.

People who experience romantic attraction differently from sexual attraction.

People who don’t particularly care what somebody has between their legs because they’re attracted to the entire person attached to it.

And people who have absolutely no intention of interrogating what their appreciation for Venom’s tongue means about their sexual identity.

No judgement.

We’ve all been there.

You could marry a completely “straight” person tomorrow and ten years from now be sitting on the sofa watching a film when they suddenly say:

“Actually…”

And your entire evening takes an unexpected turn.

Because sexuality isn’t a legally binding contract you sign at eighteen.

Humans change.

We discover things about ourselves.

We encounter people we’ve never encountered before.

We become more comfortable with ourselves.

And sometimes we realise the labels we previously used don’t quite describe us anymore.

That isn’t dishonesty.

That’s being alive.

Bisexual Men Aren’t Secretly Gay

There is a particularly ugly flavour of biphobia directed at bisexual men.

The assumption that a bisexual man is really just a gay man who hasn’t admitted it yet.

And interestingly, this prejudice often comes wrapped in the language of dating preferences.

Obviously nobody is required to date anybody.

You can reject someone because you don’t like their shoes if you really want to.

But we should still be capable of examining why certain characteristics make us uncomfortable.

Because if your objection to dating a bisexual man is:

“He’s going to leave me for a man.”

I have terrible news about heterosexual men.

They can leave you too.

Usually for another woman, admittedly, but I suspect that will provide limited emotional comfort while you’re crying into a family sized bag of Doritos.

Bisexuality doesn’t make somebody more likely to cheat.

Attraction isn’t the same thing as action.

Straight women don’t stop finding every other man on Earth attractive because they’ve entered a relationship.

Gay women don’t suddenly lose the ability to recognise attractive women because they’ve got a girlfriend.

Bisexual people don’t enter relationships and immediately begin staring mournfully through windows because they’re tragically deprived of half the population.

Monogamous bisexual people make exactly the same agreement as monogamous heterosexual and homosexual people:

I am attracted to people other than you, but I choose you.

That’s literally monogamy.

And the discomfort around bisexual men also exposes something uncomfortable about our ideas of masculinity.

We have spent generations associating male homosexuality with femininity.

A man being sexually or romantically interested in another man is still, consciously or unconsciously, treated by some people as making him less of a man.

Which means a woman who is attracted to traditional masculinity can discover that a man is bisexual and suddenly perceive him differently.

Nothing about him has changed.

His personality hasn’t changed.

His body hasn’t changed.

His relationship with her hasn’t changed.

The only thing that changed was the information she received.

That’s worth examining.

And Bisexual Women Aren’t Secretly Straight Either

Bisexual women get a different version of exactly the same nonsense.

Within heterosexual culture, bisexual women are frequently fetishised.

Our attraction to women becomes something designed for male entertainment.

We’re sexy because maybe we’ll kiss another woman at a party.

We’re adventurous.

We’re potentially available for threesomes.

But God forbid our attraction to women is actually meaningful.

Meanwhile, within some lesbian spaces, bisexual women can encounter suspicion from the opposite direction.

She’s going to leave you for a man.

She’s experimenting.

She’s basically straight.

She’s only dating women until she meets a husband.

Again, bisexuality becomes something that cannot simply exist on its own terms.

And I understand where some of that fear comes from.

Women who love women have historically had their relationships dismissed, fetishised and treated as less legitimate than heterosexual relationships. There are legitimate reasons why someone might carry fear around being treated as an experiment.

But bisexual women aren’t responsible for heterosexual society’s refusal to take relationships between women seriously.

A bisexual woman loving a woman isn’t practising for something else.

A bisexual woman marrying a man hasn’t retroactively invalidated every woman she previously loved.

And a bisexual woman doesn’t become heterosexual because her current partner happens to have a penis.

Her sexuality isn’t determined by whoever she most recently slept with.

Humans Have Always Been Complicated

People sometimes talk about sexual fluidity as though TikTok invented it sometime around 2021.

We didn’t.

Humans have been having sex with, falling in love with and forming relationships with people of the same and different genders for thousands of years.

Ancient Greece is probably the most famous example, although attitudes towards sexuality there were enormously more complicated than our modern labels of gay, straight and bisexual can capture.

And evidence of same sex relationships and sexual behaviour exists across different historical periods and cultures.

Modern Western ideas about sexuality have also been profoundly shaped by religion, law and social institutions that attempted to define which relationships were respectable, legitimate or morally acceptable.

For generations, people were taught that heterosexual marriage wasn’t simply a way to live.

It was the correct way.

Everything outside it became deviant.

Shameful.

Sinful.

Illegal, in many places.

And when you spend centuries forcing an incredibly complicated aspect of human behaviour into two neat boxes, perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that we’re still uncomfortable when people refuse to stay inside them.

Maybe We Should Stop Auditing People’s Sexuality

This is ultimately what bothers me most.

The constant demand for evidence.

How many women have you slept with?

How many men?

Have you actually had sex with a woman?

Have you actually had sex with a man?

Which do you prefer?

Would you marry a woman?

Would you marry a man?

Who was your last partner?

None of this is necessary.

A virgin can know they’re straight.

A lesbian doesn’t need to sleep with a man first to make sure.

A gay man doesn’t need to conduct a controlled heterosexual experiment before he’s permitted to identify as gay.

So why do bisexual people seemingly need to submit supporting documentation?

You don’t need equal numbers either.

Bisexuality doesn’t require maintaining a perfect 50/50 gender ratio like some kind of horny diversity initiative.

You might be attracted to women far more frequently than men.

You might mostly date men because you’ve happened to meet more men you’re compatible with.

You might have never actually dated one of the genders you’re attracted to.

You might experience attraction completely differently depending on the person.

Still bisexual.

Perhaps Body Parts Aren’t Actually the Most Interesting Thing About Us

For all the endless discourse about sexuality, I think sometimes we massively overcomplicate attraction.

Do you like this person?

Do you enjoy talking to them?

Do you find yourself wondering what they’re doing when they’re not around?

Do you feel romantically interested in them?

Do you want to kiss them?

Do you want to explore a physical connection with them?

Does being around them make something inside your brain go, Oh. Hello.

Maybe that’s enough.

You don’t necessarily need to immediately convene an internal committee meeting about what their gender means for your sexual identity.

You can just… like somebody.

And perhaps that’s what makes bisexuality uncomfortable to some people.

It exposes how flimsy some of our categories actually are.

It reminds us that attraction can be unpredictable.

That people change.

That identity can evolve.

That another person’s sexuality cannot guarantee they will never leave us.

And that love doesn’t become safer simply because we’ve successfully put everybody into the correct box.

There are meaningful, committed, beautiful relationships happening everywhere in those shades of grey.

Between women.

Between men.

Between men and women.

Between non binary people.

Between bisexual people and gay people.

Between bisexual people and straight people.

Between people who have spent decades knowing exactly who they are and people who are still figuring it out.

You don’t have to date bisexual people.

Nobody is entitled to your attraction.

But if the reason you won’t date somebody is because bisexual men are “secretly gay” or bisexual women are “secretly straight”, perhaps it’s worth asking yourself where that belief actually came from.

Because bisexuality isn’t confusion.

It isn’t greed.

It isn’t promiscuity.

It isn’t indecision.

And it isn’t a layover on the journey to somebody’s real sexuality.

Sometimes a woman loves women and men.

Sometimes a man loves men and women.

Sometimes somebody loves people regardless of gender.

Sometimes the labels are useful.

Sometimes they’re messy.

Sometimes they change.

And sometimes you’re just sitting there watching Venom thinking things you weren’t expecting to think about an alien symbiote.

Human sexuality is weird.

Human beings are weird.

Personally, I think that’s one of the best things about us.