More Than an Animal

I came out as being bisexual the summer before my senior year of high school. My family and friends accepted it without any resistance, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. They didn’t treat me any differently, and most told me they already knew. My aunt thought it was a phase, but accepted it was part of who I am; even my 13-year-old sister didn’t think anything of it. Despite a strong support group, eventually a realization emerged: because I am bisexual, people are prone to stereotyping me as promiscuous and unable to maintain fidelity in a relationship.

The first time I understood how bisexuals are thought of as promiscuous, I was a senior in high school. I was dating a boy again after my first girlfriend and I broke up. Things were going really well…until he suggested we have a threesome with another girl. I was stunned, to say the least. As a 17-year-old girl, the thought of multiple partners simultaneously or sharing my partner was horrifying. I was nowhere near secure enough with myself, much less my relationship, to even consider sharing in the bedroom. He still didn’t understand, even after I explained that I was monogamous and didn’t want another sex partner while I was with him. He got upset and, as an insecure teenager, I caved just to make him happy. Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last very long.

I thought things would change when I became an adult. Maybe I thought entering adulthood would break through some magical barrier of ignorance, finally completing a quest for knowledge. I was very wrong. The stereotyping not only continued, it got even worse. Male friends would text me, “Hey,” and jump directly into a request for me to join them and their girlfriend for a threesome. I couldn’t understand why someone would be so rude. It was almost as if they didn’t view me as a person, but as some mythical beast who was controlled by her lust and desire for both men and women. For a while I thought it was just how men thought, unrealistic expectations formulated by incorrect portrayals on Pornhub. But female friends would request my “services” as well. Even one of my best friends once asked me to be her “first girl on girl experience.” I remember her whispering excitedly to me, her husband in the other room, “It’s not cheating if it’s with a girl. I just don’t want him to know ‘cause he would get jealous.” Even a woman I respected for her intellect was still bound by the ignorance that infidelity was only such if it was with a member of the opposite sex.

As I would come to find out, that perception was not only carried by heterosexual people. Lesbians to this day still shy away from me, afraid I would cheat on them with or leave them for a man. Stephanie was a woman I dated during my last year in the Army. It took months for her to allow herself to get close to me; for months I had to prove myself to her while allowing myself to get yanked around and treated like a booty call. She said she couldn’t trust someone who “couldn’t make up their mind whether they liked girls or boys.” I couldn’t help that I was attracted to both genders any more than she could help that she liked women. After months of chasing her and wooing her, proving my worth to her and losing sight of much of my own self-worth in the process, she finally agreed to date me exclusively and monogamously. But within weeks she became clingy, whining anytime I spent time with any of my male friends, casting jealous glances whenever a male would talk to me. She was still terrified I would choose a guy over her, not even stopping to think that I, or any lesbian for that matter, could leave her for another female. It was again as if being bisexual made me slave to my attractions.

Reaching adulthood was not the crossing over to a realm of tolerance and understanding as I had hoped. If anything, it was walking through a beautifully ornate door into a tiny narrow-minded box, a box so many people had crammed themselves into, unwilling to step outside to even talk to each other and ask questions to learn about one another. Instead they are content to stand, flesh to flesh, without ever looking past their own noses. In the process of isolating and protecting themselves, they choose to see an entire group of people as animals, incapable of anything but following their own most basic desires. Being bisexual doesn’t make me any less capable of loving someone with my entire heart, any more than being heterosexual makes someone less likely to leave someone for another person of that same gender. Just because I am attracted to both men and women doesn’t mean that I need both at the same time any more than a straight woman who likes blonde and brunette men needs one of each at the same time. People like stereotypes. They are comfortable labels that don’t require any actual work, thought, or intimacy, but that is how you miss out on some amazing people, with hearts of gold and kind souls.