Imagine waking up everyday and knowing who you are is a joke to society. Imagine being told your sexuality wasn’t an actual sexuality and if you’re a man you’re just gay, and if you’re a woman you just want attention from men. Imagine being told by your own community that you need to pick a side and that you are only saying you are bisexual to avoid the scrutiny that comes with being “full on gay”. Imagine feeling like you have no place anywhere to be yourself. This is how it feels to be bisexual in today’s society. This is how it feels to be attracted to two (or more) genders, and this needs to stop.
Since I have been alive I have always known I was attracted to both. When I was a kid I had crushes on boys and girls on the playground and in school. When I would watch movies with an attractive lead couple I would think about how I wouldn’t mind getting with both of them (hello Mr. and Mrs. Smith). When I would watch steamy music videos on MTV (back when they actually showed music videos) I couldn’t help but find myself realizing I wanted to get with Britney Spears and the guy she was dancing on, and it has always been this way for me. There is a myth that bisexuality is a choice, because normally people who say they are bisexual are people in their late teens or they are adults and never children, but the truth is we just didn’t know what to call it or how to express ourselves. That doesn’t mean we chose our sexuality. Seeing is how there is already little gay representation anywhere there is even LESS bisexual representation, and when you never see yourself anywhere in or on anything other than porn you cant help but wonder what you are and to be confused until you are old enough to know what exactly bisexual means.
The most common argument bisexual people will hear is how their sexuality isn’t valid because either they are just gay because no way a man can do something with a man and still be attracted to women, or they just want male attention and they just want to have threesomes, but if you notice a common factor in all of these statements it all comes back to men, and things centered around men. Regardless of whatever progress we think we are making towards understanding LGBT+ people the politics behind how bisexual people are viewed is drenched in patriarchy and centered around our sexuality being either centered around men or for women being something that is for their viewing please and sexual fantasy. This thought process is dated and we need to move past telling people what their sexuality is, because its amazing if you accuse a heterosexual person of being gay they will say, “You cant tell me what I am attracted to,” yet will do exactly that with bisexual people.
In closing I just want to say this: sexuality is fluid. There is a whole Kinsey scale that explains how sexuality isn’t just black and white, and with some more studying who knows? You might find yourself somewhere on that scale that you could have never imagined you were. As a bisexual person I can tell you, I have tried just dating women and still felt myself attracted to and wanting to be with a man, and I have tried just dating men and still yearned to be with a woman and found myself still able to romantically and emotionally connect with them exactly like men. How about instead of trying to police people’s sexuality we try and understand that nobody can determine who you are. How you are wired on the inside and what you find physically, emotionally, and sexually attractive can never be controlled or changed by an outside source unless you let it. The sooner we understand this the easier we will grasp bisexuality. The pain of knowing that nobody in or out of your own community truly respects you or views who you are as legitimate because of how they feel cuts deeper than any knife, and all bisexual people want you to do is recognize that our sexuality is real, our sexuality is valid, and your feelings about our sexuality will never change what we are attracted to.
