It's Not Just A Phase
The world wants bisexual people to "pick a side." But we're here, we're queer - get over it.
This story contains sexual content and material that may not be suitable for younger readers. Reader discretion is advised.
“Can you just tell me now instead of in five years if you’re a lesbian? I don’t wanna waste my time if this isn’t just a phase.”
My ex sat on the vintage green velvet sofa I’d bought for $100 from a gay family when they were moving out of our building. I was across from him on the orange IKEA sectional that was one of the first things we bought together for our first apartment in Toronto. It felt like a full-circle moment because I love shit like that. It wasn’t long into the coronavirus pandemic and we were spending an inordinate amount of time together, like the rest of the world.
I wish I could say that comment was the beginning of the end, but I think the end started a long time before and had been drawn out to an excruciating degree. We were having another conversation about opening up our relationship. It started a few years before when endometriosis destroyed my sexuality and I was desperate for him to get his dick wet so I could stop feeling guilty about the excruciating pain I felt when he was inside me. Turned out that pain wasn’t just physical, but that’s another story.
“I’m not a lesbian,” I said, desperately wishing at that moment that I was. “I’m bisexual. You know this.” He’d seen it first hand. More than once.
“Yeah, but why can’t you just be the kind of bisexual that wants to have threesomes? Like we used to? That’s hot. And fun. This is just a lot of talking.”
I knew then that no matter how many conversations we had, how many times I tried to say that this had the potential to be amazing for both of us, that he would never see my bisexuality beyond a sexual kink. It took a few more months of early pandemic living to fully fall apart but when we did, we destructed.
My queerness was starting to grow so big it was like every time I sloughed off dead skin the fresh layer underneath exposed the membrane of a new, more queer self that I was eager to explore.
It looked like I would be exploring on my own.
~
I’ve known I’m bisexual for as long as I can remember. From pussy-scented play dough revelations to slumber party first kisses to voyeuristic kinks (stay tuned), it’s been a long road of figuring out who I am, sorting through the influences of Catholicism and heteronormativity bearing down on my prefrontal cortex telling me what I should be.
Growing up, even before I swapped spit with friends at a 13th birthday party on the floor of a suite at the Holiday Inn, I was always fascinated by bodies. Bodies with boobs in particular, but really all bodies. I’d been well-educated on the basics of heterosexual sex for the sake of reproduction when my little brother was born, and we had a veritable library of any book you could possibly imagine, including The Bare Naked Book. (A must-have for all kiddos, in my humble opinion).
I’d spend hours drawing pictures of naked people, making sure all of their parts were where they needed to be, according to my books. One house my family lived in when I was a kid had a long driveway that spanned the full length of the yard and wrapped around the house culminating in a basketball hoop. One day I was playing with sidewalk chalk with some neighbourhood kids and drew two giant naked bodies — one with boobies and labia, one with a penis, both with generous bush — using the opportunity to teach my friends about anatomy and sex. My mum came running out, furious that I’d drawn what I thought were anatomically accurate nudes at the end of the driveway where everyone could see them. She scolded me, saying I should know better especially around the younger kids, and made me draw clothes over the carefully delineated bodies.
At sleepovers growing up and in the change room of my all-girls Catholic high school, I shamed myself constantly for peeking at the bodies of my friends and peers as they were getting changed. My God-fearing sensibilities told me I was a delinquent, a freak, sick (not a lie), so I kept it all to myself and started packing it away in the little Box of Shame I’d created to store all of the twisted things I knew I couldn’t share anywhere else.
Also in the Box of Shame was a Far Side cartoon of Gumby being stretched on an old-school torture rack (the heat that exploded inside me when I realized I wanted someone to do that to me was far too hot for how young I was); masturbating with the blue plastic handle of my hairbrush in front of the mirror; all of the queer crushes I had on friends and acquaintances over the years; the erotica website I discovered as a teen that inspired many a pillow-grinding orgasm; my desire to be treated like a dirty little slut by someone I trust; the fact that I love to watch other people have sex, and be watched having sex; my attraction to more than one gender, and lots more.
And so I’d add things to the Box over the years and peek inside whenever I felt the urge. Some people were okay with the stuff that was in the Box, and some really were not. I learned a lot about who I was over years and years of revisiting this ever-growing box of things I learned were shameful growing up.
~
“I’ve come to realize that I’m a bisexual person in a heterosexual relationship,” my friend Laura said to me one sunny day in the park before COVID was a word on people’s lips.
I give her a lot of credit for helping me embrace my Queer Journey and Fucking the Patriarchy. On the first day of classes at Humber College, where we met, she walked in saying, “I unfollowed every cis white man on Twitter today and my feed feels so cleansed.” And I immediately needed to be her friend.
We were smoking weed and talking about sexuality and planning a podcast we never started and when she said that about being bi, something clicked.
Of course.
Being in a heterosexual relationship doesn’t make you any less bi. It’s not about who you sleep with, but who and how you love, how you exist in the world, and how you connect with others.
I think that’s what really shifted my perspective of how I can exist as a queer person in a world that wants to pathologize not only my queerness but my health, my sexuality, who I love, who I fuck, what I share, who I date, what I wear. Until 2020, I’d been in long-term monogamous relationships with cis men since I was 16 years old. That’s more than half my life spent searching for The One and trying to fulfill the romantic fantasies and fairy tales we grew up inundated with. I could never figure out why, every time it looked like I was getting closer to The Ultimate Goal (marriage, babies, etc.) I freaked out and sabotaged things either by cheating or ending relationships I knew were looking for things that I didn’t want.
Fear is a powerful motivator. And a lot of people would call that a fear of commitment, but I see it more as a fear of falling into a pre-prescribed life without taking a second to check myself to see if that’s in fact what I actually want. Let me tell you, ethical non-monogamy is not for the faint of heart.
~
The first time I felt safe enough in a hetero partnership to explore my bisexuality, it felt like the freedom I could only imagine. I was at a friend’s bachelorette party in Charlottetown and we were hitting the town Peake’s Quay-style. Peake’s was a seasonal restaurant & bar on the waterfront that turned into the scene of drunken debauchery and sticky floors after dark.
She was a queer friend of my friends I’d been crushing on for a while, tall and lean with dark hair cut short on one side and nicely emo-long on the other. There might have been purple in there, who’s to say. Her face was slender and her smile infectious — I wanted so badly to kiss her. She was wearing something black and badass, a style I secretly coveted but didn’t have the guts to emulate. This was during my fashion blogger phase so my hair was fire-engine red and I was probably wearing something red or leopard print, as I did.
We’d had drinks with friends and everyone made their way down to the bar with its wooden deck that held the dance floor for countless summers over the years. Everyone was tipsy, as you kinda have to be to end up at Peake’s and we infiltrated the bar, mostly the dance floor. I noticed that she was getting closer to me and my heart fluttered (in hindsight it could’ve been my congenital heart condition, but I stand by the fact that it was for her).
We danced closer and closer, the layers of sweat, alcohol, and future hangover clinging to our skin in the muggy summer air like flies to flypaper.
This is it, I thought. We’re gonna make out.
And we did.
Our faces got closer, she smiled that gorgeous if slightly tipsy smile, and our smiles came together as we wrapped our drink-holding arms around each other.
Was I having my sexual debut as a queer person during a drunken Peake’s dance floor makeout? Oh god.
“We should get out of here,” she breathed into my ear, sending shivers down my right side.
Yes, we should. My boyfriend at the time was also about town that night but headed home earlier than I did. I excused myself to the bathroom and fired off a series of texts:
omfg I just made out with H!!!!
are you home? can i bring her home with me?
is that weird?
omg
omg babe that’s amazing!
yeah if you guys wanna come back to the house, do it. i’m on my way home now, i’m starving.
is it ok if i’m home? i can hide in the bedroom!
lolllll u don’t have to hide baby
we’ll prob just have a drink. love you, see you soon
We stumbled our way back to my place and fumbled our way up the stairs. He was in the kitchen making post-bar ramen when she and I tumbled onto the couch and floor all tangled limbs and kissing lips, heavy breathing and heavier petting. As far as I remember he sat there eating noodles while she and I consumed each other on our well-loved kijiji sofa.
I pulled her pants down over her knees and dropped them to the floor.
There it was. Pussy. And it was about to be all over my face. The anticipation pooled in my panties and I dove in like a parched wanderer in the desert discovering water.
I’m sure I was terrible, but she was stunning, and I loved every minute of it. I loved the fresh sweat smell, the clamminess of her skin from our walk home, the feel of her thighs on either side of my head, the way she responded to my touch. I disappeared into her and I didn’t want to come up for air.
I did, of course, because we were wasted and got lost in a fit of the giggles when we realized that he was minding his own business in the kitchen not ten feet away from our tangled half-nude forms.
“So, the bachelorette was fun?” He grinned. Everybody laughed. Merriment ensued. And I was hooked.
~
Sure, my first (and subsequent) experiences with pussy were amazing and eye-opening and only made me want more — but they don’t make me bisexual. Just like sucking cock doesn’t make me straight.
But it can be hard to straddle the hetero and queer dating worlds like Jean Claude Van Damme’s epic Volvo truck stunt, especially if you don’t have Jean Claude Van Damme-level balance and control over your body.
Straight people want you to fulfill a threesome kink, or they’re waiting for you to “tell them you’re a lesbian,” and queer communities are waiting on bated breath for you to see the light and stop sleeping with cis men. I like dick, okay! Especially when I don’t have to be romantic towards it or it towards me. We’ve got a great system going, romance only fucks shit up (lol my damage is showing).
I also happen to like pussy, a lot. And I like the feeling I get when I hold a hand that’s softer than mine, or feel lips with no beard or stubble against my cheek, or have long hair to run my fingers through. It’s not all about sex - it’s about connecting with people who want to do beautiful and weird and wonderful things and doing those things together.
Bisexual erasure and biphobia are very fucking real, in queer and straight communities. The Box of Shame is proof of that - a space created for me to exist as myself when the world, religion, society, my family, my friends, all wanted me to exist in another space. A more acceptable space.
I don’t want to exist in a liminal space somewhere between straight and queer that tells me my bisexuality isn’t valid or that waits for me to decide I’m a lesbian or to ‘go back to guys.’ Bi people are all around you, trying to force themselves into more palatable versions in hetero and queer relationships all over the place. We don’t exist to fulfill a fantasy or a fetish, for your curiosity, and we don’t exist for the male gaze.
It’s not just a phase. It’s who we are. Let us fucking live.
“I don’t want to exist in a liminal space somewhere between straight and queer that tells me my bisexuality isn’t valid or that waits for me to decide I’m a lesbian or to ‘go back to guys” YES YES YES.
this was such a great read, saw my own story through yours 💗