All Bi Myself
By Jessica Williams
Aged nineteen now, it doesn’t feel like it was long ago that I came out for the first time at age fourteen. Some people have always been aware of their sexuality, I wasn’t. It could be both societal norms and my own stupidity that took me so long to realise I was bisexual. Finding out for me was like picking up so many pieces and not knowing they were for a jigsaw puzzle until they started coming together and the final picture spelt out ‘bisexual’.
Growing up, the phrase ‘girl crush’ was one I heard a lot growing up when girls would talk about the celebrities they loved so much and so any attraction I felt to a female celebrity, I immediately assumed was the same case. A friend of mine had a poster of her ‘girl crush’ Jessie J in her room for years and it was about three years later in a conversation about Selena Gomez that I said I had a poster of her in my room, the same way my friend had one of her ‘girl crush’. It was the look of confusion that passed on her face when I said I used to kiss her poster, on the cheek, before I’d sleep that I realised this wasn’t a normal thing all straight girls did. Even years after, that memory passed by for the first time in a while and it hit me that ‘this is a gay thing’.
One of the most unexpected occurrences I discovered after coming out was that most of the biphobia I personally experienced came from gay friends. It hurt hearing someone invalidate me for my bisexuality, saying I ‘didn’t know real struggle’ because I could ‘pass off as straight’ so I didn’t face any discrimination when in fact the opposite was true. If anything, it seemed to double. One of my closest gay friends was constantly telling me that I’m ’on my way to full on lesbian’ or that my ‘closet door is open, I just need to step out’, probably because he has no attraction to women at all and couldn’t understand how I could like both.
One fear of mine was how I would be perceived if I entered a m|w relationship because this seems to erase my bisexuality. Just because I enter a relationship doesn’t mean my attraction to men and women just disappears and all my experiences are forgotten. I’m still bisexual. It’s like saying if you’re single, you’re aromantic or if you aren’t having sex in this moment, you are asexual. Are you a dancer? Not if you’re sat down! It’s like how Billie Joe Armstrong and P!nk are both openly bisexual celebrities but no one seems to acknowledge that because they both married into a m|w relationship.
My biggest peeve of all is the word ‘greedy’. I hate the assumption that dating a bisexual means they are likely to cheat on you. Dating a bisexual works like any monogamous relationship so if you’re gay and entering a relationship, would you ditch your significant other for someone else? No! You make a commitment to one person. That’s the case for bisexuals as well. This mindset is so deeply rooted for people about bisexuals that they refuse to enter relationships with them and then invalidate you as a member of the lgbtq+ community because you’re not dating someone of the same sex.
