I realized I was bisexual when I was 20 years old. I was at a strip club.
I’d been married to my (male) high school sweetheart for about a year, and we were at a strip club with friends. This was the era of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” when we assumed most women my age would go through a college “bicurious” phase before settling down with the right guy. The woman in the couple we were with was in that phase, and I was very… intrigued by her. I thought I was probably going through that phase, too.
At the strip club, my husband won a lap dance in a raffle. (We were too broke to ever buy one, but it was a week night, and we got a raffle ticket for like $5. Is this a Wisconsin thing??) The dancer invited me to join them, which seemed exciting and, in retrospect, probably made her feel safer. I’ll spare the details; I thought it was cool at the time, but it’s pretty rude, in retrospect, to have a stranger dance at you in their underwear for tips. I left, like every dumb guy I’ve ever heard talk about strip clubs, thinking she probably uniquely liked dancing for me. I’m sure it was just as stupid to dance for me as it was for any guy, but I do hope she felt comfortable. I didn’t touch her.
I was attracted to her, though. Not in a lasting way. But it struck me that there was no distinction between the desire I felt for this woman and the desire I felt for my husband. That’s how I knew.
It feels silly to describe this today. I get the sense that young people today would be unsurprised to be attracted to people of all genders. That many of them grow up knowing gender and sexuality are fluid and varied and not at all binary. The celebrities they follow are pansexual and gender-fluid and polyamorous and don’t find it pertinent to use any of those labels, least of all in the press. They just exist as they are and they date who they want to date.
But when I was 20 in 2006, my world was a wildly different place for a queer kid. (We weren’t using the word “queer” in a positive way most of the time, first of all.) Until that intriguing friend of mine starting musing she might be bisexual, I hadn’t considered that was a thing a person could be.
I might have heard the word bisexual once or twice. I think there was a girl in our high school who was out as bi, but no one believed her when she said it. That’s a lasting problem for us; people assume we’re either lying to attract straight men or denying being gay. Teenagers in the early aughts were real jerks about that. There was no bisexual representation on TV or in the movies we watched. On Friends, Carol left Ross and became a lesbian. In Chasing Amy, the lesbian Alyssa was accused of being a fraud when it was revealed she’d had sex with men. My small-town high school had two out gay kids — a femme gay boy and an androgynous lesbian who were best friends and band geeks. My conservative family members weren’t explicitly anti-LGBTQ+; they just didn’t acknowledge queerness at all. As far as I could tell, being gay was fine, but not something that was going to happen to me.
I had crushes on boys just like my other friends did, so I figured I was straight and didn’t question my identity throughout my entire adolescence. I definitely had a crush on my best friend in middle school, but I didn’t know that’s what it was. I was always uncomfortable with (read: jealous of) her boyfriends. She came out as bisexual herself during our senior year of high school, long after we’d drifted apart. I’ll always be sad for us; we could have been little 12-year-old girlfriends learning to be ourselves at the age when you learn to be yourself. But we spent those years learning to be something else and had to start over when we were older.
It didn’t sink in for me that a person could be bisexual until I was 20, and my intriguing friend told us she was. I don’t know why then. Maybe we’d just made it far enough as a culture, with “I Kissed a Girl” and But I’m a Cheerleader and David Bowie and a lot of tumblr blogs. Maybe the water I swam in had just shifted enough that I finally understood bisexuality as an identity and not a party trick. She told me she was bisexual, I believed her, and I immediately thought I might be, too.
Bisexuality remained sort of a party trick for me throughout my early 20s, though. In my marriage, what I thought was acceptance was, in retrospect, fetishization. I became a party trick, a novelty for my mostly male friend group to gawk over. I didn’t fully integrate bisexuality as an identity; it was a sexual quirk. Not something to share in polite company.
My marriage ended when I was 25, and I started hanging around people who affirmed my identity. I was finally able to internalize that affirmation, too. A few years later, Obergefell at the Supreme Court made marriage equality the law of the land in the U.S., and suddenly (briefly), an LGBTQ+ identity no longer relegated you to second-class citizenship. I wasn’t anywhere near wanting to marry the women I’d dated to that point, and I’ve been in a long-term relationship with a man ever since, so I can only understand a fraction of what that decision meant for LGBTQ+ folks at large. For me, it meant my identity was simply — miraculously — something a person could be. That was pretty earth-shattering.
If I were to come out fresh today, I’d probably call myself pansexual or maybe queer or, like the crystal-cool Gen Z celebrities, not claim any label at all. Calling myself “bisexual” in leftist queer circles can feel like being the old lady who still says “colored people” and doesn’t notice everyone looking at her funny. I know there are more than two genders, and my attraction doesn’t exclude trans and nonbinary people. The “bi” in bisexual irks people, and I understand why, linguistically. And I do appreciate an opportunity to learn from people younger than me whose worldviews aren’t fogged by the baggage I’ve had to overcome.
But I still hold onto the “bisexual” label, along with a broader “queer” identity. Because it took me 20 years to claim that label in the first place. It was another 10 years before I said the word to my mother. Another five before I could comfortably say it out loud in mixed company — and still not just anywhere. Erasure and biphobia have made me feel like a fraud, a slut, a liar and a tease, and I’ve only in recent years begun to feel belonging in the LGBTQ+ community. I’ve spent my second 20 years understanding what “bisexual” means to me — so I’m not giving up the label too easily.
Your turn!
How is your identity impacted by the era and culture you grew up in? How might you see yourself differently if you’d grown up in a different time?
I knew I was bisexual at a very early age but as a teenager in the 1980s it was definitely something I hid. In the 1990s, I was more open but gay women were very cautious about bi women. That party trick idea you mentioned hits home.
I have had great loves of both sexes but I think if I had been born later maybe I would have had more serious relationships with women. I may also have explored my gender identity in a different way. Now in my late 50s, I feel a bit post gender and it’s lovely.
I appreciate your vulnerability in telling your story, Dana. It's good to hear your experience of the world as the person you are - whole and true and wonderful.