I used to see bisexuality as the clash of ‘two sexualities’. I was always balanced between two parts of my sexuality, my attraction toward men and my attraction toward women. It is this duality that I have, not quite being gay and not quite being straight, yet somehow viewing myself as both. It is not uncommon for me to be outed as bisexual only for someone to ask ‘do you prefer dick or pussy?’ I cannot get angry at this question as I have been asking myself the same question for years. Here, I will to attempt to resolve this dualism of bisexuality.

As a child growing up in a small, north-eastern English town, I had very little experience or knowledge of bisexuality. It is a town that was devastated by the British shift from an industrial to a service based economy, leaving a working-class community in the lurch as their main river of income was dammed. This contributed to the economic downturn of the town, but there was little done on behalf of the government to invest in the north-east. This lack of investment can be seen in the school system. My secondary school was one of the worst in the UK at the time, with a pass rate at GCSE level beneath 50%. In addition, a local school from a particularly poor area was closed down and those pupils were shared between the remaining schools. As could be expected, this was not the most welcoming environment for LGBT students — homophobia was rife, gay was an insult, and bisexuality bordered on the unknown. It goes without saying that we had no classes on the topic of sexuality or anything remotely LGBT. As a young person questioning their sexuality in the mid-2000s, I had to turn to the internet for help but that just confused the matter even more.

The duality in enjoying both straight and gay porn felt unnatural to me. Even as a teenager, I didn’t hate myself for having gay tendencies, but I was confused as to why they persisted with my straight inclinations. This led to the laughable scenario of completing an ‘am I gay quiz’ immediately and perfectly straight faced after consuming gay porn. Somehow, probably from one of these quizzes, I first considered the possibility of bisexuality. Yet I was never happy with this answer, I had to make a decision, believing that I could not be both gay and straight at the same time. Due to my school and hometown, I did not know of any bisexuals or even any gay people with whom I could share my confusion. That being said, I don’t believe I would have done so even if I had the chance. The evolutionary tactic I adopted was similar to that of the chameleon, to blend into the scenery to survive. To ask about bisexuality or homosexuality in my school would be a mistake akin to a chameleon turning pink in a rainforest. My resources for self-identification were the odd quiz that would label me as X% gay -X% straight, and the amount of gay/straight porn I had watched that week.

While I can only speak for myself, there are days when I feel more ‘gay’ than other days. If we imagine a scale with the far left being gay; the far right being straight; and the centre being bisexual, I am rarely (if at all) directly on that centre value. Does one have to always have the same, equal attraction to men and women in order to be bisexual? Or is my sexuality a seesaw that perpetually swings from kinda gay to kinda straight with maddening inconsistency?

This is an issue with framing, rather than genuine ‘movement’ in my sexuality. I try to frame myself as being more straight or more gay, when both are absolute values that I cannot hold simultaneously.

This brings us back to the introduction. When it is discovered that I am bisexual I am often asked whether I prefer men or women, my stock response is that ‘it depends on the person’, but they never find that an acceptable answer. This brings us back to my concern as a teenager that I would have to ‘choose’ to be gay or straight at some point.

It is this on this duality that I am endlessly walking, the pull between straight and gay.

This is how it is framed, but not how it is. It is a failure of language. Bisexuality is attraction without gendered restraint, there is no need or capacity to choose between two other sexualities. With regard to the bisexual seesaw, a person is bisexual if their attraction does not discriminate on gender. There is no measure of attraction. You do not lose your bisexual privileges if you think about women more than men sometimes. The simple attraction to both is what makes bisexuality.

While bisexuality is not a vital part of my identity, its implications and difficult parameters have had an impact upon how I view myself.

My understanding has always been that I am in the middle of two conflicting states of affairs, gay and straight, yet only now have I reached a stage of understanding in which I view myself as neither.

The point of this article is to show, perhaps obviously, that bisexuality does not rest in-between straight and gay, but exists as its own identity. This article might be pointless in the grand scheme of LGBT politics, it is a clarification based on semantics; an article that does not demand recognition, nor highlight injustice. Yet, as these thoughts run through my head, I see a fellow bisexual claiming to be 50% gay.