Before the American LBGT scene agreed to pretend that we were Born This Way, to make for more compelling TIME cover stories or whatever, my friends and I would try to find out who had been gay the longest. Who knew first? Did you date boys, or just ignore them altogether? Did you play a team sport? Were you in your high school’s GSA? Or were you prom queen, were you the one who told your friends before you left for all women’s college “don’t worry, I love dick too much to turn!”? Who had been gay the longest was a way of finding out, Who has had the most time to love herself again and who hasn’t even begun to heal? We were assessing each other’s weaknesses.

I should have done well at this game. I had desired women for a long time. When I was four, my parents enrolled me in ballet classes because my lack of balance was giving me perpetually skinned knees. My teachers and the older dancers, in leotards, with no breasts and ropey thighs, moved like gods, like rivers made flesh. They had made their bodies, made themselves almost alien, and their aloofness was celebrated. They were contained within themselves, under control, in a way I envied. The coldness, and the power, in their forms, transfixed me. If I could have something in common with them, it was my honor. If I could get nearer to grace, I would.

But I also knew, before I ever learned the word “queer,” that I loved women, but I also wanted boys. They were two distinct desires; I have never wanted the same things from women as from men, in friendship or love or sex. Since they operated in my heart like two completely separate concepts, I could never equate them, never see them how they are seen or named by other people: bisexual.

In 201o, the CDC performed the largest study of intimate partner violence ever. Among the findings: In every measurable way, bisexual women experience more abuse than any other self-identified sexual orientation group. More than 61 percent of bisexual women had experienced “rape, physical violence or stalking by a partner.” About 46 percent reported having been raped and 57.4 percent of that group said they had experienced “after effects like missing work or symptoms post-traumatic stress.” A 2011 study found that bisexual women are more than twice as likely to suffer from depression, to binge drink or abuse drugs. The study’s author pensively suggested that, “I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about bisexuals…their risk has to do with stigma.”

When I went to college — your run-of-the-mill Northeastern all women’s liberal arts college, populated by many androgynous photogenic lesbians from Westchester — I was struck not only by how beautiful and tall they all seemed, but how wedded they were to the idea of themselves as “a person who fucks women.” Fucking was very fundamental to that community; the gossip was always about who fucked who how last night at that party in the basement of Thoreau House. Virgins were not only widely mocked, but pitied. The sooner you got good at gay sex, the sooner you could get down to the real business of being gay: shit-talking about people you had sex with.

So at eighteen, all my friends were lesbians, but I was still insisting that I was straight, or “maybe” bisexual (despite the fact that my best friend told me in our freshman year that “bisexuals are just lesbians with commitment issues”). And I was constantly having to reassure my boyfriend at the time that I was the Most Hetero, despite the fact that I couldn’t stop flirting with this one girl even when we were right in front of him. While all my friends were fucking or gossiping, I felt like I was getting further and further away from ever being able to acknowledge my desire for women or claim it as part of my identity. Constantly reassuring everyone around me that my straight identity was stable, and not at all in question, was taking a toll — because I knew deep down I would never “pick a side.”

Even after I crawled out of my hetero relationship and got a chance to explore my attraction to women, I felt like I would never be Good at Being Gay. If I had cast off the boyfriend before classes ever started, I used to think, if I’d gotten the ill-advised mohawk in my first semester instead of my second, I would be popular and good at sex with girls by now. While I was dating a dude, everyone had polished up their Professional Queer Relationship and Sex Skills, and I had been left behind. Added to that was the murmurs you heard from girls who were “really gay” — bisexuals will leave you for a man, bisexuals are pillow princesses, they’re just straight girls trying to fit in. It was useless to think I could ever be gay, if I had no local history of Fucking and if lesbians didn’t want me on their team. The necessity of proving “how gay” I was, recounting every impulse and every warning sign, was daunting, but I kept waiting to be welcome or at least acknowledged. Put me in, coach!

My undergraduate advisor, a dead ringer for a more cheerful Philip Seymour Hoffman (R.I.P.), taught a class in queer history. When he challenged the class about sexuality — “What is queer? You are queer: what is it to you? An umbrella? A label? A noun? No! Queerness is the essence of resistance to power, it is always a slippery verb, you can never pin it down” — it felt like the only true politics I had ever seen. He would lecture on the polymorphously perverse, on Stonewall and memory, on Herculine Barbin; he would explain how to see power wind itself around culture and squeeze like a boa, producing the most unusual bloodsplatter. I fell in love with QUEER, with the nuclear-family-threatening lavender menace — but also with the questions, with the ability to say hey, look at me, I’m beyond labels, beyond gender, beyond this fucking place.

When I was a junior and starting to flirt with the notion of a career in professional politics, I was assigned a research paper: to detail the donations, budget and spending of any American LBGT organization. What are these groups that claim to represent us politically actually doing? It appealed to me immensely. I researched and gave my presentation on the Log Cabin Republicans. After, Professor laughed, said to the class, “You can always count on Sarah to be keeping an eye on our enemies.” This was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me, and the only time I felt like I belonged to my school’s gay scene. You’re one of us and you can play defense this quarter. Thanks for putting me in, coach.

My identity has always been theorized, examined, denied. pulled apart — reduced to numbers, trial periods, data. I have been asked the old classic — “How do lesbians have sex?” — by straight guys on the same day I’ve been smirked at by hipster lesbians for being into boys. I am tired of the fucking Kinsey scale.

I exist in this uncertain space now: Have I ever been queer, if the recognition of my queerness has never existed to me in a practical way? Does queer theory help or hinder me? Will I be thrown out for claiming a history in which my identity is rarely named? Were there bisexuals at Compton’s Cafeteria? I am in a relationship with a bisexual man, would we still have a gay wedding? If I am unseen, do I exist? If I am not ashamed of who I want, then do I need the support of others? If calling myself “queer” names my uncertainty adequately enough, then why do I keep trying to find a better, truer label? If my peers don’t recognize me, are they even my peers? Why do I think I need a community? What the fuck is a community?

I am 23 and I live so physically far away from that school that it feels like a dream. I have been in love and I have been loved and held when I needed to be. I am tired of keeping an eye on my enemies and the enemies of my enemies, tired of hoping to be recruited. I have always lived in this uncertainty. I might as well make it my home.