When Ariana Grande , pop-princess du jour, recently said in a tweet about labelling her sexuality, that she (hasn’t) before and still (doesn’t) feel the need to now,” the backlash was swift and overwhelming. Grande’s declaration was met with an understandable, if uncomfortable cynicism from some LGBT people who have routinely had their queerness trivialised and sensationalised for headline fodder.

Pansexuality, sexual fluidity, and non-monosexual identities more generally, appear to be having a moment in the pop-culture sun. MTV is relaunching it's infamous dating show “Are You The One?” with its “ first sexually fluid cast” , while Chris from Christine and the Queens , Miley Cyrus , Munroe Bergdorf , Joe Lycett, Janelle Monáe , Ezra Miller and Brendan Urie are just a small number of a growing pantheon who explicitly refuse to subscribe to traditional binaries of sexual identity, opting for an approach that is less rigid, one in which gender is not the biggest consideration in the selection of (a) potential romantic partner(s).

Ariana will never publicly come out and say she’s bisexual because that would require her actually being attracted to women(not just kissing for fun like every straight girl) she’ll say sexuality is fluid while still only dating men so she doesn’t get accused of queerbaiting pic.twitter.com/23yPVfSMbg

Some read these celeb statements as queerbaiting exploitation. From Harry Styles’ “we’re all a little bit gay”, to Andrew Garfield’s “(I’m) a gay man right now just without the physical act” – large swathes of the LGBT community see these sentiments as a way of avoiding being explicitly queer. It allows celebs to occupy that liminal space – a winking, plausibly deniable queerness – by using the sexuality spectrum’s haziness and flexibility to benefit from being perceived as queer without actually having to be, or in some cases, maybe, to lie about being queer. A cynical tactic for securing the pink pound and the support of LGBT fans without actually committing to identifying as one of us. They can reap the perceived ‘edginess’ or ‘intrigue’ of queerness in an age of infinite identities, without the shitstorm that comes with publicly occupying them.

However, the sexuality of Ariana Grande and other stars that might evade labels, is not ours to decide. This kind of queer gatekeeping often has messy consequences such as forcing stars like Rita Ora, to out themselves to ameliorate a barrage of criticism or preventing others from being candid about their sexuality in the first place. Chlöe Grace Moretz found herself accused of contributing to queer erasure in cinema for being a purportedly straight actor playing gay, only to dismantle all presumptions when a paparazzi long-focus lens captured her kissing a female model months later. It might seem on the face of it, that stars like Grande and Garfield want to have their queer cake and eat it too, but true queer liberation means that we believe everyone when they speak about and self-determine their sexuality – even in the vaguest of terms – whether or not they have the experience, public performance or ‘credentials’ to underscore their identity.

We believe them because we have an obligation to do so. To deny them the words and agency to determine their sexuality is to deny it to all queer people.

For the longest time, gayness is a label that has been persistently applied to me, and one that I’ve passively accepted, cringing internally every time someone referred to me as a gay man but making minimal protestations, despite the fact that it no longer aligned with how I understood or experienced my own sexuality. I’ve spent the last few years reluctant to talk about my experience of sexual fluidity for manifold fears and conflicts. The embarrassment of having spent so long being one thing in public consciousness then reneging; the disbelief I faced on the occasions when I alluded to it or referred to it explicitly; the self-doubt; the allegations that it was all in the name of attention; my fear that it would unsettle long resolved issues with people who had long accepted me, because they thought I was ‘born this way’ and my sexuality was an unchangeable fact of who I am; that I might change my mind and be left to come out as something a third, maybe fourth time. And perhaps, most terrifyingly of all, that I’d receive a flurry of invasive questions about who I liked to fuck, and how I liked to fuck, and what kind of porn I wanted to watch and who I wanted to love and marry, and all manner of things that I did not, and perhaps still could not, answer.

“For the longest time, gayness is a label that has been persistently applied to me, and one that I’ve passively accepted, cringing internally every time someone referred to me as a gay man but making minimal protestations”

When I spoke with Jake, a writer who identifies as queer and non-binary, they reiterated to me parallel experiences on their journey from identifying as gay towards sexual fluidity: “Identifying as ‘gay’ just cut out a lot of tricky conversations around gender and sexuality which I honestly just didn’t want to have. It’s so exhausting to be constantly politicised!”

The mindset shift for Jake came when they had a big breakup and found themselves in London surrounded by a network of trans/gender non-conforming people: “I guess it prompted me to reconsider the way that I define myself...gay is way too linear,” they explained. “I’ve had sexual experiences that I’ve really enjoyed with people who identify across the entire spectrum of gender and sexuality, and honestly the only thing that attracts me to a person now is connection and intimacy. That’s why I identify as queer now, because to me it feels really restricting to say only want to date men.”

Emmanuelle, a producer and DJ friend, describes her journey with sexuality and sexual fluidity as a “very confusing, one she’s finally beginning to understand the cyclical nature of.” She’d previously identified as straight, then bi, before identifying as pansexual for a period of time, gay for some time after that, and has come to accept that she is, in her own words, “just completely fluid and on the whole attracted to mostly non-binary people.”

“I have a hard time (with labels),” my friend Charlie* explains in a series of midnight voice notes. “On the one hand I do think I’m kind of technically bi, but I find something like the Kinsey scale (he currently identifies somewhere between a 1.5 and 2) more comfortable. It isn’t at all perfect, because I do shift along it and it is dynamic, so it kind of feels weird to put a single number on it.”

A few weeks prior, he revealed over dinner that after recent years of largely heteronormative relationships and encounters, he’d spent the last few months as a male unicorn in an ongoing threeway sexual relationship with a bisexual couple. Despite early adolescent experimentation (predominantly with boys), he’s always publicly labeled himself as heterosexual, especially in conversations with other heterosexual people, because he “finds it quite an intimate thing to talk about,” and to avoid the perceived stigma attached to being a bi man.

The thing about all monosexual identities (straight, gay, lesbian) is that they mostly require we define our desire by its proximity or distance to our own gender and sex. It requires us to prescribe truths to other people’s bodies. Conventional narratives about attraction imply and force boundaries of what the bodies we are drawn to, not only ‘look like’ but ‘are’, forcing us to delineate what bodies are and can be ’man’ or ’woman’ (or neither) and found our desires upon that, not just our instinctual attractions. It requires we distance ourselves from whatever attraction we might have felt if we were unburdened by these rigid categories.