A family member asked me last week why I continue to identify as queer, even though I’m a woman who is in a long-term relationship with a man: “Give me one good reason why you have to call yourself ‘queer.’” She added that I could save myself a lot of trouble if I wore my opposite-sex relationship more openly, like some kind of hetero-veil to block bigots. I explained that I’d signed a contract with some very shady people, and that it said that I would have to publicly identify this way for a certain number of years and, if I said who, they’d have me killed.

That’s not how being queer actually works; I wish the explanation was as easy to grasp as a contract.

I’ve grown accustomed to confusion about my sexual identity – not my own confusion, of course. Despite being debilitatingly indecisive in almost every other aspect of my life, what I desire sexually has been very clear to me for some time now. I’m queer for those in the know, and to the people who can only handle the four terms that make up the LGBT acronym, I’m the B. Either way, all anyone needs to know is that I am attracted to people who identify as male, as well as people who identify as female. I’m also attracted to people who don’t identify at all. Before you ask, no, I don’t “swing both ways”. I actually swing in all ways and toward all kinds of people.

However, for the past year and a half, I’ve only been swinging toward one person. His name is Kelly. Yes, my partner’s name is Kelly. Yes, he’s a he. Yes, I’m still queer. Are you wondering how that works? Easy! The thing is – and stay with me here – my queer identity is not defined by who I am dating.

When you’re dating one person, does every other person instantly become unattractive to you? Do you transition from being straight, gay or lesbian to being a Sandra-sexual, Matt-sexual, or Alanna-sexual? I didn’t think so. In my current relationship, I am having the best sex of my life, and I am still attracted to women. There are still women on the street who catch my eye. That doesn’t mean I’m in hiding from my true inner lesbian; it means I’m a living, breathing, queer human.

The first month I moved to Brooklyn, New York City first lady Chirlane McCray was on the cover of New York Magazine. Having obsessed over her from afar, I couldn’t wait to read the profile. To my horror, on the first page, they described her as a “black former lesbian”. I rolled my eyes hard and closed the magazine. I complained to anyone who would listen: “Former lesbian? Former lesbian?! Come on!”.

My frustration was hot and unyielding because this was – and is – consistently how queer and/or bisexual people are represented: instead of being allowed to present our whole selves and the varied experiences of sexual attraction that come with those selves, we’re forced to inhabit one end of a spectrum or the other, a before and after. Those of us who have ever spent time in the other end of that spectrum become something else altogether: not to be trusted.

Identifying as queer means being mistrusted, misunderstood and, often, mislabeled for the rest of your life. Every time you date a new person, you have to come out again. Every time someone says, “But I thought you were ...” and drifts off at the end, you feel guilty of a deception you didn’t intend, based on a projection of the other person’s assumption. In a society in which most people are addicted to certainty, the fact that I can’t immediately be exclusively categorized as gay or straight makes people nervous. I end up bearing all the blame for someone else’s assumptions that have little do with me.

I’m tired of the enduring belief that being someone who can’t and won’t simply identify as gay or straight means that I have something to hide. Close-minded people will go through all kinds of mental acrobatics to avoid the most obvious answer: being with a woman doesn’t make me a lesbian, and being with a man doesn’t suddenly make me straight. And the fact that the boundaries of my sexual attraction are more expansive than yours doesn’t mean that you have to keep one eye on my genitals and the other on the door.

I’m queer. It’s really that simple.