Last weekend, I was invited to emcee a queer-themed spoken word poetry event as part of Edmonton’s annual Heart of the City music and arts festival. Being an old hand at emcee-ing poetry slams and the like (and a three-year veteran of this particular festival) I didn’t think too much about it until the night before, when I sat down to choose material of mine to read and realized — to my chagrin — that I really didn’t have any “queer” material.

For a long time now, I’ve existed in a netherworld that so many bisexual people inhabit — a place that’s neither closeted nor truly “out.” Though I’m more or less out to my closest and dearest, there was never a moment in my life when I “came out.” Rather, my bisexuality has always been one of those facts about me, like the fact that I speak Japanese or sleep-talk prodigiously (sometimes even in Japanese). I rarely have cause to bring up in conversation, and have never sought to integrate into my public persona.

I have often said that my sexual orientation is the least interesting thing about me, and it really is profoundly uninteresting — to me, at least. I can sum it up in precisely ten syllables: I’m attracted to both men and women. Not even enough for a haiku.

That said, my bisexuality has been a hugely consequential fact of my existence since puberty. As a kid who attended elementary school in the eighties and came of age in the early nineties — a time when “faggot” was still a more or less acceptable schoolyard taunt — being gay still carried significant stigma. (Indeed it still does, although the situation is much improved in the part of the world where I live.) Being bi, well, that wasn’t even a thing I knew you could be. Even as the LGBT acronym (when it was just four letters) gained currency in my twenties, the B seemed to get shoved aside by the other letters. Bisexuality, we all figured, was a screen door between straight and gay, not a space where you’re welcome to just hang out (lest you let all the bugs in). Sooner or later everybody picked a side, right?

Thus I went from being a sexually confused teenager to an even more sexually confused (and frustrated) adult who never seemed to be able to do relationships quite right. Like an athlete on a field without a jersey, frantically trying to figure out what team he’s supposed to be playing for. I only had one long-term same-sex relationship, and that was an unqualified disaster — one that saw me vacillate between thinking I was a straight guy who had made a terrible mistake to worrying that I was actually a closeted gay guy who couldn’t accept his true sexual orientation. Looking back it’s hard to say which of these paranoid thoughts was more ridiculous. It certainly didn’t help that the relationship in question coincided with one of the worst depressive episodes of my life. But even with that in mind, I’m still surprised by how blind I was to the most obvious conclusion: I was bi!

It took me many years to put that experience, and my previous same-sex hook-ups, into context. Shortly after this anxiety-ridden relationship ended I met the woman to whom I am now married. For the first few years of my marriage I’d more or less resolved the issue in my mind: I was, I decided, a formerly bi-curious straight guy who had now gotten “all that” out of my system. Except, of course, I hadn’t gotten any of that gay stuff out of my system — that’s not how bisexuality works. I was a thirty-something man who was married to a woman and still very much attracted to dudes. What exactly was I supposed to do with that fact, and how was I supposed to own it?