All about sexual fluidity

For anyone who is questioning

Most people never seem to question their sexuality—they are either same sex attracted, or they are opposite sex attracted, and their lives are nice and simple and sorted. I was lucky in a way, because I didn’t have to question mine either. Well before I was out of my teens, my sister Helena pronounced that I was bisexual, and since the wonderful Helena knows everything, it became a fact.

Helena was up there with what the top academics would have said about me then. But neither she, nor they, were completely right.

Looking back, the reason I became the person I am was because of my parents’ — particularly my mother’s — attitude to sex and sexuality. For her, sex was just something you did, and while she derived maximum enjoyment out of it, she didn’t assign any mystical values to it. My parents were loyally monogamous, not out of any particular conviction, but because they adored each other. They didn’t believe in anything except love and logic, and so we grew up in a household where everything could be questioned, and would be, sooner rather than later.

Despite this, I grew up with the binary model of sexuality, which was all around us. There was sex ed at school, but my sisters and I were way beyond it by then, and despite the best efforts of our teachers to make everyone aware of same sex attraction, they packaged it with sexual behavior and romantic feelings and relationships. If one aspect was same sex, then so would be all the rest. In retrospect, life would have been much easier for me if they hadn’t done that.

We aren’t born into any sexual group, but instead we develop our sexuality through a process of ‘sexual questioning’ as we grow up. The biggest flaw in this line of thinking is that many still believe that questioning is a one-off event. Once it is done — so they say — your orientation is decided. For ever.

The moment my sisters and I hit our teens, the house was deluged with boys, and I learned some awful habits from the smokily sexual Helena. She is a few years older than I, and regarded men in much the way she did avocados in a supermarket — when there is an inexhaustible supply, why pick anything but the best? Following in her wake, I did my questioning, and became ragingly heterosexual, to such an extent that I still meet occasional childhood friends today who do a double take at my living arrangements.

And then came Cindy. She was a petite blonde, with almost waist length hair, and a tight little bod that awakened something deep in my pelvis. At the time, I had no idea what that feeling was, because my head was full of boys, but then I ended up doing an unplanned sleepover at her house one night when her parents went visiting and their car broke down.

Cindy’s dad — Cindy’s dad — this is unbelievable, he was such a prude, turned out to have the most incredible stash of porn on the planet. We drank some wine, we watched some movies, and sexual sophisticate that I was, I explained to her what was happening. Then we had sex.

It just happened. Her hand touched my breast and there was an electric shock of lust with an intensity I had never experienced before. It left me breathless, but not confused, and I wanted her desperately. We kissed, passionately, and then her hand was on my puss and — I come really, really quickly — I had my first orgasm with a woman, following which Cindy had her first orgasm ever. It was the most inexpert, but heart-rendingly erotic sex I think I have ever had, and it was a total surprise.

The following morning, my sister Eloise picked me up, asked the usual stuff, and I told her Cindy and I had had sex. Honestly, you would have to have lived in my family to understand why, but this was normal for us. It was a statement, but it was also a question, and Eloise replied that she had kissed girls too, but no more than that, so we took it to Helena, the ultimate authority on such things. Helena, bless her, announced that I must be bi, and got on immediately with more important stuff.

This was the late 1990s, when the weight of opinion among researchers was that sexual minorities like lesbians or gay men were exclusively same sex attracted (SSA), and men and women who were non-exclusively attracted were seen by researchers as ‘special cases’.

Cindy never told her parents, who were very conservative, and although we remained close, we never had sex again. I had lots of boys to juggle and to be completely honest — I know it sounds crazy — I didn’t think about it again for a long time. Or for what seemed like a long time.

Then I noticed Sophia. She of the sinful smile and the waterfall of lustrous red hair. We both rode horses and we were both going out with steady boyfriends (or what passed for steady in that phase of my life). We became firm friends, but there was always something more to it, and that something grew and grew in me until it became a wolf howl of lust of such purity that it became impossible to ignore.

Two of my sisters kept their horses at the same yard, and although they strenuously denied it at the time, they understood what was happening much earlier than either I or Sophia. Eloise and Helena kept nudging us together until one magical summer night, Sophia and I made love in the hay while a barbecue went on all around us. Nobody knew apart from my sisters, who sat loyally at the foot of the stairs to the hay loft, blocking the way up while we had sex. As I wrote above, you would have to have grown up in my family to understand why they did it. I love them utterly and without reservation.

Because of my upbringing, I didn’t really question my sexuality, even at that stage. It simply was what it was. I had sex with people to whom I was attracted, and if a couple of them happened to be girls, then so what? It was only later that I began to understand that I was something of an exception, and that not only was sexuality making many people incredibly unhappy, it was political.

Back then, even within the SSA (same sex attracted) community, there was a lot of pressure to go with the binary model. As older readers will recall, there was a serious push within the lesbian orbit to eradicate the concept of bisexuality, and things became very heated for a while. Some even went as far as to suggest that bisexuals were actually SSA but were concealing it — fortunately nobody told me that at the time, or I would have been left helpless with laughter.

What didn’t occur to anyone was that the reverse might be the case. Even then, there were hints that some, or even most, of the people who were labelled SSA might actually have non-exclusive attraction. Because this concept didn’t fit with the ‘bisexuality is the exception’ belief, it was poison in some SSA quarters, and few politically savvy people were brave enough to sign up to it. So the theory managed to hold up for a little longer, and with it, the idea of bisexuality itself.

By the time I was at university, it had been established that most SSA people gravitated to at least some extent towards being other sex attracted (OSA). This didn’t describe me at all well, because at that time I was following Helena’s principle of a woman who finds herself in a store full of particularly ripe male avocados. However, the concept did apply to me in reverse. During that period, I had a strong preference for the other sex, but was attracted to the same sex at times. If you want a label, I was mostly straight.

That was before I met Sue. We shared a flat, we were best friends, we dated together, we read erotic stories together, and we learned together. Sue dared me into increasingly ambitious escapades, always with men, until one day the pair of us started sleeping together because we had shared everything else and it seemed to be the right thing to do. Sue, five foot six inches of sophisticated blonde vivacity, never left my life after that.

I had now had sex with three women, but still regarded myself as being mostly straight, despite Helena’s ‘bi’ label. My sexual questioning — which if you recall, was supposed to happen only once — had flipped three times now, but every time my attraction to men had pulled it back the other way around again. Except now, I was in a long term relationship with another woman, which worked fantastically well on the emotional side, despite the fact that I was strongly sexually attracted to men.

The lady who turned the key in the final lock for me was Lisa Diamond, who made a persuasive case that sexual questioning is a continuous process in lesbian women. Lisa followed up a group for a decade, and showed that over that period, all the women who had classed themselves as lesbian at the start had experienced attractions to men and that nearly two thirds had had sex with at least one man.

The headline figure in Lisa’s research was that 70% of the SSA women in her study had changed their sexual identity label at least once. The moment I read it, I realized she was describing me, although I had never thought of myself as being lesbian, or het, or anything — but people kept insisting that I should admit that I was bisexual. To that, I was like, well why? What difference would it make?

Where Lisa’s research really helped me was in making the point that coming out as SSA marks no more than the beginning of a journey for a woman who does so. Such a person will then need to use life experience to weight her sexual attractions, and to work out where her emotional feelings are taking her.

This cleared up a huge issue for me, because I had struggled with forms which asked me to assign myself to a sexual orientation — I didn’t belong to any of them. I didn’t want to just tick ‘other’ because it sounded like a last resort. What I did not realize was that by doing so, I was going unlabelled.

37% of Lisa Diamond’s sample eventually signed off as unlabelled, just as I did. Why is being unlabelled such an advantage? Because there is no natural law that says that a person’s sexuality must remain fixed forever — nor is there any reason to insist that the sexual identity group I ‘belong to’ should align with my chosen sexual orientation. Nor is there any natural law which states that my gender expression must align with anything (although mine does with my birth assigned gender). For example, a person can identify as SSA because she is prepared to have sex with the right woman, even if she never finds her and only ever has other sex relationships.

Today, I live with two other women, Elaine and Angela, and our neighbors think of us as being lesbian, although we have never stopped having sex with men. We are by no means alone in this, because as long ago as 1990 it was known that four fifths of lesbian-identified women had had sex with a man at some point in their lives. This renders the controversy that has intermittently raged in the lesbian community — that bisexual women are denying their true sexuality — somewhat moot.

Where now? If you regard your sexual orientation as being ‘questioning’, then why not lose labels completely? I run an engineering company in the aerospace sector and in my early thirties, I have decided that I am grown up enough that labeling myself isn’t going to help, now or ever. I still have a relationship with Sue, who ended up getting married to one of my former boyfriends, and I am involved in a stable, closed polyamorous relationship which includes Angela and Elaine. If anyone can come up with a label for my sexuality that can be expressed in a less than 2000 words, please do so!

My message? My sexual orientation is fluid, and I have come to appreciate that repeated questioning isn’t ever going to produce a neat answer for me. If this describes you, the journey you are about to make will be its own reward, and accepting a ticket that says lesbian, mostly lesbian, or bisexual risks a wasted trip to the wrong station.

Although labels can help, sometimes they do not. They make it easy for us to be marginalized, disrespected, and rendered invisible by forcing us to become complicit with a widespread lack of understanding of how sexual questioning, sexual fluidity and gender identity actually work. Just as our characters cannot be captured in a single tick box, neither can our sexuality.

All that really matters is how much I am attracted to someone and whether I love them or not. May it be so for you too.

Tabby

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