Have you ever said, “I’m not gay, but…” or “I’m not bisexual, but…” as a dis­claimer before expressing how much you are attracted to someone of the same gender as you?

If you are pro­gres­sive, lib­eral, and you stand for LGBT rights, have you ever won­dered why you need to give a dis­claimer like that before expressing feel­ings that might qualify you as being bisexual?

I have.

First of all, as a bisexual woman (I prefer the term queer) who has been in rela­tion­ships with both men and women, and who is in a happy, long-term rela­tion­ship with a woman, I find it hurtful when some of my friends still qualify their own sexual desires for people of the same gender by first sep­a­rating them­selves from people like me. There’s nothing wrong with being het­ero­sexual, but there is some­thing very wrong with being het­ero­sexist, which is the idea that het­ero­sex­u­ality is the default, nat­ural, normal thing to be, and that it’s a black or white area with no variations.

If you are telling someone how you sup­port gay rights, you don’t need to keep qual­i­fying that with “I’m not gay or nothing, but…”. Similarly, if you are telling people that you are bi-curious, or attracted to someone of the same gender, then those of us who have put our lives on the line to be honest about sex­u­ality, would appre­ciate it if you could stop talking about this matter like it’s a hot potato that you are willing to sup­port in passing, but not willing to own, even when you your­self have feel­ings that would qualify you as bisexual.

Some might say that labels don’t matter. While I agree with that, I have to wonder why the label “straight” mat­ters, while “bisexual” or “homo­sexual” or “queer” don’t. If none of them matter, why label your­self any­thing at all? Saying “I’m straight, but I’d totally do that guy/girl” is tan­ta­mount to saying “I’m not a trans­ves­tite – I just love wearing women’s clothes.” The first part of the sen­tence is only there as long as the speaker is assuming that some­thing is wrong with the second part. No matter how pro­gres­sive the speaker might be, the dis­claimer unmasks the fact that het­ero­sex­u­ality is still the norm in the speaker’s mind.

Labels define us only insofar as they stand for the feel­ings we expe­ri­ence. When people say “I’m not bi, but…”, they are deciding that one set of their feel­ings (feel­ings of attrac­tion to a person of the same gender) are less valid than others. The “gay” feel­ings they might be feeling are less impor­tant, less defining than the “straight” ones. What does that say about their atti­tude, invis­ible as it might be to them, towards those of us who own up to our “gay” feel­ings and act on them daily? This sep­a­ra­tion of feel­ings into more impor­tant and less impor­tant colors the pro­gres­sivism of the speaker: instead of expressing empathy or sol­i­darity with the people he or she is claiming to sup­port, the speaker is now simply expressing con­de­scending con­cern towards lesser beings for whom he/she feels pity, but one of whom he/she can not imagine actu­ally being.

Society has given “straight” a higher status than every vari­a­tion of sex­u­ality, and calling your­self “straight” gives you the social status of one who is priv­i­leged. So, by denying your own bisexual feel­ings, and by con­stantly stating that you are *not* bisexual (or gay, or trans), even though you have feel­ings that “those” people have, you may be per­pet­u­ating the same het­ero­sexism that you as a pro­gres­sive, lib­eral person claim to be against. Heterosexism, like racism and clas­sism, is the idea that one group of people ought to be priv­i­leged above everyone else. And many people, while they may have good inten­tions, are afraid of let­ting go of that priv­i­leged status in society. But then, how pro­gres­sive are we if we’re not willing to live up to the prin­ci­ples we claim to uphold?

We need to start being honest with our­selves. And we need to think about the words we use to com­mu­ni­cate, because that’s how people know each other, espe­cially online. When you claim that you are your­self, of course, obvi­ously, “straight” but that you have these little feel­ings that come up towards a cer­tain person you know, or someone famous, who is the same gender as you, then what you are saying is that the label “straight” is more impor­tant to you than your feel­ings. And that your het­ero­sexual feel­ings are what define you and are what are *real* and *impor­tant* and that your bisexual/homosexual side can be dis­missed as some­thing fun, but mean­ing­less. That does not help LGBT rights, and that’s not what I would expect of someone who oth­er­wise sup­ports LGBT rights.

This is not to say that all pro­gres­sives have a duty to iden­tify them­selves as bisexual. We can all rec­og­nize that sex­u­ality is much more fluid than the narrow labels used to describe it. Identifying as straight in the con­text of admit­ting attrac­tion to a member of the same gender tells us much more about the speaker’s prej­u­dices against cer­tain sex­u­al­i­ties than it does about the speaker’s sex­u­ality itself. The moment you have sex with, desire for, or fan­tasies about a person of the same gender as you, you are no longer fit­ting into the het­ero­sexual def­i­n­i­tion, and by forcing that def­i­n­i­tion upon your multi-faceted and fluid sex­u­ality and denying your sex­u­ality and the sexual diver­sity of many others like you, you are actu­ally helping the status quo, the priv­i­leged het­ero­sexism that is the domain of reli­gious fundamentalism.

So, the next time you want to express your bisexual ten­den­cies while simul­ta­ne­ously denying that part of your­self, please try and think about who you are sup­porting and who you are dismissing.

I’ll end this with a mon­tage of scenes that kinda high­light this issue, from the movie “Orgazmo” by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the cre­ators of South Park: