I stand at a crowded bar, staffed by a male bartender who looks tired but friendly. I shoulder my way up to the front, squeezing between two grumpy, loud men. I’m almost a foot shorter than both of them, so I stand on my tiptoes, place my arms on the sticky wood in front of me, and grin widely, teeth gleaming between very red lips. I toss my hair and stare at the bartender. When he turns my way, he ignores the two men, comes straight to me and asks me what I’d like to drink. I flutter my eyelashes as the men on either side of me glower at me, and I order two drinks: a Bay Breeze and an Old Fashioned.
The next morning, I go to work at a gay rights organization. A coworker, a gay man, starts talking to me about a recent movie, one starring Zac Efron. In the movie, Zac — shockingly — takes his shirt off, and my colleague mentions it, then stops himself, laughing. “Well, I guess you wouldn’t care about seeing that,” he says with a smirk. I grin back at him, and, jokingly, ask about the women in the movie. We kid about it for a few minutes, then go back to work, my coworker charmed by our conversation.
Lying about your sexual orientation is nothing new — queer people have been lying to escape discrimination for centuries, certainly, and it can be helpful in everyday situations. That’s what I did, essentially, at the bar — I let that bartender think that I could be interested in him in order to get a drink faster. You can be sure that I brought my girlfriend that Bay Breeze.
But I was also lying when I joked about not being interested in a guy in that movie — I’m not straight, but I’m not gay either. I’m constantly oscillating between letting people think I’m straight or letting people think I’m gay. For the past three years, I’ve been in an extremely rewarding relationship with a woman. We live together, have two cats and regularly watch Netflix shows only because they include the presence of queer female characters. But, before that, I exclusively dated men, and I’m still attracted to them.
When people explicitly ask about my sexual orientation, I usually respond with a shrug or “eh.” I don’t think about how I define myself a lot — I wasn’t attracted to very many women until I met my girlfriend, and I’m very attracted to her, and that’s all that matters to me. But other people certainly are quick to define my orientation in their own minds and — for the most part — I let them.
Sometimes, I feel ashamed. I feel like I’m doing other ambiguously queer women such as myself a disservice by not disclosing the intricacies of my sexuality to people who mistake me as “one” or “the other” (as if there are only two sexualities, and not a plethora.)
Still, usually, I’m happy with these white lies I allow people to believe. It’s hard enough being a queer woman — I get harassed while alone, I get harassed while I’m holding hands with my girlfriend, there’s no escape! — without having to correct people every time they assume the kind of person I want to have sex with. And, although I’ll never feel totally safe moving through the world as a woman, the misconceptions sometimes make my life tangibly safer. As a “straight-passing” member of the queer community, I am privileged in some ways — I’m not as likely to be a victim of anti-gay prejudice, for example.
But there are times when the assumption is more frustrating than helpful. New straight friends have sometimes stopped themselves from telling me about their dating experiences, guessing I wouldn’t “understand” what it’s like to date men. Men look at my long hair and high heels and immediately think that it’s okay for them to hit on me, sometimes aggressively, even if I’m with my girlfriend. Even though I’ve been identifying as queer for years now, I still feel new, unsure, uncomfortable surrounded by people who define as lesbians, as if I’ll never quite fit in.
It’s exhausting, switching my identity on and off depending on who I’m around and what I need. But, for now at least, it’s the easiest solution, the one that makes it simpler for me to go through life. There’s no way I can fully explain my sexual orientation to everyone I meet, and I don’t really care to.
Maybe, one of these days, I’ll get around to making a little pamphlet that I can hand to people upon meeting them or, say, passing them on the street or sitting next to them on the subway. It can list out my sexual partners, how I felt about each one, and include a special epilogue titled “Could I Ever See Myself Dating a Man Again?” But until then, I’m resigned to living my little white lie of someone with easy, binary desires. The only person who needs to know everything about what I want is me, and I know I’m not lying to myself.
