TikTok Helped Me Realize I’m Way More Queer Than I Thought

Three decades of straight-conditioning blinded me to my obvious bisexuality.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

As one of the many people who jumped on the social video platform TikTok out of boredom during COVID-19 sheltering-in-place, I found a lot more than I bargained for in the addictive app — like so many other millennial women who had formerly identified as heterosexual (or, like me, “mostly straight”), it hit me like a train that I’m a lot gayer than I had ever realized.

TikTok has attracted users from all corners of the globe, and unlike Facebook, those users aren’t so strictly sequestered in groups of like-minded, similarly-identifying people. It’s an arena that allows anyone and everyone to be loudly authentic, to challenge stereotypes, and to find one another in droves without getting stuck in the proverbial social media echo chamber.

[Unfamiliar with the app and what I’m talking about? Check out this hilarious TikTok]

Thanks to the algorithm, videos from lesbian and bisexual women get suggested with incredible frequency to all the women who are attracted to women — even the ones who didn’t realize they fall into that category. It happens with such regularity that there’s a trend of women in straight relationships making every joke under the sun about discovering a newfound attraction to women.

So you’ve found your way to lesbian TikTok

The thing that I find so spectacular about lesbian TikTok is that there’s a trend of lesbian couples making shared profiles to document their relationships, and many of these accounts present an incredibly honest and often very unabashed version of what their reality and experiences are like. It’s not some fetishized, pornographic version of lesbian love because it isn’t created by or for the male gaze, but it is sexy as hell. It’s a bunch of beautiful, diverse, empowered women owning and relishing in their own sexuality, after all. And for a lot of us ladies who have always gravitated toward men, it’s a look at something we’ve never been able to engage with so intimately in such an authentic way.

It’s not some fetishized, pornographic version of lesbian love because it isn’t created by or for the male gaze… For a lot of us ladies who have always gravitated toward men, it’s a look at something we’ve never been able to engage with so intimately in such an authentic way.

Enter, the now-confused-but-also-excited-and-very-certainly-bisexual women who are suddenly on the precipice of an expansive new identity.

Growing up in a heteronormative culture made it easy for me to identify my attraction to men as sexual. It also made it easy to repress the sexual aspect of my attraction to women.

I’ve always loved male energy and sought it out. I kept a circle of friends as a kid that was quite evenly comprised of girls and boys. When I quit gymnastics at age seven, I opted to play baseball in a boys’ T-ball league instead of playing softball with girls because I liked the boys’ vibe better.

As a teenager, I realized I also wanted to pounce on boys, and so they were the ones I chased. They also chased me back, which made things a lot simpler.

For me, pursuing and dating boys worked, so I never felt the pressing need to dive headfirst into the more complicated and often shameful experience of exploring queerness.

There were plenty of blatantly obvious signals though.

When I first discovered Internet porn at about age 10, I didn’t give one single shit about looking at naked men, I was fixated on and aroused by the women.

When girls would play with my hair in elementary and middle school, I would get that nervous surge of fiery energy in my pelvis as shivers rolled down my spine, arms, and legs.

For as long as I can remember, being at a public beach or pool always led me to stare at women’s breasts and butts bulging out of bikinis, the curve of their hips glistening under sunscreen, the way their tan lines hugged and caressed their beautiful skin… not the male six-packs or biceps or chiseled jaws which I knew from reading Cosmopolitan I was supposed to be drooling over. Sure male muscle was sexy, but it didn’t pull me into a complete stupor the way women’s bodies did.

And it took me this damn long to fully realize that I am absolutely, undeniably bisexual.

When you’re conditioned to be straight, it’s easy to deny your own bisexuality

I grew up strictly Catholic with parents who were very conservative in the way they discussed sex and sexuality with me (which, in effect, they didn’t).

I was in the dark apart from what I gathered from porn, TV (mostly the shows I would watch when I was home alone sick from school like The Maury Show or Sex In The City), and of course, my young and inexperienced friends who were also figuring it out on the fly.

By the time I was 18, I still had a very limited, distorted, patchwork view of sex, despite being desperately curious about it and suddenly finding it very accessible on a college campus.

When I was in my university’s production of the Vagina Monologues my sophomore year, it was the first opportunity I had ever had to engage intimately with a big, diverse group of queer womxn, and it certainly left me asking a lot of questions… but I was always overwhelmed with the sense that I wasn’t gay enough to be a lesbian or to be bisexual.

I explained it to myself like: I like to take in beautiful women, and I have a deep appreciation for the female form and spirit and psyche, so I’m not 100% straight, but I’ve never pursued women nor had sex with a woman, so I’m *mostly* straight.

Exploration is difficult when you’re a very straight-conditioned bisexual person.

And then there’s biphobia…

There’s also a lot of prejudice, fear, and hatred — even in the wider LGBTQ+ community — towards bisexuality, which is collectively referred to as biphobia.

Here are some examples of what biphobia has looked/sounded like when I’ve encountered it:

1. If a bisexual person leaves a same-sex relationship and then enters an opposite-sex relationship, their queerness is called into question. Some people love to assert that scenarios like this must mean it was just a phase, and the person in question was really just a confused, straight tourist lost temporarily in Gayland…
2. Bi women are sometimes mocked by lesbians for going from dating a woman to dating a man, as if the bisexual woman is misguided to have ever chosen the “inferior” gender when she could have her pick. (Ummm, hello? It’s called bisexuality because there’s attraction to both men and women.)
3. Some people (I’m looking at heterosexual men in particular on this one) think that bisexual=opportunity for threesomes. Just because bisexual people are attracted to both sexes does not automatically signify that they are interested in multi-partner sex. And I shouldn’t have to say this, but it’s also worth pointing out in this context: A bisexual person’s sexuality is not for the entertainment or fulfillment of others. That’s called fetishization. If someone is telling you they are bisexual, assume that it is because they are bisexual, not because they are trying to seduce you with fantasies of threesomes.
4. Heterosexual partners of bisexual people often delegitimize and invalidate the realness of their bisexual partner’s attraction to the same sex by adopting an attitude along the lines of “I don’t care if you hook up with people of the same sex because I don’t see that as a threat, but if you hooked up with someone of the opposite sex I would consider it a betrayal and violation of trust.”
5. Some people are flat out intimidated by the prospect of dating someone with “twice as many options” in their dating pool and struggle to feel secure with their bisexual partner having platonic friendships. Just because someone is attracted to either sex doesn’t mean they are literally attracted to everyone around them.

Bisexuals make people uncomfortable. Many people wish that we would just go away, or at least keep quiet about it, because they perceive our very existence as a threat to the social order. A declaration of bisexual identity often results in discrimination, hostility, and invalidation. Gay- and lesbian-identified individuals frequently view us as either confused or interlopers possessing a degree of privilege not available to them, and many heterosexuals see us as amoral, hedonistic spreaders of disease and disrupters of families. Why all the fuss?”

— ‘Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World.’ ed. Robyn Ochs and Sarah E. Rowley.

Our cultural conditioning has made it difficult to accept the gray area that is bisexuality. This conditioning is so pervasive that I was quicker to adopt damaging, invalidating ideologies about bisexuality than I was to accept my own bisexuality.

I remember one day, just a few weeks into my freshman year of college, one of my male friends came out as bisexual to me and a group of our floormates. Throughout the next few days, it became a topic of hushed discussion amongst the rest of us, who shamelessly mused as to whether he was truly bi or just stopping over on the way to gay. It was fucked up, I’m the first to admit it now, but back then I didn’t see anything harmful or wrong in questioning someone’s bisexuality like that.

I wish I had grown up in an environment that fully validated bisexuality. I wish I had grown up understanding that it’s a legitimate sexual orientation, instead of seeing it as just some label for confused gay people who aren’t ready to accept the truth. I wish this for my own sake, but also for the sake of my friend, and anyone else who identifies as bisexual who I blindly harmed through my own ignorance. One of the more bizarre and disturbing aspects of cultural conditioning, in my opinion, is the way that we can become complicit in the very systems that serve to disempower and/or erase us.

Missed connections

I’m now 29 years-old and eight years into a very happy, healthy, supportive heterosexual relationship — which I wouldn’t change for the world, to be clear — but I sometimes think about all the opportunities I missed out on in the past because I wasn’t looking, or because I wasn’t fully receptive.

I think about the experiences I had on campus when pretty girls approached me and complimented me in a way that felt so special it lingered with me for hours (sometimes days), and my dumb ass didn’t realize they were flirting, nor that the reason I would keep replaying it in my head is because I was actually super into it.

I went to more concerts than I can count, a lot of them EDM shows where my friends and I liked to devour certain substances that would elevate the senses quite significantly. On more than one occasion, a girl from the group I was with, usually some type of new acquaintance (the proverbial friend of a friend), would start by stroking my hair or rubbing my shoulders, and then seamlessly make a move to start kissing me. I’d find myself in long, drawn-out make out sessions that were full of ecstasy (pun intended) — which is perhaps why I never considered pursuing things further in those moments and didn’t take the advances too seriously. I always just told myself “that was just the drugs, silly!” Never mind that this happened to me far more than any of the other girls I went to shows with…

The Law of Attraction, very loosely translated, suggests that we receive from the world what we put out into it. Looking back, I was clearly broadcasting an attraction and openness to sexual encounters with other women, I just didn’t realize it.

Claiming my queerness

For lots of people (myself included), realizing as a full-fledged adult that you’re a budding bisexual is daunting as fuck because almost everything and everyone seems to have been telling you for a lifetime that you aren’t gay enough, or that your queerness is just a phase, or that your queerness is undesirable or “wrong,” or that your queerness is nothing more than performative, or that your queerness is invalid…

So I wrote this story for all the other bisexual people out there who didn’t recognize the signs because they’d been brainwashed into a way of thinking that supports bi-erasure, or never felt gay enough, or haven’t had a sexual or romantic relationship with a same-sex partner, or any other of the myriad reasons that bi people have felt unable to claim their queerness and bisexuality.

After a lifetime of not feeling gay enough, I’m confident in my identity as a bisexual woman. I’m queer, and that definition belongs to me, not to anyone else.