I am bisexual, but fell in love with, and eventually married a man. Now I guess I’m just Andrewsexual, because I can’t see myself opening our relationship to allow a sexual or emotional relationship with another person, male or female.

It’s a label I struggle with for many reasons. I struggle with the assumption that, as a woman married to a man, I am straight. This is so frustrating for me, because I don’t feel that getting married changed my identity, and I constantly find myself defending my identity within the queer community and correcting assumptions within the straight community. I struggle with feeling I am not allowed to belong to the LGBT community because I have the “straight privilege” of being able to slip into the neat and tidy box we call “straight” if it suits me. I also struggle with it because it affirms the gender binaries I no longer believe in – so maybe I’m really pansexual, capable of loving…people.

I’m really glad this post made it onto Five Star Friday, because it’s some excellent food for thought I wouldn’t have otherwise found. The emphasis on claiming labels and the frustration people often feel when they can’t file people into orderly categories, is at the heart of the internal struggles within the LGBT community, as well as the struggles between the LGBT community and the straight community. I tend to think, if we could all just relinquish this need to pigeonhole each other and ourselves, there would be no need for an LGBT movement in the first place, because we’d all just be people who love people, and have a spectrum of preferences for which types. Perhaps if we weren’t so entrenched in a gendered society, we could see a gender preference as equivalent to a hair color preference or body-type preference. It sounds trite, but, y’know…we’re all people.

Very thought provoking post.

I do know that bi-women are viewed to have straight privilege, and certainly an easier time having children or being assumed to be straight in a homophobic world. We are also viewed to be slutty. Which in my case may be correct, but I think I’d be a slutty gay man or straight man or lesbian woman, too. :)

i agree that love is bigger than sexual preference. I also think that we try so hard to label ourselves and other people when, in reality, there aren’t enough labels to fit every person. Sexuality is too fluid, in my opinion, to fit into the boxes we try to make for it. All these labels are, at the end of the day, is a way for us to judge one another.