Has Your Orientation Changed the Way You Perceive Reality?

Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash

Society, and the powers that be, spend a remarkable amount of time debating LGBTQ+ experiences and communities.

They’ll rename Pride Month, Nuclear Family Month. They’ll say you choose to be marginalized, and will demand we stop forcing this evasive lifestyle on their probably queer child.

They get on TV and podcasts and debate. What label do we apply? Is it a phase? Confusion? Are we heathens on a direct flight to hell, or do we at least get a layover in Bali?

They will speculate about mannerisms, relationships, voices, hand gestures, that one time you (fill in the blank) and who stood a little too close to whom at the event. If you survive this, and are, in fact, queer at some level, they’ll tell you they knew the whole time yet never thought to send you a memo, or a greeting card.

All that scrutiny of someone’s orientation stays fixed on the object of desire: the man, the woman, the body, the supposed “evidence.”

**Nobody asks the other question:

What does desire itself teach us about how we exist?**

I posted a version of that question recently. In 24 hours it got almost 3,000 views. So I’ll pose it here, the way I posed it there:

How has your sexual orientation changed the way you perceive reality?

For me, being bi was about people I thought were fine, my definition of love, and who I thought to pursue, but so much of it, even more of it, was about the habits of mind that grew out of living in a world that insists on certainty while my own experience, or inner world, kept resisting it. It was this way as a teenager, and now as a 40 year old man.

Imagine walking into a party.

Across the room, a hottie catches your eye. Doesn’t matter the gender, right? But they are your type down to the hair strand. They smile. Later, somehow, they’ve found a reason to stand next to you and now you’re talking, concealing that you were into them before they said anything. They like you back. So it feels. They laugh a little harder at your jokes than everyone else does... And when the conversation ends, they touch your shoulder and say, “I’ll see you later.”

What just happened?

Were they flirting? Were they simply friendly? Did they hold your gaze a second longer than everyone else’s, or did you invent all of that? Well, it will depend on your life experience.

But here’s the thing. It gets louder in rooms that are already charged.

Men’s spaces run more homoerotic than straight men will admit. The locker room, the gym floor, the barbershop. Walk into one of these spaces as a bisexual man who reads as straight, and the same interpretation engine fires up on overdrive, just sweatier. Did that dude just clock my ass, or did I make that up? Is that a normal amount of eye contact in the showers? Does it mean anything? What’s the context? You’re running the whole calculus in real time while pretending to check your phone.

When you’re bisexual or fluid or any multi-sexual identity, those questions get familiar. Routine, even. Attraction doesn’t always arrive with a clear script as it may for other groups. Sometimes the person you’re drawn to doesn’t fit the assumptions other people make about you. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they’re still figuring themselves out, discovering their own attraction in real time, to someone they never expected to want in the first place.

So your mind learns to linger in maybes.

It collects context. You notice tone. Timing. Body language. Patterns. The difference between kindness and intimacy. You ask yourself whether you’re reading possibility or projecting. After enough cycles of this you learn that a glance doesn’t mean anything by itself. You learn that some people are friendly and that’s it. Not everyone is as aware as you and sometimes things don’t mean anything.

Attraction becomes an exercise in interpretation. And interpretation and reinterpretation doesn’t stay in the bedroom, or the brunch.

Eventually, I started reading casual conversations the same way. Subtext before text. Asking why someone believed a thing before deciding whether I agreed. Looking for more information before drawing the conclusion.

I manage people. I hire. I’ll sit across from an applicant and track what they’re telling me and what they’re stepping around. The hesitation before the answer. The accomplishment they keep almost mentioning. The reason they left the last job, rehearsed a little too smooth. An experience mentioned at the interview, but not listed on the resume… Is that a superpower, or is that just a competent manager doing his job? I can’t fully separate the two. Which is my point. And the older I get, the more I’m convinced that existing between categories had quietly rewired how I moved through the whole world.

I suppose every identity trains a kind of attention.

Disabled? You clock whether “accessible entrance” means accessible or means the door by the dumpster. Black? You scan the room for who else looks like you, and clock how they’re doing before you decide how you’re doing. A woman? You scan the distance to your car.

That last one isn’t a joke. And that’s the point. The scanning is survival before it’s insight, and for so many it never gets to be insight at all.

There’s a loneliness in this way of seeing. When you instinctively reach for nuance while everyone else reaches for the “obvious” answer, conversation starts to feel like you’re speaking an adjacent language. Obvious to whom?The world rewards confidence over curiosity. Binaries over complexity. And some of the truest things refuse to be flattened into either/or.

So when someone says “I’m proud to be bisexual,” the room often hears an erotic announcement. A straight person may feel a little TMI or “that’s random” over the cheese plate. Someone on the fence may suggest that “everyone’s a little bi.” But what this person is actually declaring, what I’ve been trying to say all these years, is harder to hear: a whole way of standing in the world that doesn’t ever resolve neatly.

Now, you may be asking, Ross, is all this to say bisexual people read people better than everyone else?

I’m a little “bi-ased.” But no. I’m not claiming superior perception. I’m saying that reading ambiguous signals for years, for decades, builds a habit you don’t get to switch off.

So. The shoulder touch. The “I’ll see you later.”

Maybe they were checking you out and gauging whether you’d check back. Maybe you remind them of their cousin. Maybe they liked your Nikes. Maybe they were, in fact, admiring your…other assets.

Who knows. That’s the honest answer, and I’ve stopped needing a better one. Everybody else in that room already decided what the shoulder meant and went to get another drink.

I’m still standing there with four maybes in my hand.

Turns out that’s the whole thing bisexuals have been trying to tell you!

If this landed for you, there’s more where it came from. Embracing All of Me is an independent storytelling and cultural media platform built by and for BIPOC, Bi+/Queer communities, our friends, and kin. Find us at embracingallofme.org.