And someone else’s discomfort with your sexuality or the sexuality label you use for yourself doesn’t make your identity any less valid. Ultimately, concerns around the term bi-curiosity are usually just biphobia in another costume.
This fear totally ignores the fact that LGBTQ+ people have the agency to make informed decisions about who they do - or don’t - date. In other words, there’s a fear that bi-curious people are going to harm more established members of the LGBTQ+ community by dating them in a half-assed way. “There’s also a fear amongst the LGBTQ+ community that bi-curious people are outsiders who are going to infiltrate queer spaces, mess with its members, and then leave,” explains Ochs. Spoiler alert: Cis and (previously?) heterosexual people of any gender can be genuinely interested in exploring the different genders they’re attracted to! In other words: They’re doing it to be hot. Why? “Some people believe that when cis and (previously?) heterosexual women identify as bi-curious, they’re doing it to appease the male gaze,” she explains. Sadly, notes Noel, “there’s a lot of stigma surrounding bi-curiosity.” Why is this distinction so contentious for some? Bi-curious is only a sexuality identifier.Meaning: not cisgender, not heterosexual, or not allosexual.īut far more than a gender or sexuality identity, for most queer people, queer is also a political identity.īi-curious differs from “queer” in two main ways: So, some people who identify as bi-curious may use a similar definition for bi-curious as the definition for queer, and vice versa.īut bi-curious and queer typically *aren’t* synonymous.īroadly speaking, queer is defined as not the norm. But the e-x-a-c-t definition of different sexuality terms can vary based on who’s doing the defining. When it comes to sexuality terms, there’s generally a definition that most folks who identify with the term use. What about queer? The answer is a little more complicated.
Someone who’s questioning is someone who’s currently exploring their sexuality, and so folks who are exploring whether they’re bisexual (AKA bi-curious) can fall into that category. The Q in LGBTQ+ can stand for “questioning” or “queer” - and sometimes both.