By Louise Alvarez

I’ve always found women beautiful. But, growing up in the Middle East, I never assumed it had anything to do with my sexuality. 

I never even met a queer person until I was sixteen. I did not understand what it meant to be queer. When I eventually made this discovery, I started questioning everything I thought I knew about myself. 

When I was seventeen, my best friend and I joked about how we would dump our boyfriends and just date each other. We thought we were being ironic; it was a funny but impossible joke. Neither one of us wanted to confess to the other that there was an element of truth hidden within that light-hearted proclamation. She was beautiful, and I was attracted to her, and I denied it. 

Fast forward to 2018, my first year at university. While I had finally acknowledged that I might be bi-curious, I was still in denial about my attraction to women. Things changed when I kissed a girl for the first time in a club. I was drunk and shamelessly flirting with her. I was not embarrassed or worried. After kissing and dancing together all night, she asked me whether I wanted to talk about it; whether I wanted to talk about what it meant. I don’t think I’ve run away faster from a situation than I did then. 

Even later, when I told this story, I still told it with an incredulous tone – as if she was the one who was reading into things and was asking me something unreasonable. It’s then that I became aware of just how much self-loathing and shame I was holding on to. It’s as if I suddenly had a realisation that I was ‘allowed’ to be gay, that I could be queer. That I could be whatever the fuck I wanted to be. 

I had that realisation too late. 

I’m now in a long-term heterosexual relationship. I’m terrified, after suppressing part of my identity for so long, that my bisexuality is somehow not ‘valid.’ That my sexuality can somehow be dismissed. That just because I am dating a man means that I cannot possibly be attracted to women. It’s precisely for these reasons that I wanted to come out to my mom. It was important to me to be able to share with her a part of my identity that I’d been hiding, a part that I had been ashamed of for so long but no longer wanted to be. 

At first, she seemed to accept it. Now, though, I can’t help but feel that she is still, either consciously or subconsciously, expecting a ‘traditional’ (heteronormative) life for me. That I will ‘eventually’ end up with a man. And it is SO frustrating that this presupposition about the bisexual identity and who we end up being, who we are supposed to be, exists.

I find that these biases exist everywhere. There is even an internal bias in me that seeks to quiet my queerness: I don’t have sex dreams. I’ve almost had numerous sex dreams, all of which were about women. But each time in my dream, I would remind myself that I am in a heterosexual relationship. Then I’d wake up. This deep, ingrained guilt stems from dominant hetero ideals that surround us everywhere. It’s time to leave those ideals behind. 

I am finally starting to accept that being in a monogamous heterosexual relationship does not invalidate my sexuality. Nor does being bisexual imply that I’m 50% straight and 50% gay. My sexuality is whatever I make of it. And it’s incredibly liberating to finally say it out loud and write it down and be able to share it. 

Your sexuality is YOURS. You get to define the narrative of who you are, regardless of what relationship you are in.