Yes, I'm Bisexual and No, You Can't Watch

Bi doesn't mean saying bye to boundaries. Calm down, bro

- By Anamika Shah

Pride month is here, which means brands have popped the Rainbow pill and won't shut up about being an “ally to the community”, restaurants are offering up special menus for same-sex dates and suddenly, your timeline is full of colourful Pride Parades or your friends are planning to catch a drag show at Kitty Su this Saturday. As a bisexual woman, I considered June as the month of confusion and curiosity, and more often than not, the corporate pride propaganda made me feel more alien than “included” in the narrative.

You see, bisexuality is often treated as the weird middle child of the LGBTQ+ community—too straight for the gays, too gay for the straights. You're often told you are “confused” or “experimenting” or worse, “doing it for attention”. Spoiler: it's not a phase, bro. It's literally who I am. It's my preference, like how you could listen to Kendrick Lamar’s entire discography and switch to a Sunidhi Chauhan playlist and derive just as much joy from both those experiences.

However, gaining this clarity about my sexuality hasn't been a straightforward path to enlightenment. When I was a teenager, I blamed my all-girls school. It was a convenient explanation—the fact that being surrounded by 800 girls had triggered something subconsciously. Add that to my mildly strict upbringing where my parents expected me to repel boys and I thought maybe I was a product of my environment, like a social experiment gone mildly fruity. However, attraction to women continued well beyond the age of wearing uniforms.