Every day I wake up differently hungry
Sometimes for sinew and sometimes for silk. Sometimes for mascara tears (mine), and sometimes for stubble rash (also mine). Sometimes I want to be ruined by a woman in a leather trench coat. Sometimes I want to be comforted by a boy with chipped black nail polish and a playlist full of Scissor Sisters and increasingly bad decisions.
Speaking of playlists….
I’ve been bisexual since I discovered the word, around age 13 or 14, curled in the corner of the internet like a secret spell I wasn’t supposed to read. I came out to my friends around 15/16. I came out to my parents around 27. The timing changed; the bisexuality didn’t. Spoiler alert: It still hasn’t.
It’s always been there. The divine chaos of desire that doesn’t ask for permission. The glitch in the algorithm. The click just before the kiss. The internal jukebox that never picks a genre.
I have loved Olympic-level women with jawlines like Doric columns. I have loved scene boys in eyeliner whose wrists were thinner than my sense of self. I have loved in gradients and ghosts, in fragments and full-bellied fire.
And still—still—I get told it’s a phase, a stepping stone, a marketing campaign, a statistical error, a kink, a coward’s closet. A try-before-you-buy sexuality. A sex-party punchline. Bi now, gay later. Bi now, lie forever.
Even now—when bisexuality is more visible than ever—there’s a rising tide of biphobia. We’re the punchline again. Too queer for the straights, too straight for the queers. The in-betweeners. The unreliable narrators of the alphabet mafia.
We get erased no matter who we date. Our love is always under suspicion. Our queerness is questioned if we hold the wrong hand in public. Even my own mum still refers to my entire queer history-themed PhD as “the gay thing.” Classic bit of erasure.
And not the “entire EP of ABBA-covers” kind of Erasure.
Another playlist incoming!
The ever more hurtful “I don’t quite see you” kind.
And yet—here I am. More bisexual than ever. Glorious, greedy, feral, fashionable, and completely unavoidable.
Being a bisexual man means being a contradiction in a culture that demands cohesion. It means navigating masculinity and queerness while constantly being asked to justify varying levels of both.
You’re expected to pick a side. To explain yourself. To “prove” it. There’s no script for us—only a pile of tropes: the confused teenager, the closeted gay man, the hypersexual predator, the flaky partner.
We are often either fetishised or ignored—rarely treated with the quiet dignity afforded to those who don’t rattle the cage of the binary.
And still, we exist. Joyfully. Complicatedly. Without apology.
Bisexual men, in particular, are part of the seemingly invisible letter in LGBTQ+. We’re not just underrepresented—we’re often completely unacknowledged. Even within queer communities, bisexuality is frequently reduced to a pitstop, a stepping stone, a phase. If you’re a man attracted to more than one gender, people assume it’s just a long way around to gay.
We don’t just vanish from public discourse; we’re erased from our own lives. From films. From historical accounts. From conversations where our presence might complicate the narrative.
I came out as bisexual and everyone acted like I’d come out as undecided. But I wasn’t asking a question. I was giving an answer. If that answer still sounds like a question to you, that’s on you.
Bisexual people make up the largest percentage of the LGBTQ+ community—over half, by some estimates. But you wouldn’t know it based on representation, funding, or visibility.
In the UK, the Office for National Statistics reports that 3.8% of the population identifies as LGB—with bisexuality sharply rising among Gen Z. But bisexual men? Still wildly underrepresented in media, politics, and public life. We’re the shadow cast by other people’s assumptions.
Mental health disparities are real and measurable: bisexual men report higher rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide than both gay and straight men. Not because bisexuality is inherently damaging—but because of the persistent invalidation and isolation we experience.
Biphobia Isn’t a Mild Inconvenience
Let’s be clear: biphobia isn’t just an awkward joke at a dinner party. It’s systemic. It’s cultural. It’s the force that pushes people back into the closet or stops them ever coming out.
It’s the disbelief. The oversexualisation. The assumption that bisexual men are greedy, promiscuous, or somehow incapable of commitment. It’s being seen as a threat to gay authenticity and hetero stability alike. It’s being too queer and not queer enough at the same time.
Biphobia is queerphobia. There’s no hierarchy of harm. There’s just harm.
Bisexual erasure is quiet, efficient, and constant. It happens when you’re dating someone of a different gender and people assume you’re straight. It happens when your past relationships are ignored or rewritten. It happens in classrooms, on Netflix, and in history books.
It happens when “gay” becomes the shorthand for all queer experience. When media flattens identity into visibility tropes. When you have to prove your queerness to enter queer spaces. When your desire becomes something to explain away.
Bisexuality does not require your validation to exist. But the world often demands our explanation before it will even pretend to listen.
We have pride because we are (as always) being erased. We have all these different identity markers because our identities are being questioned, problematised, and unpicked.
The Feral Magic of Wanting Everything
Bisexuality isn’t a halfway point. It’s a crossroads that never stops spinning. A spell cast by David Bowie and Brendon Urie. A communion of Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser in The Mummy, where your desire ricochets between them like a goddamn sunbeam. It’s the space between things—and the thing itself. It’s not confusion; it’s complexity.
It’s both/and.
It’s neither/nor.
It’s yes.
As Hera Lindsay Bird puts it in her poem “Bisexuality”:
“It’s hard to know what bisexuality means
It just…….comes over you, like an urban sandstorm
When a fish crawls up on to land?—that’s bisexuality
It’s an ancient sexual amphibiousness
It’s like climbing out of a burning building into too much water
Or climbing out of a burning building……
into a second identical burning building
Why does everything have to be so on fire? you ask yourself
But when you look down, your fretwork is smoking”
My own poem, “Either/Or,” is an unholy hymn to this experience, as a direct after poem to Hera Lindsay Bird’s poem about bisexuality.
Because that’s what it is. A divine inconvenience. A beautiful complication. A catalogue of cravings you can’t unsubscribe from. You want love in surround sound. You want longing that shapeshifts. You want to be ruined in every colour of the visible spectrum.
We Are Not a Phase. We Are the Prism.
And to the ones whispering that bisexuality is performative, or fashionable, or fake—read a fucking book.
No, really. Read Lord Byron. Read William S. Burroughs. Read Savannah Brown. Read June Jordan. Read Walt Whitman. Read Megan Fox. Read Elizabeth Bishop. Read Robert Graves. Read H.D. Read Paul Verlaine. Read me. Read us all.
If you’re reading this and you’re one of us (one of us one of us one of us one of us) please leave a comment below, show me your most bisexual outfits!!
We have always been here. Writing sonnets on both sides of the aisle. Moaning in every register of grammar. Making history ache in new directions.
We write from the fever. We write from the flicker. We write from the places that can’t be pinned down by heterosexual monogamy or queer gatekeeping. We write from the borderlands. And the borderlands are where the magic lives.
So Why the Rising Tide of Biphobia?
Because we threaten the binary. Because we refuse easy categorisation. In a world obsessed with neat labels and marketable identities, we remain stubbornly “unresolved”. We disrupt simplistic narratives that demand we fit neatly into one category or another. Because our identities sprawl unpredictably, they’re slippery, seductive, perpetually evading definition.
Bisexuality unsettles. It resists commodification. It’s a shape-shifting form of queerness that is, by its very nature, unruly. It challenges the rigidity of certainty and insists instead on fluidity and possibility. We are accused of confusion when really, we embody complexity. Our existence raises too many questions, uncomfortable and open-ended questions.
But perhaps biphobia also emerges because we mirror others' hidden anxieties and uncertainties back to them. Because we exist in the grey areas everyone navigates privately, but few openly acknowledge. Our presence might remind others of their own suppressed complexities and desires, their internal ambiguities that society pressures them to erase. We represent an unsettling reminder that sexuality—and indeed, identity itself—might be more expansive and fluid than rigid structures allow.
Instead, it’s wild. It defies expectation, constantly reconfiguring itself across spectrums of attraction, desire, and intimacy. It remains steadfastly queer, regardless of the direction it turns toward.
This is precisely why Pride Month matters. Not merely as celebration or spectacle—but as a necessary platform, as a stage for those whose identities slip through the cracks of expectation, whose experiences never quite measure up to arbitrary standards of "enough."
So let me reiterate clearly: I’m bisexual. And that's not a disclaimer, an apology, or an afterthought.
That’s the thesis.
Bisexuality is My Superpower. And My Chaos.
It’s the reason I never know where to stand at weddings. It’s the reason I’m always slightly overdressed. Bisexuality is the plot twist. The double exposure. The echo. The feast. It’s the constant cliffhanger, the secret ingredient, the unsolvable mystery. It’s why my playlists never stick to a genre, and why my wardrobe looks like the castoffs of three separate decades had an illicit affair.
And I’m not here to convince anyone anymore. I’m not here to apologise. I’m not here to pick a lane.
I’m here to write the chaos into poetry. I’m here to scream love in every direction. I’m here to be the bisexual poet I wish I’d found when I was 13. I’m here to prove that uncertainty can sparkle, that indecision can ignite, and that the in-between is not emptiness—it’s abundance.
We contain fucking multitudes. All of us. And if that scares you, fuck off!
A Queer Challenge
Who benefits from bisexual erasure?
What would it mean if bisexuality were acknowledged in its full complexity? What would it mean to see more than two fixed points on the map of desire?
What stories have you accepted as complete that were actually censored at the root?
If you’re uncomfortable—it might be working.
Bisexuality is not a compromise. It is a calling.
To love outside the algorithm. To desire with nuance. To exist with contradiction. To be multiple things without shame.
To speak in echoes. To choose abundance over allegiance. To live in flux without fear.
If you’re looking for a tidy ending, you won’t find it here.
Bisexuality refuses the tidy ending.
And maybe that’s its greatest gift.
If You’ve Made It This Far...
Thank you. Thank you for riding the wave of feral queer chaos and landing here, dizzy and glowing.
If you felt seen, send it to someone. If you felt unsettled, sit with that. If you’re bisexual, or questioning, or just vaguely horny and confused—welcome. We’ve got sequins and snacks, and plenty more where that came from.
I write about this kind of thing all most of the time. Queerness, poetry, identity, ghosts, bisexual angst, and the complicated mess of being a camp, queer softboi revolutionary in a world that still doesn’t quite know what to do with us.
Subscribe if you want more. Comment if you’ve got thoughts. Share if you know someone who needs to read this. And remember—
We’re not “half gay.”
We’re not confused.
We’re not a stop on your journey.
We’re the whole fucking map.
Happy Pride.
🌈💥🧃
RST xo
(Professional Bisexual. Unofficial Patron Saint of Bisexual Panic. Limitless Snack Sorcerer. Chaos Co-Ordinator. Self-Professed Goblin King of Poetry)
As always, find me across social media at the link below:
I’m currently running a poetry competition called Verse Traps. I’m posting daily prompts across social media, and all the details are in my pinned post. Every prize bundle includes a signed copy of my poetry collection Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel—the book that features the poem Either/Or, which inspired this article.. this is your sign to enter your most bisexual poem into the competition immediately!
"The Feral Magic of Wanting Everything"
aiiiiiiii...............
Absolutely beautiful :’) happy pride 🩷💜💙