My favourite argument against bi!Dean is ‘BUT DEAN SAID HE WAS STRAIGHT’, because I just get to laugh a knowing little laugh & think to myself ‘Yeah, so did I. even believed it at the time, too’
But for those among you who doubt statements like this whenever we post them, I’m gonna get a little more personal.
Quick backstory: I didn’t figure out I was bi until I was about 23 years old, and I didn’t come out for around two years after that. I thought I was straight for a long fucking time. And even when I knew I wasn’t, I pretended to be–despite a pretty large percentage of my friends hanging out somewhere under the umbrella of many letters. Seriously, I can count the amount of straight friends I have on one hand. I struggled anyway.
So, with that in mind, here is an actual list of things that I personally said and did before I realized that the figurative pendulum of my heart and hoohah swings both ways. Some of these things are shitty things, which are a direct result of me just not believing that bisexuality was real.
Me! A non believer! Ridiculous. Though not really all that ridiculous, because no matter how underwhelming representation is now, it was a whole lot worse then.
Alright. The list:
“No, I’m straight!” When, at age 16, someone asked my best friend and I if we were a couple. Whether I was straight or not was not the question he asked, but that was my answer. And again when another friend asked me at a party when I was 17. And again whenever girls would hit on me when I was 18-19 and going to clubs, because I was scared of acting on what I was convinced were ~passing feelings.
Kissed girls but it “didn’t count” My first kiss was with a girl I was friends with at age eleven, but I didn’t count it as my first kiss. I kind of forgot about it, despite the fact that we used to kiss each other in her treehouse all the time. Like… for over a year, I’d go to her house after school and we’d hang out and kiss each other. But for a long time, if someone were to ask me who my first kiss was, I would have said it was this guy Adam who I kissed at a party when I was sixteen. Nope. It was Lucy.
“It’s more like a sexual disorientation, because they just don’t know what they want!” and “Everyone knows bisexuality is just a pit stop on the way to gay town!” I used to say some variation of this literally every time someone mentioned bisexuality at all when I was a teenager. Yes past me, you were very witty with your wordplay and your banter but you were also an incredibly ill-informed jackass who hated herself a little bit. Honestly, this attitude is why it took me so long to work it out, because I was like… bisexuality isn’t real! Everyone knows that! You either like one or the other, you can’t like both! Sigh. Seriously, if you’re looking for reasons why representation matters, THIS IS ONE OF THOSE REASONS. Don’t even get me started on how much the whole Willow-is-a-lesbian-now thing on Buffy fucked me up. As great as that arc was for lesbian rep, the fact that there was never even a suggestion on the show that maybe she was bi was a major failure on the show’s part. Moving on.
I flirted with girls but only when it felt safe to do so. Talking to girls on the Internet? Safe to flirt! Punk or ska gigs? Safe to flirt! Indie clubs? Safe to flirt! Comic book store? Safe to flirt! Mainstream clubs or bars? Not safe to flirt. Why weren’t those places safe? Because creepy straight dudes crawl out of the woodwork the fucking second they sense two girls flirting–let alone dancing or kissing. Instant mood killer, instant need to disinfect entire body just to get rid of the crawling feeling.
“No, that grosses me out!” When a guy at one of those mainstream clubs flat out asked me if I would ever sleep with a girl. I already knew I was into girls at this point–the only thing that grossed me out was that this creep I didn’t know was clearly asking for drunken-threesome reasons.
“I’m just not into girls, sorry.” When I found myself on an accidental date (I thought it was just friendly coffee, she thought she had been clear) with a girl from my screenwriting class. I had inklings of my bi-ness then, but that didn’t mean I was ready to taste the rainbow, so to speak. I denied all interest in women in order to cut off all chances I might be swayed.
I had crushes on girls that I never acted upon, except in “harmless” ways Mix tapes were made for this cute girl in my film class. Excessive compliments were bestowed on my neighbor when I lived on the island. I initiated a lot of bad dancing. I wanted these girls to like me, the same as I wanted guys I had crushes on to like me. The only difference was, when they occasionally showed signs of actually liking me, I panicked and did the internal equivalent of walking into a table.
Meanwhile, through all this, my sexuality was like:
It’s been discussed widely, so I’m not going to go into it too much here, but every time Dean has said he “doesn’t swing that way” he has been in a situation where he’s felt threatened. He notably doesn’t say any such thing when Aaron hits on him.
No, he looks interested. Flattered. Aaron, on the other hand, clearly wasn’t expecting his flirtation to get that kind of reaction, and you can see it on his face as he thinks “Oh, shit.”
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