Guest Post: Shot by both sides

In the next of my series of guest posts Charlotte Dingle, chief young person for the Greens, looks at whether there's homophobia in the gay community.

Greedy, untrustworthy, confused, lying, slutty, cowardly. I’ve been called all these things over the years, simply for being honest about the fact that my desire isn’t limited to one gender.

In a world which is slowly but surely getting its head round homosexuality, bisexuality seems to be the last taboo. People who would think twice before making a derogatory comment about a gay person still think it’s perfectly acceptable to suggest that bisexuals are great big sluts, unable to commit to monogamous relationships. As a bisexual woman, I have lost count of the number of times men have asked me for threesomes… or the times I’ve had both women and men say they’d never even consider dating me in case my desire for a ‘bit of the other’ got the better of me.

Bizarrely, the most prejudice I’ve encountered has been on the gay scene. It’s seen as some kind of betrayal, I think, that I’d dare run off and do the hetero thing at the same time as claiming my place in the gay community. They think I want the best of both worlds – in reality I am getting the worst, with hostility from both sides. The ‘B’ in LGBT often feels like it was added as an afterthought (well, actually, it was).

I grew up in a very liberal household, but even there I was taught that being bisexual wasn’t really the ideal way to be. I’ll never forget my Dad calling bisexuals “exotic”, as if it were some kind of decadent and affected behaviour… Oh, and my Mum calling them “sad” (in a melancholy sense, that is). Thankfully, both have (I hope) revised these opinions since I’ve grown up and tried to help them understand what bisexuality really means.

Then there are the folks who think bisexuals don’t exist. I’ve tied my brain in knots in the past, trying to work out if perhaps I am actually either gay or straight… and sometimes I’ve convinced myself for a while that I am one or the other, before someone cute comes along and blows my theory out of the water. The bottom line is, I have liberal friends and a liberal family and I work as editor of a magazine for lesbian and bisexual women. If someone was going to be too scared to admit they were a lesbian, it certainly wouldn’t be me. I certainly don’t date men in order to feel part of mainstream heterosexual society – I have no problem with walking down the road hand-in-hand with a woman.

Bisexuality falls along a spectrum, this much is true. I know there are girls who kiss their mates to turn their boyfriends on – and they like it just as much as Katy Perry did. I defend to the death their right to do this, but the fact is, they don’t account for all of us.

Anyway, if you’re waiting for me to ‘make my mind up’, you’ll be waiting a long time.