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magazine home, so I hid it in some bushes and went back to visit it daily until a night of rain destroyed it.
    Confusing the issue was the fact that I was supposed to like boys. The boys in my fifth grade class were immature morons. Who would want to kiss them?
    Relief, along with attraction, flooded my body whe n Star Trek: The Next Generatio n spawned my first real crush in 1990: Wil Wheaton. Case closed: I was straight, and I was grateful.
    In high school, I began experimenting with boys. I liked kissing boys. I liked the tangible proof of their arousal when ‘hanging out’ turned into making out. I liked it when they slid their hands under my shirt. Those ‘turgid manhoods’ of the bodice rippers were no longer repulsive.
    I would think about girls, but when those thoughts turned sexual I told myself that what I felt was envy or aspiration. That I wanted to be like them, not be with them. It’s not like I was a lesbian – I liked making out with boys – so I was straight.
    A lesbian wouldn’t enjoy making out with boys. I couldn’t picture any other explanation.
    When I became sexually active, I chose male partners.
    In college, I constructed a new explanation for my confusion without modifying my identity as a straight woman : Society teaches us that women are sexually desirable. It’s only normal that I should find women attractive. It’s society’s fault, not mine.
    I told myself that when I would wake up from a dream involving a woman. When I’d masturbate and the person I was thinking about suddenly became a woman. Even finding my panties and cunt wet with arousal after hanging out with a woman I liked (as a friend) didn’t change my identity as a straight woman.
    I shared my theory about society and female attraction with my best friend. She agreed with me (which meant I was right). I was straight and it was society’s fault I was attracted to other women. It wasn’t a real thing, just the by-product of social conditioning.
    My best friend and I continued to blame society for every girl we thought of as sexy.
    We even used my theory to justify experimenting. Just to see what it would be like. Because society had taught us that we should want to experience the difference between men and women’s lips. We ended up on my dorm bed. Lipstick smeared, bras abandoned, fingers sliding into panties. Afterward we went out to a night club and made a point of dirty dancing with men because, dammit, we were STRAIGHT.
    It was awkward when she decided that our make-out session had satisfied her curiosity. That maybe at some later time she might do it again, but for now it was all penis all the time. I didn’t feel the same.
    Even though by that point I had gay friends and had divorced myself of the prejudices of my upbringing, I just couldn’t wrap my head around my own sexuality. Had I been attracted solely to women, I could have understood that. Wanting both men and women made me feel guilty. Why couldn’t I just pick?
    This is the heart of one of the most harmful and common tropes of bisexuality: that we are greedy, slutty fence sitters who are unwilling to limit ourselves to partners of one sex. I should know how harmful it is, it’s the argument with which I berated myself.
    Admitting that I sought counseling from my college’s therapists is somewhat embarrassing, but I needed to talk to someone, to say things aloud that I’d kept quiet for a long time, and they provided a safe environment. Within a few months of that make out session, I came out to someone for the first time. My friends accepted me. My mom decided it was a phase I’d soon be over, just as I’d gotten over my goth phase, and rolled her eyes.
    While reaching the conclusion that I was bi was a challenge, once I made peace with it, I was quite happy to define myself as bisexual.
    I spent the rest of my early and mid-twenties dating and fucking my way through a swath of partners. I hooked up at bars with men and women. I did online dating