Once upon a time in middle school, I came out to my mother as bisexual. Like many girls that age who have non-hetero tendencies, I had a mother who didn’t buy it. It’s normal to experiment with other girls, she told me. She clearly thought I was having make-out sessions with my girlfriends and was just confused, too young to get that this was just practice before the boys arrived. I should’ve been so lucky to have friends who would make out with me! Instead, my experience ledger was all but a blank slate till late into high school. Still, I knew that there was something different about me, virginal or not.

Research on human sexuality is pretty limited. The evidence we do have suggests women are “sexually fluid” creatures, which sounds like some kind of secretion issue but actually refers to a mix and match approach when it comes to the sex of our lovers, and not necessarily in equal proportion. I’m a member of this group. My sexual timeline can be clearly broken into “gay” and “not-so-gay” sections. Among my friends, many of whom are feminists who also attended liberal arts colleges like mine, which had naked Love Your Body marches and anal sex workshops, this is not so unusual. I’ve known a lot of women who once identified as lesbians, who fell in love with other women and had long-term relationships with them and still maintain a passing interest in the fairer sex, but now primarily have relationships with—or are married to—men. Others are open to dating members of either sex, but lean towards one or the other. Then there are those who spend many years in relationships with men, only to develop a partnership with a woman. You can call these women bi if that’s convenient for you. You can call them defectors or confused, but ultimately those terms will probably say more about you than the women you’re trying to categorise.

In high school, my label shifted to lesbian. Though I felt a rush of nervousness around my friend’s Goth guy pals, in addition to an embarrassing crush on one of my older sister’s hockey-and-football-playing friends, I wanted a relationship with a girl. Eventually, I found one. I fell in love immediately and almost as immediately got my heart broken. Well, “stomped on” would be a more appropriate description. I was undeterred, however, and when I arrived at the uber-liberal college I’d chosen a year later, I promptly threw myself down the love stairs all over again.

My state of monogamous lesbianism persisted through college. Though I developed crushes on a guy or two in my fiction workshops and painting classes, I also kept my eye on other girls, including a platinum blond who shared my name. Yet I was faithful to my girlfriend and the lesbian label. I was what you call a “gold star lesbian,” meaning I’d never been touched by a man.

That all changed around the time I graduated. My girlfriend had broken up with me and was already in love with someone else, a married man. I was heading off to grad school in the fall, which was both an exciting and terrifying prospect. It was time for a change. So, I decided to start dating men, despite knowing virtually nothing about how to go about that. My straight friends filled me in on the basics and unleashed me on the local watering hole near campus.

Once I started seeing guys, I decided to put the “lesbian” label back in the drawer. For a time, I called myself “queer,” which is a catch-all for any non-hetero behavior. Over time, though, as I continued dating men, sticking with this label started to feel dishonest. Labels are designed to sort us out, to distinguish between the deviants and the non. (Sexual deviants have more fun!) They’re also a means of empowerment through visibility. Yet, if I was no longer living a lifestyle that could be viewed as deviant, wasn’t I appropriating a category that I didn’t really belong to and was doing nothing to actively support? So, I peeled that label off, too, and began making my way through the world label-less.

The secret I uncovered is that if you’re engaging in straight person behavior, such as dating a man, you don’t need a label because everyone just assumes you’re straight, which is fine by them. When I tried to assert my more complicated identity by, for example, pointing out in mixed company which female celebs I was attracted to (if you haven’t seen Gina Gershawn in “Bound,” you need to drop everything and do so immediately) I was met with awkward silence. I quickly learned to shut up about my history, especially around straight dudes who thought it was “cool” or “sexy” that I’d been with women. To them, I was “bi,” which was another way of saying “open to a three-way.” But I wasn’t looking for a ménage a trois or a ménage a-anything and I never thought of myself as bisexual, since my interest in the men and women was not exactly 50/50.

My first ever boyfriend at the age of twenty-two was also my first experience openly dating someone. Though my ex-girlfriend and I were together for a total of three years, my extended family never knew of her existence and my immediate family sometimes pretended that they didn’t, either. Suddenly, strangers and family alike not only knew about my relationship, they were approving of it. It was fine for my boyfriend and I to walk around holding hands or even kiss in public. I could stop looking over my shoulder and worrying about harassment or violence. I could let my guard down. The experience of this stark contrast left me incredibly angry. Furious, in fact. Now I knew first-hand what I’d been missing out on, what many of my friends were still being denied.

Ten years later, I’m living in San Francisco and married to a man. My existence is still label-free, but my story is a hard one to explain to those who haven’t experienced any fluidity in their sexual identity. When called upon to discuss my romantic history with people I don’t know that well, I often play the pronoun game and resist revealing whom I loved in the past for fear of raised eyebrows and comments on how I must’ve been “confused” or one of those LUGs—Lesbian Until Graduation. In reality, the truth about my identity is far more complicated than this limited system of categorisation.

I believe I always had the capacity to be attracted to and fall in love with both men and women. How that potential manifested probably had a lot to do with my options, how accepting—or not accepting—my community was, and also the lifestyle I was living at that time. In other words, I guess I’m a kind of sexual chameleon who adapts to her circumstances, which can make it seem like I was too cowardly to stay on the lesbian path, but that view politicizes intensely personal choices and feelings. As the old adage goes, the heart wants what the heart wants.

Things have changed quite a bit since I was a brave eighth grader trying to talk frankly about sexuality with my mother. Today, there are people who admit to same sex attraction but choose to remain celibate for religious reasons. There are those who commit to a same-sex partner and buy a house, raise some kids, and drive a big honkin’ SUV. Others are in polyamorous relationships or eschew commitment of any kind. All of these people can still be neatly filed into categories of “gay,” “straight,” or “bi” based solely on the sex of their partners, but that detail seems irrelevant when you take the long view. Things get stickier when you involve trans identity. If a lesbian woman has a relationship with a trans man, is she, like, totally straight now? Or what about someone who is intersex? We can roll up our sleeves and exhaust ourselves grappling with this and that category till finally we have to ask, what exactly are we accomplishing here by deciding what to call a person who loves another person?

As The Well of Loneliness days draw to a close and we all inch (slowly, but surely) closer towards widespread acceptance of queer identity and non-straightness generally, we should all be able to choose our partners and decide what kind of life we’ll live with them without having to put a sign on the front lawn that declares our label. Hopefully, in the future, if there’s no longer such a tremendous need to identify to unify, or if we as a society stop trying to point fingers at those “sexual deviants,” these categories may then become obsolete and we can put that old sexual label maker back on the shelf, where it belongs.

-LM