If I Date a Man or a Woman —

Which one makes me gay?

The answer to this is resoundingly clear to myself and a lot of the readers here. I’m a man, so if I date a man that is what makes me gay.

The confusion comes when other people start getting involved with their…perceptions.

I was at a family party over the weekend and had a decent enough time. Dad and I are not super social so we stayed put at one table and other relatives filtered in and out. But one cousin popped in to grill me for gossip as cousins do and she asked if I was seeing anyone. The answer is no, not in particular, but she was delighted to get a blush out of me.

It’s not that my dating life is particularly salacious. I mean, I’ve got some stories, but on the whole, it’s not super enthralling. It’s that it forced me to think about the perception of my family, if I were to bring someone new around. This is likely an issue with my friends as well, to a lesser extent, though we’ve had enough conversations by this point about my bisexuality. I choose the term bisexual because it feels the best fit for me personally. Maybe I’ll delve more into it at another time. My friends won’t bat an eye more than to say, ‘Oh, you’re actually seeing someone seriously enough for us to meet them? I thought you were #singlefolife.’

If I bring a guy to a family party, this would fit the pattern they’re used to from me and so they might think of this as a heterosexual relationship for me, despite the fact that I’ve fully got a beard now. If I turn up with a woman, they’d probably ‘know’ that would be a straight relationship, but they’d also probably think I was a ‘lesbian’.

While it doesn’t matter who I date, it will be a queer relationship to some degree for several reasons, it bothers me that it would be read as the wrong sort of queerness, for the wrong reasons.

My first serious relationship, long before I came out, was with a woman. I was never comfortable with open affection with her because I didn’t like people looking at me and saying, “lesbian.” I mean, they’d been saying that all through school because I read as queer even when I was desperately trying to hide it, but they had some ammo at that point. I hated the sense of erasure that came with being labeled the wrong sort of queer and that didn’t help our relationship, though it limped along for two years before imploding.

So you might say I’m extra touchy about the whole thing, really.

Being aware of how other people perceive you is something that I think trans people are super focused on. After all, it’s often a matter of safety, sometimes literal life or death. Which means there’s a lot of overthinking and navel gazing, even on aspects that aren’t actually dangerous so much as annoying.

The only obvious solution is to remain single forever (#singlefolife). Beyond that, I have no solutions, but I’d welcome any thoughts from anyone else.