Embracing My Bisexualiy Meant Embracing Change

I knew that I was queer for the longest time, but I was deeply confused about what that meant specifically. Growing up as a queer kid in South Africa was a very isolating experience. South Africa has been something of a trailblazer when it comes to on-paper LGBT rights, but culturally, it’s a fairly conservative country. I had no one to talk to about how I felt, and no visible role models. I wasn’t sure exactly where I fit.

As a teenager, my first girlfriend and I had this amazing sexual chemistry, but at the same time, I was also in love with my best friend who was a guy. One moment I’d be with my girlfriend and I’d think I was straight. Then I’d have fantasies about my friend and think I must be gay. In the pop culture of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, all you ever saw was “straight” and “gay.” Bisexuality was basically nonexistent. It was a word in the dictionary that you knew existed in theory, but you never saw it in practice. And it left me in a state of total cognitive dissonance that lasted for many years.

Fast forward to 2012: I’m 29 years old, married to a beautiful woman I love, and making strides as a mechanical engineer. Everything seemed wonderful on the surface. But something was missing. There was a part of me I had repressed all my life and it had become unbearable. I came out to my wife — not as bi, or gay, or with any label, but I told her I was attracted to men as well as women. It took her by surprise. We both loved each other and had a great sex life. She initially assumed I must be gay, but that didn’t add up. Either way, she accepted me. It was my therapist who first suggested what should have been obvious all along but somehow never was: that I might be bi. I knew so little about bisexuality that I didn’t know what to make of it. It wasn’t until I began interacting with the bi community that I finally started coming into my own as a bi man.

I reached out to bi organizations and began corresponding with Rio Veradonir and Ian Lawrence from Bi.org. They helped me create a Johannesburg chapter of the bi social club, amBi. Ian in particular was incredibly generous with his time and gave me a lot of advice, encouragement, and affirmation when I needed it most. He even flew out to South Africa from California to make sure everything was in order while we were setting up the amBi chapter and stayed with my wife and I. My bisexuality finally had a name, but until that point, it was just an abstraction. It was immensely liberating to go from just thinking about my sexuality to actually building a space in the real world where I could enjoy the company of other bi people as a bi person myself.

While my wife accepted me as a bi man, she didn’t feel comfortable opening up our marriage, which I’d asked to do. As time went by, this put a strain on the relationship. I treasured my wife and the life we’d built together, but I also had this burning desire to explore this other side of my sexuality, and it was consuming me to keep it bottled up. Eventually, she relented and agreed to open up the marriage. It didn’t work out. Some people are just wired for monogamy. We ended up divorcing in 2017, though we parted on amicable terms and remain good friends to this day.

To that point, I still hadn’t been out to my family and friends, so I came out, and it went wonderfully. That was the beginning of my life as an openly bi guy. In many ways, I was a late bloomer, and it wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I felt mature and self-possessed enough to really confront these fundamental questions of identity — questions like “who am I?” — with myself. I think a part of me also wanted to subconsciously make sure I was well-established in my career and financially independent so that in the event that I faced some kind of backlash, I wouldn’t be in a vulnerable spot.

I moved to Canada in 2018 and have been living in Toronto ever since. I’m in a relationship now with a man, but I’m still as bi as ever! I want to emphasize that because there are a lot of misconceptions about bisexuality. I have a good friend here in Canada, a gay man, and he’s told me on more than one occasion that he doesn’t think I’m bi. He doesn’t think bisexuality is a real thing. According to him, I’m just gay. We’ve had some heated discussions about it. On the spectrum of sexuality, I think my attractions are more homosexual than they are heterosexual. Maybe a 4 on the Kinsey scale. And I’m currently in a same-sex relationship. But that doesn’t mean I’m gay.

Bi people end up getting pigeonholed as either gay or straight based on whoever they’re in a relationship with at any given time. It’s something I encounter a lot, especially among gay and lesbian folks, who have a tendency to disregard or erase bisexuality. I guess they just don’t understand what it’s like. The longer I live as an out bi man though, the less I find that these stereotypes and misconceptions affect me. I’m in a place now where I feel like other people’s negativity can’t really touch me. When you’re secure in yourself, it’s easy to just brush it off and live your life.

It took me 40 years to get here, but I’m just happy to have finally arrived.