I’ve been circling this territory for a long time and still haven’t really landed. I started out believing I was heterosexual, went through a brief period thinking I might be bisexual (I had a wife and a boyfriend, what else was it?) and then fell completely in love with a man and have identified as gay ever since then.

I’ve also come back to support Kinsey’s idea of a spectrum from “completely homosexual” [is word] to “completely heterosexual.” But my thinking has expanded to believing it is more of a matrix than just a linear spectrum.

I’m coming back to liking the word queer. For many of us old LGBTQ it also feels a bit uncomfortable as it was an epithet viciously pitched at us when we were young. It is a generic label that for me incorporates all varieties of atypical sexual behavior.

I don’t believe I’m guilty of “bisexual erasure,” but for me the community is so diverse that it is difficulty to characterize it, and as a scientist, unless you can define the criteria, you can’t really study it. Many have attempted to define it which accounts for the fact that no real universal definition has been adopted.

We have sexual desire, sexual fantasy, sexual behavior and sexual identity. These vary from individual to individual and even vary within the individual. Sexual fluidity factors into these variables, too, although I believe more for women than men.

So as a man who had sex with men (MSM) I fit into some definitions of bisexuality although that’s not how I define myself. Could I have sex with a woman again? Yes. Do I fantasize about it? No. But I am a sexual being. I like sex. If the circumstances dictated it, I probably would. Would my identity change then? I’m not sure that it would.