Sometime between learning algebra and using tampons for the first time, I decided that being bisexual must mean you were necessarily polyamorous. There were no gay elders in my life or community for me to go to, I didn’t even know coming out was an option, I was vaguely aware of polyamory (not that term) because my mother, I think, is naturally polyamorous and is stuck in a socially-dictated monogamous marriage and I thought, always, that loving lots of people just made sense the way she talked about it. She always spoke about relationships in ways that I now recognise in poly communities. With the very limited information I had about life and sexuality at that age, I knew a couple of things for sure — I liked girls and also boys and I didn’t want to date just one person at a time — I just put that all together and concluded that I must be polyamorous because I am bi/pansexual. It made sense to me at the time. If my body was designed to be attracted to all kinds of people, surely my brain was given the privilege of not having to make a choice between genders, right?
I am two decades older now and I understand that is not how it works.
When you’re a kid, you’re taught romance as a fairytale and you build an unreasonable picture usually informed by Disney and the modernised renditions of the Grimm brothers and if you are lucky, a dash of your own authenticity, and my picture had me in ‘happily ever after’ with at least one man and at least one woman, and maybe some other people, who all lived in separate houses with dungeons in all basements where they would torture me constantly. I did not understand enough about societal conditions to factor those into who I am and it was only when I started dating that I realised the complexity and politics of queerness, polyamory or fetishism. In a heteronormative, sexually conservative, monogamy-normal world, dating is hard when you are none of those things. I was also born with the curse of too much directness and honesty. I just believe that everything will be fine if I always tell people the truth about who I am and what I want.
I did that.
In the first five years of doing that, here are the things that happened: I got the reputation for being a slut and was socially-shamed for it. When I started dating the first woman I loved, she made it very clear that we had to hide it from everyone and when her family found out they blamed me for her mental health issues, accused me of making her a lesbian, threated to attack me and told the entire city that I had almost killed their daughter with my lesbian intentions. Most people I dated told me there was something wrong with me because I wanted to date more than one person at a time and that necessarily meant that I was broken in some way. Once word got out about my “lesbian-ness,” every girl at my school who wanted to “experiment” ended up at my house with a bottle of vodka at some point and extracted promises that I would never tell anyone that we had hooked up. Every man I dated assumed my bisexuality existed so they could have threesomes and considered it cheating when they weren’t involved in my relationships with other women. As for masochism, it was simply understood by everyone that I had a mental health issue that was causing me to be that way. I was told that by people I dated, by my family, by the therapists I was forced to see and the psychiatrists who diagnosed me with one issue after another based solely on my “deviant sexual behaviour,” that something was wrong.
That’s what the conglomerate of my sexuality and sexual orientation was called. The nexus of pansexuality, polyamory and fetishism was diagnosed as deviant sexual behaviour and my childhood version of “happily ever after” was read back to me as an illness. Fortunately for me, I somehow had the conviction that they were wrong and so I refused to agree with this or accept it or hate myself on the basis of it. On that front, I really think I just got lucky in that I made an arbitrary decision to stick with my assessment of events instead of theirs. I figured I wouldn’t have to live in the society to which I was born, I could leave as soon as I was an adult and once I did, I could just create my own society where I was acceptable.
And so I thought I did.
I left home, I went to a liberal city, to a liberal college and I continued to live my life as I always had. I suddenly found that being queer, poly and kinky meant that I was cool in this environment. All the things for which I had been attacked, shamed, diagnosed all my young life were suddenly cool things in this youth-centred environment. I did not know what to do with that. As much as I don’t want my identity shamed, I don’t actually want it exalted either, it’s two sides of the same coin. My sexuality is not a social currency and I did not know how to articulate that. I was more interested in social and political advocacy so I got involved with the queer groups and alliances that existed on campus but I soon found that most of what they did was have parties and hook up with each other. They couldn’t talk to the press because “what if our parents see it” and they couldn’t go out in the streets to protest because “what if someone takes a picture” and they couldn’t take their partners home (and honestly I am delighted to see pride parades and more and more political advocacy as I get older and I hope to continue that for as long as possible). Essentially, for a lot of them, the four years of college was the only time they had to be wild and free.
And let me be very clear, I completely understand this.
India is not a country where you can just come out. The progressive circles in which you can be “out” whether that is out as gay, trans, poly, sexually liberal, kinky or anything, honestly, that is at odds with the ever-expanding “sanctity” of “Indian culture” are very small. A lot of us, as we get older, tend to insulate ourselves within circles where we can be ourselves but that is majorly a function of privilege, most communities do not and would not accept this. If you have ever wondered why our politicians do not appease the progressive sensibilities, it’s because this vote bank is miniscule (and hopefully it is getting larger). In this country, we exist as versions of ourselves in different spheres of our lives. You may be gay in your own home, but you are expected to present as straight in your parents home. You can tell all your friends about your girlfriend but your colleagues must still see you as heterosexual. The “don’t ask/don’t tell” is implied. As you get older, even your friends start to question your “wild ways” and ask when you are going to settle down with a nice boy and have a real life. Your formerly progressive friends whose pussies have been in your mouth start asking why won’t you just grow up and be straight already.
You know that question Indian women are asked at interviews about when we are planning to get married? I answered that question once by saying I couldn’t because I was dating a woman and we did not have the right to be married. This person proceeded to tell me that I had chosen a hard life for myself and then not give me the job without seeing the irony (and though now I work for a place that has a very clear policy of non-discrimination, that place was hard to find). Essentially, you can be yourself as much as you like, you can be as progressive as you want, but the cost of deviation will be assessed by the sensibilities of the society around you and the cost is high. I know for a fact that for most of us the cost is emancipation and for a few it’s death. Personally, for the choice of being pansexual, polyamorous, sexually open, liberal, outspoken and whatever else makes an unpalatable woman, the price has been social shaming and shunning, estrangement from my family that lasted years, the complete lack of a support system, being attacked, being denied employment, being objectified and I assure you that I got off very easy. And so when my friends in college decided that they would be gay only while in college (or if they left the country), I completely get the reasoning there. Hell, maybe if I had ever been given the option of not being out, I wouldn’t be. Maybe when I had been building my dungeon-palaces with girlfriends on horseback and someone had stepped in and told me that was sick and wrong, I would have been able to accept living as myself only in certain spaces.
But it didn’t work out that way.
So, there I was, in college, suddenly cool, and surrounded by people who were living their free lives and I figured I must have found a home. Yet, dating within queer, poly and kinky communities, led to a lot of the same experiences as dating outside them. A lot of women left my apartment at 4 AM and refused to see me at 2 PM. A lot of polyamorous people turned out to be ones who considered emotional attachment to more than one person, cheating, and the ones who didn’t were also almost always lying to their partners about something or other. A lot of kinky folk were deeply entrenched in redistributing patriarchy under the garb of sexuality and for good measure, they continued to tell me there was something mentally-wrong with my kind of masochism and romance. A lot of bisexual people put on the performance of being into me because a man was watching and every man still expected that my sexuality meant they would have threesomes. I understood all of this better at this time. I understood it wasn’t about the individual alone, society was the voyeur in our bedrooms ensuring we knew how much of ourselves we were allowed to be and ensuring we did so as quietly as possible. The allowed purpose of this version of youth was to get our “deviance” out of our systems or if we couldn’t, to create the hidden spaces where we were allowed to be deviant and exist only within them.
So, I created such a space for myself as well, you know, to make my life easier. A space where everyone was “deviant” in some way or other and in this space I had the opportunity to confront my own self. When my girlfriends made it very clear that we could date in the town where we lived, but we could never meet each other’s families or be gay back home, I knew I had to accept that because I couldn’t decide for them what social cost they should pay, but I also knew I didn’t want that. I want my partners to be able to call my office or my mother if the seriousness of the relationship between us warrants that. When other poly people told me that I could date them but they didn’t ever really want to see my stepson or have a relationship with my sister or introduce me to theirs, I realised they had to represent as monogamous because of their own societal constraints, but I also knew that I didn’t want to. I want all my partners to be visible parts of my life, to be able to hang out with my friends and be at my sister’s wedding. When the performative version of bisexuality that exists to appease the male gaze followed me even into these spaces, I knew I had to realise that the patriarchy permeates everything and faulting these individuals wouldn’t fix that, but I also knew I didn’t want to partake in it. I don’t even want to have threesomes (unless it’s cuckolding-style threesomes) or have a man know the sexual details of my relationship with my girlfriend, I don’t want the male-gaze in my relationship (and very fortunately I am with a woman who feels exactly the same way, but it was hard work to find her) and I am not saying wanting threesomes is invalid as a form of sexual expression, I am saying sometimes they are sexual expression but sometimes they have many other layers of meaning some of which are male-gaze associated and due to my personal experience with these things, I am biased to believe it’s more likely to be the latter. I condone and understand the need for insulated spaces of existence that provide you enough sanity and safety to actually live your life. I understand why it is worth that to sometimes just pretend to be less yourself when dealing with the rest of society. However I know, that for me, the personal choice I make is that I will be myself, completely, and everywhere. It is a choice that has been made by people before me as well and I that’s the part of the queer community in which I feel I belong.
I always thought that fairytale I had in my head when I was a kid was a guide to my romantic aspirations but now I know it was a guide to my socio-political aspirations. I choose to experience my sexuality politically because I want to live in a world where that is not necessary. I want my family to have to choose between having me in their life and accepting my sexual orientation or not having me in their life and continuing to hate. I want my kid to understand many forms of love and have the option to know all my partners. I want my friends to have the same. I want my employers to invite my girlfriend to dinner just as they would my husband. I want to be able to rent a house with her. I want “don’t ask/don’t tell” to be unnecessary. I don’t want young women who feel masochistic desire to be labelled mentally ill and prescribed normalcy in the form of pills. I don’t want anyone to be attacked for their sexuality. I don’t want to ever feel hidden nor do I ever want to make anyone else feel like they have to be.
That means having to engage with all spheres of society that I have mentioned above as myself. It means that young girls who have just discovered they may want to date other women should know that I exist so they don’t have to go ask their questions to the heteronormative brigade. It means that my employers should have to know who I am so their hiring policies are made more inclusive. It means that I have to talk about how the performance of a sexuality for the benefit of a male gaze is insulting to those whose identities and lives are decided by those things. It means being visible as a possibility so they have to cater to you. It means navigating the complex mire or queerness et cetera instead of carving a space that is comfortable (and again, there is nothing wrong with doing that, it’s just not for me). It means suggesting the normalcy of masochism to doctors when they see my body or mental health professionals when they call me crazy so they start to fucking consider the fucking possibility that the world is not fucking black and white (even if that means risking access to healthcare myself).
Obviously some of this is because I have a martyr complex, but most of it, is because I know what it is like to be a young girl who knows she is queer, poly and kinky and I know that the two decades that follow after that are a nightmare, and I want to make it easier for someone. I want to make it easier because if I had known how much I had to learn about the world in order to understand what was inside my pants, I would have liked to have had a textbook or a teacher.
And if it doesn’t exist.
Fucking be it.
It took two decades but now I know you don’t have to be poly to be bisexual, but I can be. I know you don’t have to hide, but there are understandable reasons to do it. I know there are societal factors at play and they can be dangerous, I know that I can help someone who is facing that right now. I know the global narrative on queerness differs from the local narrative and a newer generation may not be hearing from sources that are relevant to them and as a result, feeling unseen. I know there are stages to discovering yourself and they coexist with the stages of learning about the social environment in which you exist and that can be hard when you feel you have to navigate it all by yourself. But most importantly, I know that there is nothing deviant about or wrong with anyone who feels this way, please ask me, so I can tell you that. It will all be okay. We’re here, we’re queer and we will look out for you.
Ancillary Kink Support 
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