ISSUES
: Sexuality and Gender
Chapter 1: Understanding sexuality
8
“I’m a bisexual homoromantic”: why
young Brits are rejecting old labels
Miley Cyrus, Kristen Stewart, Cara Delevingne … it’s not just celebrities who
refuse to define themselves as gay or straight. Nearly half of young British adults
say they aren’t exclusively heterosexual. It can only be a good thing.
By Rebecca Nicholson
W
hen Rugby League’s
Keegan Hirst came out
as gay this week, he said
that he had been hiding for a long
time. “How could I be gay? I’m from
Batley, for goodness sake. No one
is gay in Batley.” If the 27-year-old
Yorkshireman had been a few years
younger, he might have found some
people in his hometown who are at
least sexually fluid. A YouGov poll
this week put the number of 18- to
24-year-old Brits who identify as
entirely heterosexual at 46%, while
just 6% would call themselves
exclusively gay. Sexuality now
falls between the lines: identity
is more pliable, and fluidity more
acceptable, than ever before.
Thegay-straight binary iscollapsing,
and it’s doing so at speed. The
days in which a celebrity’s sexual
orientation was worthy of a tabloid
scandal have long since died out.
Though newspapers still report on
famous people coming out and their
same-sex relationships, the lurid
language that once accompanied
such stories has been replaced by
more of a gossipy, ‘did you know?’
tone, the sort your mum might take
on the phone, when she’s telling
you about what Julie round the
corner has been up to. And the
reaction of the celebrities involved
has morphed, too, into a refusal
to play the naming game. Arena-
filling pop star Miley Cyrus posted
an Instagram of a news story that
described her as “genderqueer”
with the caption, “NOTHING
can/will define me! Free to be
EVERYTHING!!!” Kristen Stewart,
who has been followed around by
insinuations about the ‘gal pal’ she
is often photographed with for a
couple of years, finally spoke about
the relationship in an interview
with
Nylon
magazine this month.
She said, simply, “Google me, I’m
not hiding”, but, like the people
surveyed by YouGov, refused to
define herself as gay or straight. “I
think in three or four years, there are
going to be a whole lot more people
who don’t think it’s necessary to
figure out if you’re gay or straight.
It’s like, just do your thing.”
It’s arguable that celebrities such
as Stewart are part of the reason
for those parameters becoming
less essential, at least in the west.
It shouldn’t fall to famous people
to define our social attitudes but,
simply, visibility matters: if it is not
seen as outrageous or transgressive
that the star of
Twilight
will hold
hands with her girlfriend in the
street, then that, in a very small
way, reinforces the normality of
it. If Cara Delevingne tells
Vogue
that she loves her girlfriend, then
that, too, adds to the picture. The
more people who are out, the more
normal it becomes; the less alone a
confused kid in a small town looking
at gossip websites might feel; the
less baffled the parent of a teenager
who brings home a same-sex date
might be. Combine that with the
seemingly unstoppable legislative
reinforcement of equal rights, too
– gay marriage becoming legal in
Ireland, in the US – and suddenly,
it seems less ‘abnormal’, less
boundary-busting, to fall in love
or lust with someone of the same
gender.
“I would describe myself as a
bisexual homoromantic,” says
Alice, 23, from Sussex. For the
uninitiated, I asked her to explain.
“It means I like sex with men and
women, but I only fall in love with
women. I wouldn’t say something
wishy-washy like, ‘It’s all about the
person,’ because more often it’s
just that I sometimes like a penis.”
