"Why do I really want to kiss one of my female friends all the time?" is a question Harleen found herself asking as she entered adulthood. Ah, the classic sapphic experience.
The 29-year-old, who now identifies as bisexual/pansexual and non-binary, has been on quite a quest to uncover the truth about her sexuality. From dreaming of being with women as a child to reading gay erotica in her teenage years, she exhibited the typical indicators of queerness early on. Yet, she didn't even consider that she could be queer until much later in life.
The 'Q' in LGBTQIA+ stands for the umbrella term queer, but it also stands for questioning, as in, questioning the default sexual orientation and/or gender expected from you by society. While questioning is an intrinsic part of any queer person's journey of growing into their authentic self, one facet of questioning that's fraught with stigma is bicuriosity. Understood as someone who is interested in exploring or experimenting with bisexuality, a bicurious person is just responding to the heteronormative world. While it has been increasingly 'normalised' to experiment with your sexuality in your youth, first in the free love era of the 1960s but more so in India in the current wave of sexual liberation, bicurious people face othering both within and outside the queer community. Within the community, they're not taken seriously and asked to make up their mind'. In cis-het circles, bicurious women are especially vulnerable to fetishisation by straight men - most of us are familiar with the trope of the 'drunk straight girl who makes out with other girls at parties' just for the spectacle of it.
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