Pansexual, with the couch to prove it

Sorry… loveseat

A few weeks ago I wrote in my newsletter about an almost comically good week that I had. Not good in the sense that I was in amazing spirits, but in that it felt like opportunities were falling at my feet.

One of those things was an offer for a full-time job from my favourite client. The other was a touch more absurd: the opportunity to be the Featured Pansexual in a Pride campaign. 

The campaign, as it was pitched to me, would feature a number of “underrepresented Pride flag identities.” As a participant, I would tell my “love story” in an interview and then do a photo shoot on a loveseat that would be specially-designed using the colours of the pansexual flag (do you get it?).

Despite my complicated feelings about Corporate Pride as an overall concept, which in my more cynical moments mirror the sentiment of this iconic Meg Stalter video, I thought, “I can’t say no to this, right?” At the very least, I figured it would be a fun experience and a good story. 

A week later, I was on a Zoom call talking about compulsory heterosexuality, biphobia within the queer community, and my own experience of coming out to myself (first as “hmm, maybe not straight”, then as gay, and then, finally, as pansexual). This was the first time I had talked about it in such a direct and pointed way, and corporate agendas be damned, it felt nice. It also made me realize that while I’ve never really hid my sexual orientation, I’ve always tended to acquiesce to however I feel I’m being perceived by the people around me. 

When I started dating women, I was kind of surprised by how quickly people started referring to me as a lesbian. I had only ever dated men until I was 28 years old, some of whom I loved deeply and was very attracted to, but it felt like that was sort of erased the moment I had a girlfriend. Not that I can blame anyone for categorizing me as such. I was in a committed, monogamous relationship with a woman for two years, so at the time, I looked to the world like a lesbian. 

Actually, if I can take a brief detour, I should add that people were only quick to categorize me as a lesbian once they accepted that my girlfriend and I were actually dating. As two femme, straight-passing women, it sometimes felt like there was nothing we could do, short of holding our intertwined hands in the air and yelling, “We’re fucking!” to make people understand that we were a couple. Whether it was being asked if we were “friends or sisters” as we held hands during a couple’s pedicure (gross, I know, but we were in love! Sue me), or receiving a confused, “Wait, but didn’t you say it was a one bedroom?” after talking to another couple at a holiday party at length about how excited we were to be moving in together, or having to finally say, “Well it’s not like that, we’re dating,” half an hour into an interview at the SPCA where the interviewer kept saying things like, “Okay, but sometimes roommates move out, so you two should figure out who this dog is actually going to belong to before you do this,” it felt like we were constantly failing to satisfy whatever internal queer rubric other people were comparing us against. I don’t blame my ex for very pointedly open-mouth kissing me while we were checking out at a clothing store one day, after the salesperson said, “So fun that you get to bring a friend as a plus-one to this wedding!”

Anyway! My very-long-winded point being: I’ve been aware for quite some time that I can’t control how people perceive and subsequently categorize me. I tend to believe that assuming another person’s sexual orientation is seldom a malicious act; I think people make whatever judgement is easiest and makes the most sense to them and then, for the most part, they stop thinking about it.

What I didn’t realize was how much I was letting those assumptions warp the lens through which I viewed myself. Being a relatively late arrival to the queer community, I often let my need to fit in supersede my desire to correct people who said things like, “Well it’s a good thing you figured out you’re gay! Better late than never.” It felt difficult to try to define my sexuality beyond any sort of gay-straight binary because I wasn’t even sure of where I fell within the larger queer spectrum. Calling myself gay felt like denying my past, but calling myself bisexual felt like placing a label on myself that I wasn’t sure I could live up to either. Was it worth calling myself bi if I never dated a man again? Wasn’t it easier to just go with whatever label the world wanted to put on me? Adding to this pile of confusion was the fact that I’ve always been a deeply monogamous person with novelty-sized blinders on any time I’m in a relationship. If there was a category of sexuality that was defined as “whatever gender the person I’m in love with is,” that’s the one I would happily adopt.

Given all this, perhaps it’s not surprising that it took a year of forced solitude to actually figure out how I identify. Without the imagined—and sometimes real—pressure from the community in which I was trying to thrive, and without another person to project my entire identity onto, I found myself in 2020 with endless stretches of time during which I could ask myself that age-old question: “Who do I want to fuck?” 

Without a clear answer, I finally decided last October to dip my toes back into the dating pool and find out. I joked to my friends that I was setting my dating app preferences to “chaos mode” (or the “Everyone” button if you’re using Hinge). I was weirdly nervous about it. My heart raced as I sent the first man I matched with a message after a few minutes of back and forth, saying, “By the way, I’ve only been dating women for the last few years. I just wanted to put that out there in case that’s an issue for you.” He was fine with it. When I actually started dating a man a few weeks later, I was even more of a wreck. I was certain that I had become “too gay” in the last four years, and that I would be coming into this relationship with a level of Lesbian Intensity that would get me ghosted before date three (my god, the amount of internalized homophobia I hadn’t realized I needed to unpack). 

I came away from that relationship realizing that, in the midst of a tornado of anxiety about how my sexuality was perceived by others, I was missing the point: my sexuality is mine. Only I can define it and decide what it encompasses and what its limits are.

The answer, for me, is not so clear-cut and probably never will be. When I picture myself finding a long-term partner in the future, I have no gender in mind. I want to find someone who is as curious and enthusiastic about getting to know the many disparate parts that make me a whole person as I am about getting to know theirs. I also want someone who makes me laugh. I think my list of hard requirements ends there.

It didn’t take a photo shoot on a pansexually-themed loveseat for me to figure this out, but hilariously, it did give me the push I needed to have the confidence to articulate it clearly to others. On the shoot day in late May, I sat in a waiting area while the set was being prepared and did a double-take as my eyes wandered around the room. Taped to the wall was a sheet of paper, among a series of others. On it was a picture of me that had been taken from my Instagram page, along with a title: “Sarah Bellstedt—Pansexual.” “That’s hilarious,” I thought, wishing I could take a picture to send to my friends. Then, “That’s me.”

Here I am being pansexual on my pansexual loveseat