too early to format my posts but
a common narrative i see erased in gay and lesbian identities but esp. in gay and lesbian characters are those of us who have had or would have sex with genders we aren’t attracted to because it’s sex, and because sex is either a form of self validation, self punishment, or just emotionless pleasure for us
while someone’s sexual behavior and sexual history can be indicative as to their sexuality, it’s ultimately just a guess. you don’t know what’s going on in someone’s head when they’re having sex. you have no way of telling that. only they know, and (esp. if that person has a history of being An Unreliable Narrator), you can’t always trust what they claim to have thought and felt about it.
historically there have always been gay people who struggled with our sexualities so we felt obligated to sleep with genders we felt nothing for. historically there have been gay people who stomached having sex with people we weren’t attracted to because we were upkeeping an image, or because it was just sex and nothing else, just a physical thing, and we weren’t actually into that person or those people at all.
there have always been gay people who boasted proudly about their sexual exploits, including those with genders they weren’t into, just because sex was sex. there have always been gay people who were ashamed of the fact and hid it away after coming out.
not every gay person is gold star, not every gay person realizes something is wrong immediately when they don’t identify solid sexual attraction to someone they’re having sex with, not every gay person is a “one and done” deal when it comes to having sex with “the wrong gender,” not every gay person Hates having sex with the wrong gender because it’s just sex to them, not every gay person realizes they’re gay at a young age, not every gay person realizes they’re gay at all, and not every gay person stops having sex with “the wrong gender” just because they’ve realized they’re gay (reasons for which may range from, as i said, fear / social obligation / peer pressure / just wanting to have sex with an available person even if u don’t like them / self harm / sex contributing to your sense of self worth).
some gay people even FORCE themselves to build a long, theatrical sexual history with “the wrong gender” and to blabbermouth about it because we are TRYING SO FUCKING HARD TO COME OFF LIKE WE HAVE M/F ATTRACTION, and are therefore more “normal” than Gay People, because of COURSE we aren’t GAY, look at all the [X]s we’ve fucked!!!!!
sexual behavior =/= sexuality. only sexual attraction = sexuality. you cannot tell someone else how they do and do not experience sexual attraction; no one knows that but them.
so stop telling people they “can’t be gay because they’ve slept with [X],” and stop insisting a character can’t be gay because they’ve slept with [X].
unless a character explicitly comes forward and says “i’m bisexual” there is nothing wrong with interpreting that character as gay. you can’t say smth is bi erasure when there is absolutely no evidence backing a character being bisexual other than that they’ve had sex with multiple genders. you can’t use sexual behavior as “proof” of sexuality. for all of the reasons above it is homophobic to do so, and it is homophobic to deny us our own experiences with this kind of shit / to deny us relating to characters who exhibit these behaviors bc we see our own gay experience reflected in them
you can think someone is bi but if they’re gay then they’re gay and it’s not fair to say “but they’ve dated —“ / “but they’ve slept with —“ / etc etc as a means of Disproving Us. you can have ur own interpretation of things but gay people are allowed to be gay. if you wouldn’t say that shit to or about a real gay person, you shouldn’t say it about a character; it projects the same bigoted notion. leave us alone if we aren’t actually hurting u and stop trying to tell us that we MUST have m/f attraction, or that the characters we project our gayness onto must aswell. it’s nasty. it’s an attempt 2 silence us, even if it’s an unintentional one. gay erasure isn’t bi representation any more than bi erasure is gay representation; undefined fictional sexualities are open for headcanons either way. we need 2 respect that, and respect each other.
and if you have a Problem with that, you might wanna think rly long and hard about why you want gay people to be forced to “rethink” their own sexualities and why you don’t want us headcanoning characters with ambiguous sexualities as gay instead of bi (bc believe it or not, the implication of additionally feeling m/f attraction DOES matter to us). then go ahead n get back 2 me.