If anything this is less surprising now than it would have been then, but in 2012 it was already becoming readily apparent to people outside the LGBT and academic communities that sexuality doesn’t match a stereotypical categorisation that puts everyone into “straight, only wants to see the bits of the opposite sex”, “gay, only wants to see the bits of the same sex” or “bi, anything goes” boxes. Certainly if you spent much time online back then, it was talked about frequently.

Now it should be pretty much obvious: does anyone other than conservatives think that sexuality works like that? Do any of us think that “straight” is something more than an identity, a social construct like gender and race? Given that, can anyone be surprised that there are people who identify as straight but don’t quite match someone else’s strict drawing of the boundaries of that identity?

Maybe some LGBT allies want to say, “honey, if you like watching porn with two dicks in it, maybe you’re a lil bit gay”, but how comfortable would you be with telling someone who identifies as gay that actually they don’t know their own sexual identity? Hopefully you would be pretty uncomfortable with that. Of course there are limits and sometimes people can be in denial or in the closet, but you need extreme caution when drawing such a conclusion otherwise you’re going to erase someone or something. Erasure isn’t OK just because you think you’re erasing straightness. Erasure is only OK in one scenario.