I’ve always considered myself to be openly queer. Recently however, I’ve been wondering how true that actually is. This mini existential crisis was all brought on by a water bottle that I purchased about a month ago. I bought it just before Pride. While visiting a booth, I got a sticker that says ‘Bisexual Pride’ and put it on without thinking. Since then I’ve been struck with how few places I actually take it. I’m a lot more ‘in the closet’ than I had formerly thought I was. My family knows, so do my friends, my coworkers and my small faith group. But plenty of people in the general congregation don’t know. My students don’t know. I have to ask myself if being selectively out of the closet is really being out of the closet at all. Unfortunately, the more I think about this question the more complicated the answer seems to become.

Every queer person on earth knows that there are times when being out of the closet isn’t a great idea. It seems obvious that a couple walking through a neighborhood where a gay man was beaten to death two weeks earlier can choose not to hold hands there and still be considered openly gay. But where is the line? What about a man who’s not out at his office because he doesn’t work for a gay friendly corporation? Is he still out? A woman who’s living with another woman, has a strong community of gay friends and brings introduces her girlfriend at staff parties as her partner while she’s living in Illinois but still hasn’t told anyone back in her hometown in rural Texas. Is she openly gay? If I talk about my sexuality at the dinner table, but not at the block party, am I still in the closet?

I’m out at work. Or, at least I certainly think that I am. All my coworkers know that I’m bisexual, and it’s a safe environment. I mean, we teach art at a small locally owned business, it’s practically an anomaly not to be LGBTQ. I still don’t bring my water bottle in to class though, because I’m not out when it comes to the students. Odds are, they’ll be fine with it. But kids ask questions and tell their moms every detail of their days. There’s still is a chance, even now, that someone’s parents will be concerned that I’m trying to shove my liberal agenda down their children’s throats. They may call my boss to complain or even take their kid out of class. So I don’t bring the water bottle in. I don’t mention it.

I’m finding that there’s a fine line between being out of the closet and being too far out of the closet. Maybe having the sticker is okay, but not changing the subject if a kid asks me what it means isn’t. There are so many societal rules about how queer people are allowed to express themselves. Take high school. We all knew or know a classmate who found out they were gay and let everyone and their mother know about it. In my experience, this was perceived as agitating to the heterosexual people around them. Though some of them may have had other faults that made them harder to get along with, they were all perceived as irritating own a level at which they never would have been were they less open about their sexuality. We are taught to see flamboyant as synonymous with obnoxious. If someone puts a thousand cat stickers on their locker, they are the kid who really likes cats. If someone puts a hundred rainbow stickers on their locker, nobody wants to sit with them at lunch. It’s societies way of saying, you are welcome to exist, but you don’t actually get to be ‘proud’ about it. We are allowed to exist as we are, just not to remind people that we do.

I think seeing that in high school had a profound effect on the way I express my own sexuality. I try to be openly queer in the same way that people are openly straight. Mentioning girls that I have had or do have crushes on in conversations, mentioning how pretty I think someone is. Yet even with this there is a balance. If I, on occasion, say something overtly sexual about a man, it’s viewed as cute and funny. If I do the same thing about a woman it’s perverse and people don’t know how to respond. I walk a tightrope of being quietly queer to the point where it feels remarkably apologetic, or I’m oversharing. There’s only so much slack that gay jokes can give me.

I am planning on bringing my water bottle to work. I love it. It’s really pretty and it carries up to 1400 ml, therefore allowing me to proclaim to the whole world that I am probably a more well hydrated person than they are. But I’m planning on doing it once I have at least half a dozen more stickers on there. Being bisexual is something that I want people to know about me, because it’s an important part of who I am. Sadly, we still live in a world where though that may be fine, it isn’t something that I would be wise to draw an excessive amount of attention to. Trouble is, I still don’t know what exactly is ’too much’. Those rules, unfortunately, are still determined by heterosexual people.