Today at The A.V. Club, I wrote about #LoveVictor ’s move to Hulu from its intended home at Disney+, its place in the LGBTQ TV landscape, and its struggle to dig beneath the surface.

And now, *Reluctantly Puts On Personal Announcement Hat* I want to dig into why I wrote it. https://twitter.com/TheAVClub/status/1275081289767346177

I don’t talk about my “personal life”—whatever that means in 2020—here, or anywhere, but between three months of social isolation-fueled self-reflection and the state of the world that forced it, I’ve reached a point where it feels necessary to discuss a Thing.

When I was a teenager, I realized my experience of sexuality didn’t fit into the binary I was presented with. And although the era meant I had few tools to confront this, the privileges of a white middle-class upbringing meant this wasn’t a crisis. It was just a Thing I Knew.

And so in the spirit of Pride, and for reasons I’ll expand on in this (too long, sorry) thread, this Thing I Knew belatedly becomes a Thing You Know: sexuality is a spectrum, I’d place myself somewhere in the middle of it, and thus identify as—and have always been—bisexual.

The TL;DR version of there being this Thing I Knew is that as my world broadened—university, grad school, Twitter—I intellectualized and internalized the question of sexuality, absorbing new information as I met a wider range of people and gained valuable perspectives.

My aforementioned privilege afforded me the ability to exist in this space comfortably, and my work provided an outlet to take what I was learning and apply it in the classroom and my criticism. The Thing I Knew informed all of that work, albeit silently, and that worked for me!

But more recently, before the pandemic but especially during, two things have led me to confront the bubble I built around my bisexuality, and the inefficacy and unsustainability of continuing down that path despite the (very) comfortable existence I’ve found within it.

First, I’ve seen more and more inspiring friends/colleagues channel their place in the LGBTQ+ community into powerful criticism and activism, at a time when I stood silent behind the lie of omission I committed to by not forcefully rejecting compulsory heterosexuality.

And second, I’ve found that as queer representation has become both more plentiful and more accessible in recent years, this Thing I Knew began moving to the foreground of how I was experiencing media, making that lie of omission weigh heavier here, in particular.

Put simply, while I still have no interest in discussing my private life in any setting, I can’t pretend that my bisexuality isn’t a huge part of how I interpret the world I see, and for it to remain this Thing I “Hide” while writing/tweeting from this perspective seems wrong.

I want to say I haven’t “hidden” anything. I want to say that it’s always been embedded in what I’ve said here and elsewhere (not to suggest anyone was reading so closely as to notice, I’m not THAT vain). But I know on some level that’s not true, and so here we are.

And while this thread may suggest I’ve been “dealing” with this on my own, the truth is I never was: many of you have been critical parts of this journey, even if you didn’t know it, and I am so grateful for the community of progressive, diverse voices I’ve found here.

To conclude: as much as this can be a hellsite on many levels, I am so grateful to have this platform, and the people on it. Thanks for joining me on that journey, then and now.

Okay, that’s it. Back to empty cups. *Takes Off Personal Announcement Hat, Burns It*