I talked to my therapist today about the fact that I experience physical attraction to women and men, but men hold a far greater romantic attractiveness to me than women. She encouraged me to be myself and not force labels upon myself. However, if it comes up in conversation, for the sake of convenience, may I refer to myself as gay? Or is that somehow misleading? Maybe even cultural appropriation?
You can call yourself whatever you wish. Whatever you feel most comfortable with. If you don't want to call yourself anything, then you don't have to.
You can absolutely refer to yourself as gay. Since sexual orientation isn't a binary or trinary, most everyone is somewhere on the spectrum. If we use Kinsey, that's 0 (totally straight) to 6 (totally gay). Kinsey's work says that only a small portion of the population are truly 0 or 6, although most cluster at one end or the other. So a lot of people who call themselves "gay" have a small amount of opposite-sex attraction. Also, I don't know if your therapist has talked about the stages of loss. As we process any loss, in this case the loss of identity as straight, there are stages (denial-anger-bargaining-grief-acceptance). So many people, while they are on the journey to discovering themselves, identify as 'bisexual' during the bargaining phase, as a sort of bridge to fully accepting that they're gay. For these folks, they can genuilnely feel (or genuinely believe they feel) opposite-sex attractions, but as they become more comfortable with themselves and accepting who they truly are, they drop the 'bisexual' label and accept that they are, in fact, gay. And before the angry 'bisexual erasure' crowd shows up with unnecessary drama... no, I'm not saying this applies to *all* bisexuals by any means. Bisexuality is one of the most studied and widely accepted and acknowledged aspects of human sexuality, so nobody credible questions that there are people who are genuinely bisexual. It gets confusing because of the people who essentially misuse the 'bisexual' label while coming to self-acceptance. Long and short: Fine to use 'gay'. Fine to later figure out you're truly bi and switch to that. No harm done.
I agree with what Chip said- nothing to add on that! I think for people who are still figuring themselves out the presence of some attraction to the opposite sex is very confusing, because a lot of the messages that we receive are: "you are still bi, if you are even a tiny bit attracted to the opposite sex" and " you are not gay if you are not 100% exclusively attracted to the same sex" I am behaviourally gay and on good days I feel like this combined with being in touch with myself allows me to feel secure in my gay identity, but at other times I don't. I feel like I am not entitled to use that label unless I am 100% sure that I am not attracted to the opposite sex in any way- and nobody can guarantee it, furthermore on some days I am a bit gender- blind in my attractions, so it does not help, knowing this. I guess seeing you say clearly "you can call yourself gay" to OP cheered me up
