And is it just another word for “bisexual?”
By Anna Iovine
If you identify as straight but are open to queer experiences, you’re not alone. You may be called “heteroflexible,” a portmanteau that signals being “mostly straight” with a flexibility towards same-sex attraction.
What does heteroflexibility mean?
There’s not an objective definition of heteroflexibility. In fact, it hasn’t yet been used in the scientific study of the psychology of sexual orientation, said Pavel S. Blagov, Ph.D, associate professor of psychology at Whitman College.
One of the earliest cited writings on the term, by then-professor of sociology at Yale University Laurie Essig, was published by Salon in 2000. Essig, now a professor at Middlebury College, defined heteroflexibility as when someone “has or intends to have a primarily heterosexual lifestyle, with a primary sexual and emotional attachment to someone of the opposite sex.” But, as Essig continued, “that person remains open to sexual encounters and even relationships with persons of the same sex.”
As much as 15 percent of the American population may identify as heteroflexible, according to a 2019 study.
What’s the origin of the term “heteroflexibility”?
The exact genesis of the term “heteroflexible” is unknown, but it’s been used as early as the 1990s. In the 1997 humor glossary of LGBTQ slang When Drag is Not a Car Race, heteroflexibility is defined as “bisexual, or at least open to sexual experimentation.”
Heteroflexible appeared to pick up steam on college campuses in the early 2000s, as displayed in Essig’s Salon article. A 2002 dispatch from The Buffalo News declared heteroflexbile the “hot term being bandied about on campus,” and defined it as “the condition of being not fully bisexual but open to adventure.”
How is heteroflexibility used today?
Today, people seem to use the term differently, said Blagov, and its use is being studied by scholars in gender studies, sociology, and public health.
“The concept seems to have different meanings across individuals and in different corners of popular culture,” he continued. There are several facets of sexual orientation that one may use heteroflexbility to refer to: someone’s identity, their sexual desires, their sexual behavior, or something else — or a combination of these.
Based on various sources online, Blagov senses that someone who describes themselves as heteroflexible may be trying to convey one or more of these concepts: “Some degree of attraction to the same sex; some degree of interest in same-sex sexual behavior; a positive attitude toward diversity in sexual orientation; an open mind about different identities; that they owe some allegiance to a heterosexual or straight identity; and that they do not identify as bisexual or homosexual.”
He also cited sociologist Héctor Carrillo and contributor Amanda Hoffman, who researched sexualities of American men in an aptly titled study, Straight with a pinch of bi. One one hand, Carrillo and Hoffman wrote, terms like heteroflexibility and “bi-curious” represent a renewed sense of sexual identity among young straight Americans with same-sex desire — and possibly a search for public recognition and societal acceptance.
At the same time, Carrillo argued, by not adopting a queer identity like bisexual, heteroflexibile people seek to remain in the “heterosexual category.” They want an indication that same-sex desire and behavior “are not altogether incompatible with heterosexuality.”
Blagov reiterated that heteroflexibility isn’t currently an established concept in the scientific study of psychology. “It is not referring to how a person’s mind works or any objectively defined way in which people differ,” he said. At least currently, it doesn’t indicate a proven difference among people. Rather, it’s a label people have started using to describe themselves and others.
The use of heteroflexible also likely differs across individuals and groups, and — like our definition of so many other words — may change over time.
Is heteroflexibility just bisexuality?
Heteroflexibility, Essig wrote, “is a rejection of bisexuality since the inevitable question that comes up in bisexuality is one of preference, and the preference of the heteroflexible is quite clear.”
At first, Essig said she was pissed at the term. “I resented the fact that they [young people] would root their marginal sexual practices in the safety of heterosexuality,” she said. Then, after reflecting, she embraced it because in her view, it could bring an end to heterosexuality’s dominance. In the future, Essig mused, everyone would be flexible.
Other scholars, however, don’t have such a rosy view of the term. In a 2009 article about queer representation in the media, media and communications professor Lisa Blackman wrote that “heteroflexible” serves to expand the boundaries of the “heterosexual” label rather than to normalize queer identities. Flexibility is merely a “temporary interruption” of heterosexual desire, a “break from the routine.”
Blackman goes on to say that the idea of flexibility serves to support the agency of heterosexual people, but not queer people. Queer attraction, at least in media at the time of Blackman’s writing, was seen as something novel for straight people (primarily women) to experience. She cites two examples — Samantha Jones in Sex and the City and Jessica in Kissing Jessica Stein — as characters who flirted with homosexuality, but only temporarily.
Does “heteroflexibility” describe queer desire in terms of…straightness? In Blackman’s sense, yes, said Andrew Cheng, postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Linguistics at Simon Fraser University.
While this argument is an academic look into film and television at the time, other queer people have decried the term for similar reasons. Writer Charlie Williams said in Affinity Magazine that the word heteroflexible erases bi identities, saying both heteroflexible and the opposite, homoflexible, are just “fancy words” for bisexual. Another writer, Kravitz M., called for people who feel attraction to multiple genders to question why they don’t call themselves bi, and claimed it might be because of internalized biphobia.
It’s important to remember, though, that the meanings and uses of identity labels change quickly — especially in the internet age — and that identities are dependent on local communities, said Cheng.
“The rise in heteroflexibility as an identification among, say, rural men in the Midwest today, might be very different from how it was used by city-dwelling college students in the nineties,” he continued.
Further, without much psychological research it’s hard to speculate out why someone may identify as heteroflexible (or bi-curious or “mostly straight”) instead of a queer identity, said Blagov.
All this to say, there’s no “correct” use of heteroflexible. It may not be its own sexual orientation — it’s been long known that sexual attraction can fall somewhere between hetero and homosexual — but anyone is free to identify as such. Sexuality, like language itself, can be flexible.
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