 I was here in 2014 and read from my book, Women, so it's awesome to be back. I love a chance to come to San Francisco. And this is the last reading on a three-month stop-and-start book tour. So I'm feeling kind of like I can take some risks. So I'm not going to read what I was originally going to read because I want to challenge myself. So I'm going to read an essay that my editors told me is very lazy, but it's supposed to be, was my argument against that. It's called The Laziest Coming Out Story You've Ever Heard. And it's really more of a bullet point list. So here it goes. My friend Lauren told me her number on the Kinsey scale went up this year after reading my book Women, which is about a lesbian love affair, and after watching Alison Williams play Peter Pan in Peter Pan Live. Another friend, Renee, emailed me. Zach had heard I'm now open to dating women, and he was like, so what does that mean? What are you doing to meet women and date? And I was like, oh, literally nothing. I'm just inwardly identifying as queer now and am open to being seduced by anyone, male or female. That is The Laziest Coming Out Story I've Ever Heard, he said. I told Renee I would be using that anecdote in an essay. I asked her if she wanted me to use her name or call her a friend. She replied, a friend. I'm not out yet. Everyone is bisexual. This was me and my friend Kelly's party trick in middle school and through high school. It riled people, and we knew it. And by people, I mean males. They laughed in our faces thinking it was ridiculous. After my first relationship with a woman, I talked to Kelly on the phone. Everyone's bisexual, remember, she said. Ashley Ford interviewed me over the phone for Buzzfeed LGBT. To have the abbreviation LGBT at the time, even associated with my name was odd to me. I had never come out as bisexual. I just wrote a book with a narrator who was confused around her sexuality. I asked Ashley why it was important to her to have B for bisexual in her Twitter bio. She explained because even though she's in a relationship with a man, it's still a big part of her. I asked her about coming out. I never came out. I just started writing about it. Me too, I told her. Which begs the question, is that a cop out? Someone told me it was brave. I disagree. I told her it felt passive-aggressive. I guess we're thinking about it in different ways, she said. When you label me, you negate me. Either that or I'm a coward with intimacy issues. I understand it is 2016 now. I understand it was 100% more difficult in all of the previous years. I understand I am lucky. I understand because of Ellen DeGeneres and Ellen Page and the L word and Leslie Feinberg, things are different. I also understand distress and confusion are the same regardless of what year it is. One of the best parts about the show, Broad City, is the nonchalant way the character, Ilana, likes both men and women without it being a thing. We are in a culture of non-commitment. We end our sentences with, I don't know, or whatever, and I don't get it. But we are still not allowed this in the sexuality department. Straight, gay, or bi, I don't know. I don't get it. In case you missed it, I'm confused about my sexuality. Eating noodles with my friend Amanda on First Avenue, she says, so you're not bisexual and you're not straight? Yeah, I say. She looks up from her noodles and says, I don't understand like anything about you. My friend jokes that she has a Google Alert for bisexual celebrities on her computer. An OKCupid, a woman asked me, so you're bisexual but you're on the women tip right now? While I was in a relationship with a woman, I went to a Fourth of July party. At the end of the night, I was walking to my car with some people I didn't know, including a gay man. He had been trying to meet men that night and was frustrated on his luck. No one's gay, he griped. Everyone's gay, I said, excited about my newfound sexuality. That's easy for a straight white woman to say, he said. When I think of this now, I try to tell myself I stayed quiet. I feel shame about speaking up for some reason or another. I feel bad for making him feel bad, how very female. I smiled. I was shocked because I was so changed on the inside but not on the outside. I was wearing a dress and had long hair. You think I'm straight? I said, and he was embarrassed. He started apologizing. I've always been interested in how we can look one way and be something else entirely. Now I was getting tired of it. My out friend wore shirts that read legalized gay. Maybe I should do that. I'd always think to myself when I saw her wearing them. How many times have I done the same thing? Assume a woman's straight only to be so thrown when she mentions having dated a woman. My mom used to have a bumper sticker tacked up by our calendar in the hallway that said, don't believe everything you think. I don't get it, I whined for years. And the opposite. In a video when Lena Dunham interviews Miranda July, July tells Dunham about being at Vipassana, a 10 day silent meditation retreat and becoming besotted with a woman there. At the retreat, the participants were not allowed to speak or make eye contact or even facial expressions. They all wore the same thing, black pants and shirts. July was positive her crush was a powerful butch woman. I wanted her fingers inside of me, she says. On the last day of Vipassana, they changed out of their black sweats. July was excited to talk to this woman and see if their connection was in fact real. The woman came out of her cabin wearing mom jeans, a pink polo shirt and white tennis sneakers and hopped into her minivan with her husband. July joked that she was devastated. The moral of the story, according to July, is if you wanted it badly enough, you could completely misread someone as a lesbian. So it's like, if you want it badly enough, you could mistake anyone for someone you could love, Lena says. Right, July says. Or a lesbian, Dunham says. They laugh. It was a confusing time for me, July says. We all want to judge, but don't want to be judged. I published a version of this essay online and some girl tweeted, LOL at basics, figuring out they're bisexual, but I guess that's none of my business. I was livid and tweeted back, yeah, that's a pretty immature and rude thing to say. She favorited my tweet. I muted her. Someone told me to take that anecdote out of this essay. She wins that way, they said. I don't care. Last summer, my mother and I were cleaning out my apartment on the same day as the Pride Parade. We took a break and walked to the parade. My dad was there too. The three of us stood in silence. It meant something to me since I was inwardly identifying as queer now. Maybe they know, I thought. A few weeks after, my mom and I took a walk and she told me about an old coworker of hers. She looked her up on Facebook and was surprised to see she'd married a butch-looking woman. My mom said she looked happy and that she was happy for her. Is that the whole story? I asked. She said it was. That's a nice story, mom, I said. I stayed a night at the St. Mark's Hotel with a girlfriend from high school. In the morning, she kept calling me weird because the night before I hooked up with a girl. Weird, you're weird. I got pissed picking a fight with her later via text. I say weird because I'm being lazy, she said. I'll work on getting better at saying what I mean. I guess like weird as in different than what I would do maybe. Once a girlfriend who had been intimate with said while lying in bed, oh Chloe, you're an alien. As much as this scared me, some part of me took it as a compliment but mostly it did scare me. Having dinner with my friend Karina, she says, the more kinds of gay people and the more ways of being gay, the better. When I walk by men, my thought process goes, don't fucking look at me. I'm just trying to walk down the street in a dress. Do not fucking talk to me. Why aren't you looking at me? Aren't I attractive? Ugh, I knew it. In her book, My Life as a Dyke, Erica Kleinman writes about dating a woman who like to say, I don't date fucking bisexuals because they don't fucking exist. Erica has told me, I'm married to a man but I could have easily married a woman since I'm completely bisexual. I'm a Kinsey three, seriously. If someone asks about my sexual orientation, I'm like, depends, who's asking? Oh look, there's a lesbian couple over there or maybe they're sisters, whatever. The one with the white streak in her hair and the eschertat is fucking hot. In the movie Appropriate Behavior, writer and actress Desiree Acavan tells her brother she's dating a woman. So you're gay now? Well, I like dating men too so I guess I'm bisexual, she responds. That's a thing, he asks. I'm afraid so, she says. At a bar one night, I sat on the patio with a friend from high school. You're not bisexual, he said. You're just trying to be cool. Later in our conversation, he said, you could date a girl, marry a girl and looks relatively disgusted. Sure, I said, couldn't you? Girls can be more cruel to each other about bisexuality than guys are. In a live version of her song Drive, Melissa Farick says, if your girlfriend owns more than one towel, she's probably straight. Being a five foot three, average looking blonde chick has his pros and cons. You can become invisible or visible but the shitty parts are the days you want to be seen and you're not seen or the days you want to be unseen and you're seen. The morning after having sex with a woman, I got my hair cut. So do you have a boyfriend? My hairdresser asked me. No, I said, isn't it hard to meet men? He said. At a writing retreat in California, I drank countless glasses of wine, putting myself in a vulnerable and dark state of mind. I was sitting around the fire with some writers talking about sexuality. At the end of the day, you know, one woman said and I burst into tears in front of everyone. Partly drunk, partly still devastated from my last relationship. Partly because I had just finished a book unpublished at this point about a not knowing narrator. I myself did not know. At the end of the day, I did not know and it was causing me strife, grief, extreme distress. I used to know myself so well. Maybe someday I would again but on this night around the fire in California, I did not. Thank you so much.