On Monday, British Diver Tom Daley publicly came out to tell the world he was dating a man. Daley has faced persistent rumours that he is gay, and in a Youtube video he declared that he had met a man and started dating him a few months ago.
Note that I didn’t call Daley gay. That’s because, if you watch the video Daley didn’t call himself gay either. In fact, he said that he still ‘fancied girls’. He is just currently dating a guy. Look through most of the coverage though and you wouldn’t have got this message. Most headlines screamed ‘Tom Daley comes out as gay’. Even a piece in Mammamia yesterday, which spoke about how it is important that being gay shouldn’t define who you are, constantly spoke about Daley being gay. The piece, which had the URL ‘Tom Daley, Gay Diver’, even spoke about how he still ‘fancied girls’, and that was a great thing. As the author said:
What’s great is that Tom says he still fancies girls. I think that’s brilliant. Today, it is far more socially acceptable to sit somewhere on the spectrum of sexuality than it ever was. I love that he’s owning that.
It’s amazing how it can be great to be able to ‘sit somewhere on the spectrum of sexuality’, but the moment you start seeing or sleeping with someone of the same sex we have to place the ‘gay’ label onto you. Apparently he ‘sits on a spectrum’, which is great, but that spectrum still only has two labels – gay or straight. Labels such as ‘bisexual’ as rest still apparently impossible to utter.
Tom Daley didn’t come out as gay – not as far as I know. If anything, even though he didn’t use the term himself, he would be identified as ‘bisexual’. And it is about time we stopped ignoring bisexual as a legitimate sexual label. Just because you are a man that has sex with men, doesn’t automatically mean you are gay. Just because you are a woman who has sex with women, doesn’t mean you are automatically lesbian. There are a range of labels people place onto themselves, and all are just as valuable as the binary ‘lesbian/gay’ and ‘straight’ that we are determined to place onto people.
Sexualities are identities more than anything. And bisexuality is a genuine form of sexuality and identity expression. If we want to be excited about people being able to express themselves along the spectrum of sexuality more, then we have to start treating bisexuality as a genuine expression of sexual desires, rather than an ‘aberration’ or ‘confusion’. We have stop automatically applying the ‘gay’ or ‘straight’ label on to people, and instead allow people to identify in their own way.
Tom Daley, as far as I am aware, didn’t come out as gay.