If you're a bloke who's into men and women, you've probably had the moment. You said it out loud — to a mate, a partner, a GP, a stranger in a sauna — and the response wasn't curiosity.
It was a question that sounded a lot like: are you sure?
That feeling has a name. It's called bi erasure, and it isn't a piece of jargon dreamed up online for an argument.
It's the everyday experience of having your own attractions waved away as a phase, a stepping stone, a politeness, or a fib. A lot of it tracks back to not being believed — and that wears on you.
What "bi erasure" actually means
Bi erasure is the social habit of treating bi men like they don't really exist. Not in the cartoon sense of pretending you've never met one — in the smaller, more constant sense of assuming you've misread yourself.
In practice that's a partner saying "you'll work out which one you really are eventually", a friend telling you bi is just what gay men say at uni before they admit it, or a doctor pencilling you into the gay column on a sexual health form because the bi column wasn't worth printing.
You can be out, settled, and still get it weekly. The point of naming it is that once you can spot the pattern, you stop blaming yourself for the friction.
The two myths that won't die
There are two stories the world keeps telling about bi men, and both of them get the same thing wrong.
The first is that you're really gay and not out yet. This one comes from gay men, sometimes kindly, sometimes not. The framing is that bi is a halfway house — a soft landing while you sort yourself out — and that anyone honest will arrive at gay in the end.
The second is that you're really straight and just experimenting. This one comes from women you date, from family, and from the bloke version of locker-room logic. The framing is that whatever you've done with men is curiosity, alcohol, or a phase, and the real you is the one who marries a woman.
Both myths share the same engine. They assume bi men can't sustain attraction in two directions at once, so they round you down to whichever side feels less complicated to the person doing the rounding.
Where bi men get it from
It shows up in the gay community, often in the form of "pick a side". Some of that is old wound — generations of bi men who came out as gay first because there wasn't the language for anything else, and the assumption stuck. Some of it is plain gatekeeping, and it's worth naming when you hear it.
The straight community has a quieter version. Mates who were fine with you mentioning a man you slept with at 22 get cooler when you mention one you slept with last month. Partners who thought your past was a story go quiet when they realise it's a present tense.
Doctors and clinics still ask if you're gay or straight as if there are only two boxes. And then there's the version closest to home — partners who'd rather hold one version of you than the version that includes both.
Bi erasure inside relationships
The hardest version of erasure is the one in your own bedroom. A long-term partner who knows you're bi but treats it as something filed away in a drawer marked "before us". Or a partner who acknowledges it in conversation and then goes cold any time you mention a man you find attractive on screen.
It often isn't malice. It's a person trying to manage their own anxiety about what your bisexuality means for them — whether you'll leave, whether they're enough, whether the version of you they fell in love with was the whole picture. The cost still lands on you.
In practice, this looks like editing your own past in conversations with their family, going quiet when their friends make a clumsy joke about bi blokes, and learning to read the room before mentioning anything. Done long enough, it teaches you to keep parts of yourself away from the person who's meant to know you best.
If this is the shape of your relationship, the place to start isn't a defence of bisexuality — your partner usually isn't arguing about the orientation, they're arguing about what it might mean. The conversation that helps is the one about what you actually do, what you actually want, and what stays the same. The longer-term arc of holding two truths in one marriage sits at bi-and-married, and the practical shape of saying any of this out loud is at telling your wife.
Why this is changing slowly in the UK
UK culture is shifting, but it's shifting unevenly. There's more room to say it than there was ten years ago, particularly for younger men. That's not a fashion. It's what happens when the language finally catches up with what people already are.
There's also more bi-specific organising than there used to be. BiCon runs every year alongside newer bi men's groups in most major cities, and bi-specific health is slowly getting into conversations it used to be left out of.
What hasn't shifted as fast is the everyday register. Workplaces are better than they were. Pub conversations and group chats often aren't.
The cost of erasure on mental health
Being doubted about your own life is a slow drip, and it adds up. A lot of it comes from feeling unseen by both communities at once — not quite right for either room.
The cost shows up in smaller ways too. In the energy you spend pre-explaining yourself before you've said anything. In the relationships where you've quietly edited your past, and the ones you didn't start because you couldn't face the conversation.
None of that is in your head. It's the tax on being asked to prove yourself before you're allowed to relax. The longer read on this sits at our mental health page for bi men, which goes into what to actually do about it.
What helps
What helps first is recognising it. When you can spot bi erasure as a pattern rather than a personal failing, the weight of it eases.
The question stops being "what's wrong with how I'm explaining this" and starts being "why does this person need me to be one thing".
Naming it helps too, when the room can take it. You don't have to give a TED talk — a calm "I'm bi, that's not changing, can we move on" closes more doors than a lecture opens. Some people will adjust, some won't, and the second group tells you something useful.
Picking your battles is the third piece. Not every doctor's form, family member, or stranger at a wedding deserves the full conversation. The people who do are the ones close enough to matter, and even there, you get to decide the pace.
For the practical groundwork — language, terminology, and where bi sits next to MSM in clinical and dating contexts — the glossary entries on bi erasure, bi, and MSM cover what the words actually mean and where they're used.
If you're earlier in this and not sure yet what to call it, Am I bi? is the place to start. If you've worked it out later than you'd have liked, coming out later in life is the next page along.