• I'm a bisexual woman who just got engaged to a man.
• I haven't officially dated women because I was afraid to come out to my family.
• Now, I'm worried I'll never get the chance and that I'm cutting off my queerness.

When my boyfriend proposed, my younger sister was surprised; she was convinced that I hated men.

This joke started in my teenage years because I was a naive but outspoken feminist, which caused some stir in my traditional Protestant family. My beliefs never really meshed well with my religious family.

Though I was a proud bisexual woman, I kept my queerness a secret from them. It helped that my romantic history only involved men.

Now I'm engaged to a man and thrilled. But I'm worried I've put up a permanent wall between two parts of my sexuality — and I'll lose access to my queer self entirely.

Bisexual women often deal with stereotypes

Many people have certain beliefs about queer women: Bisexual women sleep with women but only date men, or they only sleep with men because they find women so intimidating, or they like women but are happily settled with their "golden retriever boyfriend."

If you go on social media, where these jokes are recycled for content and solidified in cultural canon, you'd think a bisexual woman had never successfully dated another woman before.

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I worried for years that I wasn't being true to my sexuality. Sometimes, I'd wonder if I was straight and somehow duping myself. With an impending marriage, the anxiety returns.

Julia Shaw says in her 2022 book "Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality" that there's a "sense that, once people are married, the gender of their partner is indicative of their 'real' sexuality."

It's taken years to admit that my hesitation to pursue women came from the restrictive, internalized ideas of my Christian youth. I believed in the church, and only after discovering my sexual interests in my late teens did I question my faith.

I spent the better part of a decade agnostic and happily bisexual, in theory, but struggling in practice. I kept thinking I would eventually date a woman. After all, I found women attractive and daydreamed about them plenty.

But dating a woman meant coming out at home. I convinced myself that I'd come out to everyone if I fell in love with a woman. I didn't recognize how much that would subconsciously dissuade me from pursuing them. So, not coincidentally, I kept dating men.

Fetishizing versus respecting bisexuality

Many men fetishize queer women, and this provided an outlet for me in past relationships. I could flirt or be intimate with women without jeopardizing my relationship with a man because my sapphism wasn't viewed as "real" or "valuable" the way heterosexuality is.

My sexuality was finally viewed as something other than a sin: It was hot. I felt bad for furthering this horrible dynamic, but I was suffocated no matter what I chose.

When I met my current partner, I nearly avoided dating him. I'd repressed my sexuality for too long, I told him, and I wanted to explore it.

In the end, though, I wouldn't sacrifice my time with him for the theoretical pursuit of queer romance with women I didn't yet know. Discussions abounded in the first months of the relationship, and I felt a grief I'd never encountered before.

It took a while to recognize it was because he fully respected my sexuality, thus removing my toxic outlet. It felt ironic. He saw physicality or romance with women as equally valuable, so it could have no space in our monogamous relationship.

I'm now mourning missed opportunities

I mourned this loss, which may be confusing to someone heterosexual. I don't want to cheat or be non-monogamous. I'm happy with one person and feel no need to experiment with that.

My relationships with women — romantic, platonic, or familial — have simply been different from those with men. It's something integral and hard to articulate. They each bring something unique to my life.

Nothing is scarier than the unknown, except maybe missed opportunities, and I felt I'd spend the rest of my life not knowing what I missed. Ultimately, though, we lose something no matter what we choose.

After much discussion, my partner and I know maintaining my connection to queer people and events is integral. I may be in a heterosexual relationship, but I don't have to bar myself from all the beautiful cultural aspects of the LGBT+ community.

Beyond that, my partner and I acknowledged that things change. My decisions aren't all made now. Our sexuality and our needs can develop as we age, and we may have to return to and approach the issue differently throughout our marriage.

Honesty and understanding are the best features of our relationship, and they make my bisexuality feel cherished instead of stifled.

• The surreal ending of Luca Guadagnino's "Queer" may stump some fans.
• The film is based on William S. Burroughs' incomplete novel of the same name.
• The surreal ending is partly based on Burrough's life.

Director Luca Guadagnino's new erotic drama, "Queer," attempts to provide an ending to the unfinished classic 20th-century William S. Boroughs novel of the same name.

"Queer" — Guadagnino's second movie of the year following the hyped tennis drama "Challengers," his highest-grossing film yet — is based on a semi-autobiographical novel that Burroughs started writing in the 1950s. He published it unfinished in 1985.

The film and book are based on Burroughs' experience living with a heroin addiction in Mexico City in the 1940s and 1950s.

"Queer" tells the story of two lovers trying to find a hallucinogenic drug.

Both the novel and movie adaptation of "Queer" follow two protagonists and have a similar plot.

The insecure William Lee (Daniel Craig) becomes infatuated with and tries to charm Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a young expat whom he meets in Mexico City.

Allerton is based on Burroughs's real-life love interest, Adelbert Lewis Marker: their relationship ended in heartbreak for the writer.

Allerton is sexually curious but not wholly interested in Lee. They journey together through South America to find a drug called Yage (ayahuasca) in the hope it will give Lee telepathic powers.

They don't find Yage in the book, but the movie takes a different approach.

When Lee and Allerton reach Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville), a Yage expert, they persuade her to let them try it, leading to hallucinogenic scenes where Lee and Allerton's body fuse together.

Critics have described these scenes as "trippy" and "body-horror-surreal."

The pair achieve telepathy after taking the drug, and Allerton tells Lee, "I'm not queer. I'm disembodied," making it clear that there is no future for their relationship.

Guadagnino told Variety in September he enlisted the help of Justin Kuritzkes, the screenwriter for "Challengers," to write the script for "Queer," including the ending.

"Justin can be more precise about this, but I remember that we said, 'What is unfinished, we want to try to finish,'" Guadagnino said. "And in doing that, we have to understand why it was unfinished and how Burroughs would have finished it."

Guadagnino said the pair also spoke to Oliver Harris, a leading expert on Burroughs' life and a professor of American literature at Keele University, UK.

According to the film's production notes, the phrase "I'm not queer. I'm disembodied" came from Burroughs' journals, and reflects his unease about identifying as gay.

The final section of the movie is based on the novel's epilogue

The final part of the film is set two years after the trip to the jungle, and shows Lee's return to Mexico City.

This is based on the novel's epilogue, where Lee searches for Allerton, discovers he has left Mexico City, and dreams about him.

Instead of a dream, the movie enters another hallucinogenic, surreal sequence, where Lee sees himself in a doll house. In the following scene, Lee and Allerton are in a room, and Allerton places a glass on his head.

Lee shoots at the glass with a gun, but hits Allerton's forehead instead. There is no blood, and Allerton soon disappears.

This scene may be based on Burroughs accidentally shooting and killing his wife Joan Vollmer while they lived in Mexico City, which he wrote about in the 1985 introduction to "Queer."

"I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan's death, and to a realization of the extent to which this event has motivated and formulated my writing," he wrote.

Per Burroughs' biography, he used a glass on her head as a target, in a similar fashion to the scene in "Queer," to prove he was good at shooting, but hit her forehead. Burroughs was convicted of murder and given a two-year suspended sentence.

The film's final scene shows Lee back at his apartment, old and dying. Lee imagines Allerton appearing in his bed, draping a leg over his.

Guadagnino told Entertainment Weekly that this scene is meant to show Lee's lasting and "profound" connection with Allerton.

He said: "The task that we gave ourselves was always to make this a very romantic movie and a testament to this romanticism between Lee and Allerton, no matter how much they are in sync or not throughout this story of their encounter."