Sexual Fluidity in Popular Culture | A Beginners Guide

3 min readDec 22, 2025

Is Being Sexually Fluid Part of the LGBTQIA+ Community?

In short? Yes.

Dr Lucy H and PhD researcher Jay M use their academic knowledge to discuss what sexuality fluidity and its place in the LGBTQIA+ community in their Podcast ‘Your Thoughtful Besties’.

Recorded not long after Betty Who spoke of their personal lived experience with their sexuality on the Made It Out podcast, we acknowledge that sexual fluidity, or in other words Abrosexuality, is a valid sexual identity within the LGBTQIA+ umbrella but that its status is a fraught one. We then think about why this is the case.

Betty Who’s comments on Made It Out were quite controversial and received a lot of backlash. They have responded to this some time ago with an apology. Whilst we do talk about what was said and the struggle Betty Who had in articulating herself, neither of us are claiming to know what was said and why, but rather use these comments to reflect on the current status of the LGBTQIA+ community and how we work with one another.

Introducing the academic context, Lucy references Lisa M Diamond’s work on sexual fluidity, the featured link will take you to a list of publications by Diamond since 1997. We contrast Diamond, and other academic work in the same area of research, with popular LGBTQIA+ rights campaigns that speak to a very different understanding of sexuality. We focus on Lady GaGa’s ‘Born this Way’ video and the popular momentum for queer pride that it generated. In his article for The Atlantic, ‘The GaGa Anthem that Previewed a Decade of Culture Wars’ Spencer Kornhaber explores how iconic and important this song was for championing queer rights and empowering queer identities.

Don’t be a drag, just be a queen
Whether you’re broke or evergreen
You’re black, white, beige, cholo descent
You’re Lebanese, you’re orient
Whether life’s disabilities
Left you outcast, bullied, or teased
Rejoice and love yourself today
’Cause baby, you were born this way
No matter gay, straight, or bi
Lesbian, transgendered life
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born to survive
No matter black, white, or beige
Chola or orient made
I’m on the right track, baby

Lady Gaga, Born this Way, 2011

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We observe how the lyrics ‘I’m born this way’ foster a static understanding of sexual identity, one that is fixed an immovable. By exploring these two different lens of reading and understanding queer identities, we pull apart what it means to create a space for those with fluid and fixed identities within the LGBTQIA+ community where everyone feels validated and secure.

Through this exploration, we come to the conclusion that there are a few things that need addressing for the LGBTQIA+ community to accept and find affinity with each other. Firstly, the act of ‘passing as heterosexual’ is discussed as a springboard to talk about the differing experiences of sexualities within society on an everyday basis.

The struggle for rights and the socially privileged position some seem to hold is linked to potential tension between sexually fluid identities and those that are able to be in a heterosexual relationship and those who are not . We follow this thinking through to consider how the ripple effect of losing a generation of queer people to the AIDS crisis has impacted the understanding and reception of sexual fluidity within the community. Briefly, we then ruminate on our shared queer history and relationship to it.

Finally, we think about what it means for us as a queer community to struggle to talk to one another openly about — at times — potentially opposing experiences of sexuality in a world where government records, like the census, are only just starting to recognise and collect data on LGBTQIA+ existence.