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Journalism of Courage
In an interview to the ABC show Good Morning America this week, American actor Bella Thorne (right) described herself as “pansexual” — not bisexual, as she had said earlier. Thorne is among several celebrities who have declared that they do not conform to binary labels while defining sexual orientation.
“I’m actually a pansexual, and I didn’t know that,” Thorne was reported to have said. “Doesn’t have to be a girl, or a guy, or a he, a she, a this, or that. It’s literally, you like personality, like you just like a being.”
Stonewall, the LGBT rights charity in the United Kingdom, defines pansexual as “a person whose romantic and/or sexual attraction towards others is not limited by sex or gender”. In the spectrum of gender identities, there is only a small proportion of people who identify themselves as being pansexual.
The term itself is not new, however — having been coined in the early 1900s. It comes from the Greek prefix ‘pan’, meaning ‘all’. The other word for pansexual is omnisexual — derived from the Latin word ‘omni’, which means ‘all’.
Interest in pansexuality — both the word and the idea — has surged every time a celebrity has come out being as one. In August 2015, Google searches spiked after actor-singer Miley Cyrus described herself as pansexual. More recently, in April 2018, singer-songwriter Janelle Monáe told Rolling Stone magazine that she was pansexual.
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