Robyn Ochs, a Massachusetts author, held a workshop on biphobia and what it means to be bisexual. Robyn herself married her partner, Peg, in 2004, though doesn’t identify as a lesbian, but rather as being bisexual and queer. She’s travels all around the U.S. giving talks to youths and adults about sexual identity.

Her discussion of her own sexuality was broadened to the rest of the room when she enlisted everyone in a little survey she developed. She asked people to describe their sexual orientation, sexual attraction and sexual experience—all on a scale from 0 to 6. Zero was “other-sex attracted,” 6 was “same-sex attracted.”

She gathered all the surveys, jumbled them up then redistributed them randomly—everyone now had the identity of another person in the room. Then came the aha moment. Ochs asked all 25 participants to go to the back of the room, where she lined up the numbers 0 to 6 in order along the floor.

Each person was told to stand along the spectrum of their sexual orientation (according to what it said on their paper). Instead of a clean binary of 0s and 6s, things fell in place with many all across the line—though trending more towards 0 to 2.

“Every single time I’ve done this, I’ve never seen a binary distribution,” Robyn told the group.

What I found most interesting was how many people—most, really—  moved across the line to a more binary setup when asked about sexual experience—showing how many people (in the room, at least) feel somewhere along the sexual spectrum, but act in a very different way.

Robyn, of course, said she sees this kind of thing all the time.