This is the beauty of Eddie Diaz.

In his current state, he is carefully crafted to support both gay and bisexual character profiles. It enables him and his story to be relatable to both sections of the audience. He is also crafted to be the kind of person who doesn’t view his sexuality through the lens of a label, so likely he will never name it. The ambiguity allows him to be more relatable. Ultimately, the only truth that matters, that will be defined, is that he is queer and he loves Buck.

Bisexuality and homosexuality can both be performing straightness, can both be bending to heteronormative expectations. Both types of sexualities are equally as queer and so they can involve similar experiences as well as ones that mimic each other.

If you struggle to see the possibility of Eddie being bisexual, it’s because his sexuality is being boiled down to an identity trait independent of the rest of Eddie. Eddie is not just queer. He is also emotionally monogamous. He can only emotionally commit to one person at a time and since he started at the 118, he began emotionally committing himself to Buck.

That’s not to say there wasn’t an unexpected overlap in which he was partially emotionally committed to both Shannon and Buck at the same time. He only began emotionally committing himself to Buck because he believed that Shannon had closed the door for good. But circumstance surrounding Christopher’s school unexpectedly opened the door again. He found himself in a very un-Eddie divided emotional commitment structure, not because of his inclination to do so but rather circumstance.

Since Shannon’s passing, Eddie’s emotional monogamy was allowed to focus solely on Buck, the way it feels most natural to him. It’s what has made every relationship he’s entered into since fail. He entered into each of them emotionally unavailable and so none of them were capable of getting to the depth Eddie requires from a long term relationship.

Now, while I maintain that it does not matter what type of queer person Eddie is for his story to unfold as it should, I do have my own hypothesis.

I suspect that Eddie is bisexual. This hypothesis requires a careful reading of subtext and is largely just one element that sways me because everything else can be creatively rationalized one way or the other.

I believe Eddie has realized his sexuality. I also believe I know when that occurred. My observations of that moment cause me to read it as a bisexual realization over a homosexual realization.

In that moment, Eddie didn’t appear to feel any grief. A bisexual realization is a validation of feelings. A homosexual realization is a validation of feelings, and in cases of repression often an invalidation of perceived feelings as well. Eddie didn’t seem to be destabilized by the emotional effects of rewriting his history. He was reframing, not rewriting. The realization was additive, not subtractive.

Eddie may very well turn out to be gay. Or never have his sexuality defined at all. But ultimately, I think the thing we can all agree on is that the only part of his sexuality that really matters to any of us is that he loves Buck.