One of the biggest changes we can celebrate in our media in recent years is the increasing visibility of LGBTQIA+ people on screen. But what about people whose sexuality doesn't fit into one of those labels?

Well, what are you...

There are a lot of people who don't consider themselves entirely gay or straight – especially people who are asexually oriented or unsure about their sexuality and struggle to find the right name for their identity.

Filmmaker Christopher Stoudt has an interesting new project to give more visibility to people who don't neatly fit into a specific orientation: his video "I'm Graysexual," in which he explores his romantic life as a young graysexual man.

Gray Sexual

Graysexual is a term that encompasses the fluid area between people who are and people who are not sexual. Although graysexuality usually falls under the umbrella of asexuality, a broad term that includes many different identities, it is somewhat misleading to place graysexual people in the same category as people who experience no sexual attraction or sexual desire under any circumstances.

According to the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, graysexual people (or gray-A or gray-ace) usually do not experience sexual attraction, but sometimes do. They may also experience sexual attraction but have a low sex drive. Or they may experience sexual attraction and drive but not strongly enough to act on it.

They can also be people who can enjoy sex and have a need for it, but only under very limited and specific circumstances. There are many possibilities.

In short, the term graysexual describes people who do not often have a need for sex, but who sometimes experience sexual attraction or sexual desire – people who experience fluidity or do not clearly fit into the asexual or sexual categories.

Graysexuality is not a brand new term – this 2011 Frisky article explores the personal experiences of two women who identify as graysexual. Both women enjoy certain forms of physical intimacy, but the way they experience and express those feelings differs significantly.

And that's pretty common for people who are graysexual. The experience can take many forms, but there is room for everyone's story.

I'm sure many people will wonder why, if you consider yourself someone with fluid sexuality, you would want to find a label for yourself at all. In her article "The Questioning Continuum," Joshunda Sanders, a contributor to Bitch, shared how alienating it can be not to fit into one of the existing categories.

"Like many people, I long to fit into a neat category, and it annoys me that I'm so open to the possibility of love in any form. But a whole life is a long time to be in conflict with yourself," she writes.

It's important to create space for people who don't neatly fit into labels, because their identities and experiences are real and matter. It's an incredible feeling to discover that you're not alone in experiencing something.

And gender-fluid people are really not alone. Many people feel this way – a recent study showed that 19% of British adults identify as something other than fully heterosexual or fully homosexual. That's a lot of experiences that don't have a clear label.

There is little data so far on how many people identify as graysexual, but creating a language that describes graysexuality is necessary if we are ever to understand what graysexuality truly looks like.

People with fluid sexuality are often overlooked, partly because they are not easy to label. But that doesn't make their experiences any less valuable.

A language that describes these experiences more accurately helps us all to understand them better and allows us to talk about them in a way that normalizes these experiences. It's nice to have a label that acknowledges how limited most labels are.