The Bi-Vestigation of Eddie Brock

Pride month means all my queer comic and comic adjacent subReddits are talking canon sexuality among Marvel characters, particularly the Marvel Rivals cast. And I do have to express a level of chagrin that people are boxing it into “gay, straight, bi” because like…asexual? Split theory of attraction? Whatever.
One of the big points of discussion, though, is “Is Eddie Brock bisexual?”
Eddie Brock being the human behind the mantle of Venom for the uninitiated.
Obviously his few relationships with women cover one half of that label. It’s his relationship with the Venom symbiote (heretofore I’ll call just Venom for ease, I don’t want to fight on that little tidbit, right now) that raises this question.
The narrative hits you over the head with the fact that Eddie and Venom have, at minimum, a romantic undercurrent to their relationship. They have physical intimacy, use words of affection, and doing a really bad job of raising some kids together. You do have to start from that assumption for this conversation to even make sense to begin with, and the vast majority of the fandom is working from that original notion.
Some people get caught up in the weeds on whether they have sex or not because “it was only one comic,” but that’s a very dismissive way of interpreting canon. If it happened, it happened, and should be taken in gestalt with the rest of the narrative. The people I’ve seen who don’t ascribe to the romantic narrative, I find either aren’t actually paying attention to canon or are coming at it from a very narrow understanding of what a romantic relationship looks like.
But that narrow understanding also plaques the other side and gives rise to the question to begin with.
Because even people in my own community struggle with relationship structures and concepts of gender they’re not accustomed to. A lot of this “gay-vestigation” focuses on “well, what’s the gender of the symbiote?” That spirals down into a whole other set of complexities. Does a natively sexless species have a concept of gender? Do they pick it up from their hosts? What gender does Eddie perceive Venom? These stacked questions introduce a muddiness to the hypothetical.
What you miss when you get lost in that tumble of variables is that a person or a character can be “not straight” without needing an affirmative label on the other side. One of the reasons “queer” persists as an umbrella term is because there are those for whom the more specific labels don’t quite do it. Where a more general “queerness” matches their feelings. So a character can be queer-coded without pinning it down to the usual labels. That’s fine. That’s a thing you can do. Real people do that.
In this particular scenario we’re dealing with an alien. The instant you introduce a non-humanoid alien into a romantic situation, you’re looking at numbers that don’t exist on the Kinsey scale. In theory, anyone physically attracted to an alien isn’t abiding by any of the language we have around sexuality. They’re experiencing a whole new thing. In my own fantasy world-building, I made up a set of vocabulary for cross-species attraction (that I haven’t quite had a chance to use, yet, but let me cook).
We tend to selectively ignore that and just assign whatever word makes the most sense to us. Shephard/Vakarian is a “straight” relationship on the surface, but, from their perspective, they’re both fucking an alien. Without the usual biological markers of their own species, what exactly are these two people attracted to in a sort of broad sense? We accept that there must be something more than the physical, but we still don’t have the words to describe what that “more” is. Even the split attraction model presumes all the same human-centric language, and we tend to forget to use it when it would actively benefit us.
So the question “Is Eddie Brock bisexual?” isn’t actually answerable with the information at hand and the way we use language. We don’t have a word for “attracted to alien goo that shares a body with me that I usually only perceive as a disembodied voice-thought.”
It also doesn’t matter.
Eddie Brock doesn’t need to be bisexual, specifically.
He’s in a relationship that breaks all cis-heteronormative structures. If that’s not inherently queer, then what is?