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There's this biphobic stereotype that coming out as bi is a stepping stone to coming out as gay. Which is of course not the case, but people who believe it often base that belief on having personally observed people around them first coming out as bi and then as gay. My counter to this is usually that I've also observed the reverse; people first coming out as gay, then later as bi/pan. That doesn't mean that coming out as gay is a "stepping stone" to coming out as bi or pan.
But I do think these dual phenomena, people coming out first as bi/pan, then as gay, and people coming out as gay, then as bi/pan, is interesting. So I want to muse a bit about why this happens.
We live in a heteronormative society, which conditions us to assume people to be straight until proven otherwise. This assumption extends to ourselves. We assume we are heterosexual, until we discover that we're not. But those are actually two different assumptions. 1) we assume we are attracted to the opposite* gender and 2) we assume that we're not attracted to our own gender. I'm veering a little out of my lane here, because I'm not homosexual, but I think when a lot of gay people first start to figure out that they're attracted to their own gender, it only breaks down one of those assumptions. The person realizes that they like their own gender, but they keep assuming that they must still like the opposite gender. Therefore they come out as bi/pan. It's only later that they figure out they don't like the opposite gender that they come out as gay.
*setting aside what the heck "opposite" means when gender isn't binary.
But our society isn't only heteronormative, it's also binarynormative. We're conditioned to see things as binary, either one or the other, and one of those binaries is that people are either straight or gay. So for many bi/pan people, when we figure out that we like our own gender, we think "oh, I must be gay". So we start out coming out as gay and maybe even go back and forth between identifying as gay and straight. When we finally realize that there are more than two options, we come out as bi or pan.
I've also seen this happen with asexual people, but the other way around. They discover that they don't like the opposite gender, so they assume "I must be gay". Then they struggle to "be gay" until they figure out that they're not attracted to their own gender either.
Breaking down heteronormativity and binarynormativity could save a lot of people a lot of heartbreak.