It's 2013. I just graduated from Temple University with a Bachelor's in English and was feeling...optimistic about all the possibilities opening up before me. I had just spent years analyzing text, getting to know my sexuality, beginning the very basic baby steps of questioning "Do I Even Gender?", and I wanted to start my career off strong. Getting published in Bi Women Boston seemed like a great start; it would combine all the things I had done in college.
The topic for Bi Women Quarterly's fall issue was "Bisexual Enough?" In other words, they wanted to collect the experiences of bi women who had ever been made to feel like they weren't bisexual "enough." Here's the essay:
Every once in a while, I return to this essay to reevaluate; now that it's over ten years past the original publication, it's the perfect time to revisit. What do I think about the topic now?
When I did another version of this essay a few years ago, I said this:
I'm not inviting discourse over what is or is not biphobia or what the community is or isn't or should/shouldn't be; I'm talking about my experiences, which might look nothing like yours. I don't have answers or even meaningful suggestions. I have lived experience and where I'm coming from, presented anxiously. I want to revisit my thoughts on my experiences and on my identity (my identity) now that I've had more time to digest certain things and understand my identity more fully.
I present it less anxiously now, but this sentiment still stands; I don't have a horse in the race of what the community "should" be because so often I feel alienated from the community, and the reasons why are all over the original essay, even if I don't recognize that fact at the time I wrote it.
When I was in college, I identified as Queer because I felt connected to the community, because it was a badge of honor and a sign of resisting; I had spent my education learning about LGBTQ history and finding words for the things I had experienced but could never identify: (cis)heteropatriarchy. The unique crossover where sexism meets biphobia (in my specific case, but swap for any non-straight sexuality) meets gender essentialism/transphobia. At the time, Queer held the power to shield me from everything CisHeteroPatriarchy wanted to throw my way.
My high school had a GSA club, but it was seen as a joke; our school newspaper reported that a non-insignificant number of students had heard their teachers use "gay" as a derogatory term. I had plenty of internalized homophobia, even including what was taught to me by my liberal family; although my mother was clearly in a relationship with another woman, it was never discussed like a relationship. It was the quiet, willful ignorance; they might not have disapproved, but they certainly didn't accept it enough to acknowledge it. "Queer" was a way of shedding those old ideas and to make room for new ones.
Now, however? Considering the way I was continually triggered and faced more biphobia (being called regressive, being told I was on the side of homophobes, etc.) from the same people who claimed to be part of my community for thinking that maybe queer shouldn't be the universally accepted umbrella term because of how many people had been harmed by it, I distanced myself from The Community (such as it was on social media) and went back to calling myself bisexual.
I was tired of being expected to trigger myself by engaging in endless discourse—the kind that cast moral judgment on the opposition versus merely challenging ideas; it wasn't a "consider this" moment that led to actual understanding if not agreement, but a series of "If you don't believe x, you're regressive" with threads of well-written posts shutting down any argument that resembled mine.
"Queer" became less a symbol of progress to me but of inter-community warring, of expectation. At least on Tumblr, where I spent most of my time online, Queer became the default. I saw posts like this:
If our enemy uses a weapon against us (calling us queer) and we take it and use it ourselves, we've taken that weapon from them.
But I could never get over this argument that I could never be comfortable enough to share:
But if you start swinging the same weapon around indiscriminately, now you're dealing the same damage to your own side that the homophobes were.
But for me, the homophobes' taunts and even their violence is expected; that's their nature. If it's coming from people on my own side, the people who claim to be protecting me despite being told "Identify that way if you want, but please leave me out of it because it's harmful" repeatedly, that adds the bitterness of betrayal to the damage.
Defaulting to "the queer community" or "queers" (especially the latter) as an umbrella by itself either forced me to exclude myself or to accept the identity despite it triggering me for years just to be part of the conversation. If you're called queer without having reclaimed it, how can that feel defiant? How can that feel revolutionary? It's just one more label being placed on you—one more box you're forced into without your consent, and this time it's from your own people.
So for the most part, I excused myself from the conversations and the community.
But I still keep bisexual close to my heart not just because it's politically significant, but because it's socially useful. I can say "I'm bisexual" and I can give useful information to those around me; it'll give an idea of how I perceive and am perceived by the world, and it gives people an idea of what I might be looking for in a partner. This is even more complicated now that I've realized that I'm agender, but in the most casual way. My own gender or lack thereof isn't important to me, but gender in others does play a part in how I experience attraction. "Queer" doesn't satisfy that for me even now that it doesn't trigger me like it once did. Queer implies something undefinable, something that defies the idea that LGBT identities need to define themselves, to justify what "bisexual" means especially to the satisfaction of cishet observers. And I understand the value in that for others, but I can define my general types and attraction.
I have types; I know what types of men I'm interested in, I know what types of women, I know what aesthetics I look for in nonbinary people. I know how I prefer masc and feminine presentations to look in general. When I was first getting into a relationship with my current partner, I decided I was really not interested in dating a man again. It wasn't just that I wanted to balance my punch card like in the original essay. I decided that after the last two men I had dated, both of whom piled their own flavor of trauma on me (see their features in The [skeletons] Closet for fun!), I didn't want to be with a man again for a while.
I knew I wanted to actively pursue a relationship with someone who had a different way of viewing the world and navigating it than the men I'd been dating; I had a different experience when I dated my first girlfriend, and I wanted that again. Gender and the experiences tied to it and to presentation are part of what I look for, not because I'm trying to find a masc man and a femme-presenting woman, but because for most people, their gender will inform their very way of thinking and living. The same way someone might say they're looking for someone emotionally compatible, or whose humor is compatible, I wanted to seek compatibility on even that basic level. That's not to say I'd never be interested in dating a man again if my partner and I separated, but to this day, nearly six years later, I'm still not interested in what perspectives a man might bring to the table versus a woman or someone nonbinary.
In other words, I'm still attracted to men, but it's not what I need from a relationship. (It's the same with monosexual people; they don't date everyone of the gender they're interested in for any number of reasons, but somehow that logic is too hard to apply to bisexuals. But somehow not living up to that biphobic rhetoric also made me feel not "enough.")
When I wrote the original essay, I hadn't really gotten familiar with the concept of asexuality, and while I don't identify with asexuality for a number of reasons, I could call myself demisexual because while I might be attracted to the ideas of people, my trauma has put me in a position where I only want to date someone I know is safe. A friend. Someone who knows me. They're not using my body or sexuality against me.
So I no longer have to sit and nitpick and try to justify my sexuality based on the measure of arousal when looking at men vs women (because I didn't have enough experience with nonbinary people at the time of this writing to include them in the discussion of my identity) because I know myself more thoroughly. I've explored more intimately the intersection of my trauma and my sexuality so I don't feel pressured to prove what's arousing to myself. I know that I can still define my attraction without the physical manifestation of it.
"Bisexual" captures the idea of how I pay attention to and prefer certain genders or presentations while still leaving room for the more subtle nuance of how I experience the actual attraction. The "who" is broad, and the "how" is personal, defined and explored mostly with my potential partners.
But on top of "bisexual" suiting me personally over "queer," calling myself bisexual still feels more revolutionary to me. "Queer" has been adopted in so many mainstream areas; queer studies, queer theory, queering the narrative; it's academic, it's the word that ties the community together; cishets use it freely. But "bisexual" is still treated as a dirty word.
Some results for "bisexual is a dirty word" on Google:
"Google Removes 'Bisexual' from its List of Dirty Words" (2012(!!!), Advocate)
"Is Bisexual a Dirty Word?" (2015, Cherwell)
"Bisexual is Not a Dirty Word" (2017, The Breeze by JMU)
"Bisexual: The Other Bad 'B' Word" (2017, San Francisco Chronicle)
"Bisexual is Not a Dirty Word, So Start Using it to Describe Valkyrie" (2019, SYFY)
(the link worked when I first wrote a draft in 2021 that would become this, but even Archive.org missed the capture; the quote below is copy-pasted but the relevant link was captured at least)
"The Evolution of the Word Bisexual and Why it's Still Misunderstood" (2020, NBC)
"Bisexual" is making its way into more mainstream media after decades of having "gay" and "lesbian" as common terms coming out (haha) of the 90s boom of gay and lesbian representation—because finally, it was safe enough for LGBTQ actors to come out and for networks to monetarily risk breaking from the influence of the Hayes Code; but bisexuality is still seen as...lesser or undesirable. Bi people are not trusted by other members of the community. Gay men and lesbians are not required to date bisexual people, but maybe it's a problem if gay men and lesbians refuse to date bi people just because they're bisexual? If they think of bisexual people as traitors in the same way that straight people do?
From the SYFY article above:
Bisexual is a beautiful, powerful, and important word that describes the sexual identities of many, many people who are consistently maligned by or excluded from both straight and lesbian and gay communities. This “double discrimination” has significant impacts on the mental health of bisexual+ people.
I mentioned "bihet" in the 2013 essay. Sure, I am safer when I appear straight when I'm with a partner—but that's a result of heterosexism and coercive closeting. It erases my experiences and my identities based on the assumptions and comforts of other people. Does a lesbian not experience some level of increased safety if she's walking with a male friend than she does with her girlfriend? Do I not if I'm walking with a male friend who isn't my boyfriend? Am I in more danger walking with a female friend than I am with my girlfriend? With my boyfriend?
If a lesbian and a gay man date each other to protect themselves, it doesn't make them straight, it makes them closeted. Why is it that only bisexual people are called privileged if we're closeted and date to protect our safety? Because we might find some fulfillment dating someone of a different gender and the closeted lesbians and gay men likely can't? It's the same closet.
I've been lucky that I've been able to be open and out with my boyfriends; I haven't had to hide my bisexuality, but I have been fetishized for it. Straight men dating bisexual women will often reason that it's okay to fetishize us, even asked for by our very identity. We're here to be unicorns, or else we wouldn't be bisexual. Is it a privilege and not a closeting if I did have to hide my attraction from a boyfriend to avoid that fetishizing? To avoid the sexism? The biphobia? The potential violence that might come on the back of it all?
Of course, I should find another man to date. Or just not date a man. But then I face the issue of potentially having to hide my identity from a lesbian partner because she thinks bisexual women are tainted because they like dick. Aside from the transphobia of denying trans women/transbians without bottom surgery as a part of the community, it's buying into a classic sexist idea about womens' sexuality and the transformative nature of mens' penises.
Coercive closeting is nuanced; I am not a woman, but I look like one. Does that not have any impact on the assumptions of whether I'm in a "heterosexual" relationship? Condemning a bisexual person for appearing to be in a different-gender relationship is the work of straight homophobes. I've never seen a lesbian railing against a bisexual woman in a different-gender relationship/a straight-passing relationship turn around and extend a protective arm to bisexual women who are with other women/in same-sex-passing relationships; I rarely saw bisexual people in same-gender relationships mentioned at all during that discourse. So it's almost like it's not about the gender of the bisexual person's partner, but the identity of the bisexual person as a whole.
It was just easier to target bisexual people in different-gender relationships than it was to target bisexual people in same-gender relationships because the former wouldn't immediately clock as discrimination—think of all the misogyny masquerading as woke because they tack "white" in front of "women." Because whiteness is safe and appropriate to criticize, white women became the targets of sexism wearing a mask with Anti-Racism smeared across the forehead. The "bihet" discourse is just biphobia wearing a mask of Anti-HeteroPatriarchy. It's much more difficult to push back against when the biphobia comes on the back of claiming it's trying to dismantle straight privilege.
I don't say all this to target my lesbian siblings, because gay men also do the same to bisexual men, but again, this is about my experience. Lesbians are the ones I saw engaging in the biphobic rhetoric online, the ones being interviewed about their refusal to date bisexuals. And that doesn't mean that I'm not going to stand against lesbophobia/misogyny aimed their way; despite not engaging with the community as a whole, the LGTQs are still my community when it comes down to it.
I mentioned in the 2013 essay holding on to the gut punch of experiencing homo-/biphobia as evidence that I am really bi, in lieu of practical experience or helpful physical attraction markers. And I understand why I did that—it almost feels (or felt at the time) like it's not enough to not face violence or true discrimination for my sexuality, like because I've mostly dated men instead of women or nonbinary people, I'd have to face biphobia to make it real. I'm one step away from being straight unless I'm in danger for being bisexual. (And then only the danger from straight people is acceptable to the gay men and lesbians who make us question whether we're enough because if the call comes from inside the house, it doesn't count.)
But only associating "true" bisexuality with homophobia is also wildly harmful, and I wonder how not doing that would have affected me. Instead of knowing my identity was real because of the way that gut punch felt when I was called barsexual (accused of kissing other girls in a bar just for attention by another bisexual woman); of the accusatory tone my grandmother took when she asked if I was gay, just to start crying and say she wished I wasn't because being gay is hard and she didn't want me to suffer (she doesn't know I'm bisexual to this day and never will); of the time my father cornered me and asked "how do you know? Have you ever been with a woman?" when I had never been with a man, either—instead of all those things, I could have been measuring my worth with the joy of being bisexual.
I could have known it was real because of my connection to the experiences of the community, in finding pleasure, comfort, and satisfaction and the happy experiences with men and women and other genders.
It's not revolutionary for me to date a man, of course. But it's also not the same as a straight relationship. It's a fully neutral act that doesn't strip me of the wholeness of my bisexuality so I'm Barely A Bi. Just like when I date a woman, I don't expect to be held up as Almost A Lesbian or to have it be counted as revolutionary. I can't be revolutionary in choosing my partners based on what the community wants from me because I need first and foremost to not be abused anymore.
I considered so many times whether I should just give up "pretending" I was bi/attracted to women, especially because of my limited libido, and just accept I'm straight. Is that privilege? Is it privilege to face increased rates of domestic violence compared to other members of the LGBTQ community from both same-/different-gender partners?
I wrote the following in another rewrite/revisit of the original 2013 essay; it doesn't completely still hold, but I made a very good point:
[...] I still associate mildly with girl because I'm afab and gender is just not a thing. But because people perceive me as A Woman, because I lived so long thinking I was just a super casual lady, I never had to assess my attraction to men. It was expected. It was the default.
So every time I look at women/nby people, I have to go back to when I was 23 or 24, just out of college in 2013, and do the same assessing. I have to second-guess what I'm experiencing; to prove I'm bisexual, I have to prove I'm attracted to women, but I never have to prove I'm attracted to men. I have to make my attraction active, which is also a part of why I choose to call myself bisexual. I don't have convenient markers of attraction to go by, no physical reaction to trust. So I choose it. Being agender already makes it more nebulous and weird than when I thought I was cis but casual.
But it also means that even if I am attracted to men, it's not a het relationship; if people perceive my relationship as m/f, will people defend it because I've been misgendered, or will it hold that I still have [cis] straight-passing privilege? My bisexuality and my gender inform my life. How I interact with and view the world. So which part do I have to compromise on?
As I mention right above the quote, my libido/the physical part of my sexual attraction is complicated. It's because of all this trauma. But I always assumed that it was true that I was attracted to men, even though I still lacked the physical feedback. The biggest difference now is that being agender has made it easier for me now. Whatever attractions I experience are now pretty inherently under the bisexual umbrella.
In other words, all the attraction I experience is not The Straight Experience. It's one of the millions of unique bisexual experiences. I'm not choosing who I want to date because I get a little punch card to mark off how many men or women I sleep with, and if I don't keep it perfectly balanced I'm Bad And Regressive, Actually—I date and experience attraction to people based on who can give me what I'm looking for in a relationship and to whom I can give something in return.
So because I feel...separated from the community, I have curated one of my own. I don't dabble in random online spaces, just in ones with trusted friends. And we still don't see eye-to-eye on every topic, but at least it can be a discussion and not a battleground for our very souls like in the spaces I explored in 2013.
Part of that curation is creating bisexual characters who call themselves bisexual repeatedly and by name; some of them are in different-gender relationships, some of them are in same-gender relationships, some of them are in polyamorous relationships. And most of them are informed by my sexuality; I deal with things I don't fully understand in myself in my novels and short stories.
Recognizing and recovering from trauma; depression; the pressure to be with a man even if they treat me like shit because that was socially preferable to being with a woman (straight-passing privilege, allegedly; The Longevity of an Acorn explores this); sometimes it still doesn't feel like enough. Is this the latest way that I prove that I'm bisexual enough? Maybe! That's how I show my pride—not by joining communities online or marching in Pride parades but by writing relationships I wish I had or that reflect the one I'm in now. It might not be enough for everyone. But it's all I have.
Kommentare