What does it mean to “lose” one’s queerness? Is it even possible? And if one does “lose” their queerness the way one can misplace, I dunno, car keys, then can one’s queerness be found, be reclaimed?
I feel like this is the subject matter of a lot of personal essays about being a bisexual. You spend your youth being wild and queer, smoking in alleys and hitting up all the queer bars, and then you wind up in a committed, monogamous, and (gasp!) hetero relationship, and suddenly you’re not so sure who you are anymore. And maybe you’re just stuck like that forever, being boring and sad; or maybe you get a haircut and feel like you’ve come roaring back, baby. I don’t know.
What I do know is that this essay about a bisexual woman “losing” her queer identity by becoming a boring married suburban mom is just the latest iteration of the same boring ass bisexual personal essay we get over and over again. And it sucks, and it’s tired, and, quite frankly, I don’t even think it’s actually about being bisexual at all. I think these essays are far more a lament of lost youth and freedom — and a troubling reminder than for many people, “queerness” is scene as an aesthetic, a party lifestyle, more than an integral part of one’s self or even (gasp!) a political alignment.
Isabel Mader — the woman grieving the queerness she has maybe just left under the bed or behind that shelf over there, who knows — is married to a man. Fine. She has two kids. Also fine. And she lives in the suburbs. Which, you know, I don’t get, but it seems to appeal to a lot of people. One could rightly point out that in this day and age, there are many queers — and not just cis bisexuals in cross gender relationships! — who are married suburban parents with children, that to adopt this lifestyle is not necessarily to become heterosexual, to become “unqueer.” But to Mader, the entirety of her current existence is utterly at odds with “queerness” as she defines it:
Everything that they tell you will change when you have children has changed — and there are some things that they didn't mention. At the top of the list of things I did not expect was the grief of feeling completely disconnected from a large part of my identity: my queerness. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but I do have a theory.
Days at the park replaced nights at the gay bar. The school drop-off line replaced the coffee shop. I am no longer taking smoke breaks in alleys with the same people I go to Pride with, intensely arguing about the merits of whatever media we consumed that week, projects we're working on, or who we're sleeping with (and why it's justified). Instead, I am on the playground, being asked by other suburban moms, “And what does your husband do for work?”
I sort of have to wonder what, exactly, Mader thinks that gay and lesbian parents — or bi parents in same gender relationships — are doing with their lives. Does she think that they are carting the kids into the city for late nights at The Cock? Does she think their kids just self-transport to school? Does she think they’re at some other, different playground — a cooler one filled with cigarette smokers eager to argue about whatever think piece is on Autostraddle rather than, you know, just other tired parents watching their kids go down the same goddamn slide 50 times in a row? And if not, does she think that these parents are somehow ceding their claim to queerness?
Because the way that Mader describes the supposed “loss” of her queerness (is it in a box in her garage maybe?) sounds less like it’s about queerness and more like it’s about fatigue with being a suburban mom instead of a childfree twentysomething with no responsibilities who lives in an urban center. And that’s not really about queerness — indeed, I’ve heard many straight women make that exact same complaint. But I feel like bisexuals — and especially cisgender bisexual women — are encouraged to see the trappings of suburban domesticity and motherhood as at odds with “real bisexuality;” more to the point, we’re encouraged to write these essays that position queer and specifically bisexual identity as this easily extinguished thing, a membership that is perpetually at risk of lapsing if you’re not, I don’t know, constantly hitting up the queer bars.
And I don’t want to invalidate that feeling — a feeling many of you may personally experience! — but I do think it’s worth asking why this experience, why this essay, is the one we most frequently get about bisexuality; why the ever-present narrative is about bisexuality as a favorite t-shirt that gets worn out in the wash, a beloved tchotchke you can absentmindedly misplace.
I mean, first things first: is there a way that Mader could be a heterosexually married, suburban mom and still feel queer? I would argue yes! She herself notes that a full 25% of queer women ages 18 to 59 are moms, and that many of those women are suburban ladies married to men. Though it likely wouldn’t be easy (it’s not even easy for queer moms in two-mom homes, apparently), Mader could certainly seek out friendship and build community with those other queer moms, or even queer dads. She could figure out ways to incorporate her old queer friends into her new suburban mom life — I’m a single urban queer and I still hang out with my mom friends! She could also just ask herself whether the strictures of heterosexual family life are actually what she wants to live with — and if not, how she and her family might challenge and change them. There’s a lot of shit you can do to queer the family that goes beyond the question of whether or not you partner with someone of your own gender, with whether or not you decamp for the suburbs, with whether or not you tell your kids that you are bi (although you absolutely should, for the record).
But I think even beyond that — what is this obsession with “losing” one’s queerness, you know? Because if queerness is about some inborn thing — if queerness is about whether or not you experience same gender attraction — then, I mean, that’s not really something you can lose. It’s in you, regardless of whether you externally manifest it. All those closeted gay guys who married women and didn’t come out until they were 70 were still gay the whole time, you know?
And if queerness is about what coffee shop you go to and what bars you hit and what your hair looks like then I mean, who actually gives a shit? That’s just a party scene, a fashion choice — that’s the reduction of queerness, of queer life, to something as uninteresting and insubstantial as whether or not you’re into dubstep. Who cares?
I would personally argue that queerness is both a) that inborn thing that makes you out of step with the expectation of exclusively heterosexual attractions, and thus a thing that you cannot lose, but also b) an intentional politic, one that pushes back on, and works to dismantle, all the expectations and norms of heterosexuality. If Mader is worried about “losing” her queerness, well a) she hasn’t, but b) she could always make intentional choices — even as a heterosexually married suburban mom — to advocate for a world where the nuclear, one mom, one dad, family isn’t centered; to advocate for a world where a variety of family structures can flourish. She could work to locate queerness as something outside of herself, outside of whether she goes to the coffee shop or the club, and understand it as a sweeping social movement connecting a variety of people who exist outside of hetero norms, who want to build a world that’s not governed by a limited idea of “normal” family structures and relationships.
But I don’t think that that would be an essay that Insider would run, you know? I don’t think they’re interested or invested in essays about bisexuals pursuing a queer politic even from within a suburban hetero mom lifestyle; I don’t think they’re interested in essays that ask us to consider bisexuality, not as something that fades away when you partner with someone of a different gender, but as a political ideology, a commitment to advocating for a group of people who are marginalized due to their refusal fit into a limited set of pre-established boxes.
Which is, of course, why we keep getting this same stupid fucking personal essay, this one that reduces the experience of being bisexual to just being some really annoying navel gazing whiner. That’s the one that editors want, you know? That’s the one that fits into their worldview. And it just makes me so irritated because, honestly? It’s just such a bad and boring essay.
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Another one that you didn't write *for me* but that I felt affirmed by. I feel like a tldr of your essay could be to mistake a heteronormative lifestyle for heterosexuality.
“we’re encouraged to write these essays that position queer and specifically bisexual identity as this easily extinguished thing, a membership that is perpetually at risk of lapsing if you’re not, I don’t know, constantly hitting up the queer bars.” So much this! It is easy to fear that if one’s bisexuality is not on ready display in ways that are immediately legible it may go missing. Or even worse perhaps it never existed? If you’re a cis bi woman of a certain age most folks (gay&straight) thought it was a phase anyway. It’s not true. But it’s nevertheless easy to believe.