So I’ll be honest: when I first started getting Google alerts telling me that Mo’Nique had come out as bi in a recent Netflix special, my main reaction was a “Well, good for her,” and a shrug. I did not feel compelled to watch an entire hour+ comedy special just because someone came out as bisexual in it; in the grand scheme of things, this just felt like one more celebrity coming out that was being reported on in lieu of actually important news about biphobia and bi rights.
But then I was talking to a comedian friend about specials he’d watched, and he casually mentioned Monique’s special (which I’m realizing now I… don’t remember the actual title of), framing it as a “Black Nanette.”
That piqued my interest, particularly since when I’m thinking of comedians who seem adjacent to Hannah Gadsby — comedians who might be expected to put together a Nanettesque hour — Mo’Nique is not really one of them. Mo’Nique! Bawdy, brash sitcom star Mo’Nique! Doing a Nanette? I needed to see what he was talking about.
So I watched, and — well given that so much of the special is Mo’Nique revisiting various traumas (being in special ed as an adolescent, her grandmother’s fraught relationship with Mo’Nique’s bulldyke aunt, Monique’s own sexuality) while peppering some jokes in, it wasn’t hard to see why my friend had compared it to Nanette. And once I had figured that out, well. It was time to examine the bi stuff.
What was interesting to me about Mo’Nique’s story is that — well, let me give you the broad brushstrokes. Mo’Nique spends a good chunk of the special talking about her butch dyke Uncle Tina (who sounds kinda trans masc TBH but who Mo’Nique repeatedly refers to as a lesbian and woman, so I’m just gonna go with that), and then about how her grandmother’s religious beliefs prevented her from fully accepting Tina, from — as Mo’Nique puts it — loving her publicly. Watching her aunt get this treatment from her grandmother was brutal for Mo’Nique, who loved both women dearly; more than that, it caused her to feel ashamed of her own attraction to women, which she worries will make her grandmother love her less.
So it is only after her grandmother dies that Mo’Nique feels remotely capable of acknowledging her sapphism, which she ultimately tells her husband (and, of course, the viewing public) about — and though she is terrified that learning about her queerness will make her husband love her less, she is ultimately thrilled to find that, to the contrary, he’s ecstatic about it.
Then Mo’Nique cops to the fact that she’s probably not going to pursue another woman because she’s a pillow princess (she doesn’t use this phrase but it’s what she’s saying), which she is convinced queer people will get mad at her about, which is very very funny to me since like 80% of Lex posts are from proud pillow princesses.
So basically the arc here is a bi woman who has never slept with a woman and may never do so; a bi woman who is happily married to a man and not planning on leaving him. You know, the very arc that a lot of people use to dismiss bi women as attention hungry straight girls. And yet the thing that is so compelling to me about the special is that Mo’Nique deftly illustrates why actively being in queer relationships is not a prerequisite for suffering within a biphobic society.
She talks, very openly, about how she could not be her full self around her loved ones, because she feared their rejection. She makes mention of the fact that she aggressively pursued sex with men in an attempt to eradicate her fantasies about other women. And it is very clear that she really, truly believed that this aspect of herself was so heinous, so vile, that her beloved husband — a man who’s known her since she was a teenager — might outright reject her after learning that she’s interested in having sex with other women. One has to wonder who Mo’Nique might have been; what her arc might have been; if she’d grown up without fear that her bisexuality rendered her tainted and disgusting. One has to wonder what Mo’Nique’s journey might have been if she’d grown up in a world where she was allowed to just be.
And look, this story — I think it’s a common one. It is the arc of many of the bisexuals who are routinely dismissed as fakers, as not queer enough; and yet in Mo’Nique’s telling, it is clear that there is real pathos, real pain, to the experience. I don’t know that an hour of comedy is going to change the way anyone feels about bi people, about bisexuality. But I certainly hope that Mo’Nique’s story might help add some texture to the bi experience — might make people less ready to dismiss other bisexuals with arcs like Mo’Nique’s as nothing more than whiners and attention hogs.
Great piece on this and great link, I was quite moved by her bravery, she covered some tough personal stuff - I am learning so much 😀
Thinking about your post about myth busting, even if we were seeking attention, there's nothing wrong with that.