When I first came out as bisexual, back in the prehistoric era of 1997, there was one thing I knew for sure:
Now that I was out, I needed to be proud.
Pride was, and remains, a central facet of the queer experience. Our parades? Pride parades. Our annual celebrations? Pride months (or at least weeks). You almost can’t say that you’re out without appending “and proud,” being just “out” sounds incomplete. What are you, out and ashamed?
So it was strange, then, to realize a few years ago that bi pride — it didn’t really resonate with me. More than that, I realized that in my rush to become proud, to announce my pride so immediately at the tender age of 14, I hadn’t actually thought through why it was that I was supposedly proud. I hadn’t fully grappled with the extent of the shame that I was supposedly countering with my “pride” (which, for the record, I publicly proclaimed with an absolutely atrocious necklace that I am including a picture of below).
Anyway. What I realized, decades after coming out, was that in my rush to become proud, I had skipped over so many steps. I had not wrestled with my anxieties about being bisexual specifically — I had assumed that all my fears of not being “queer enough” were simply a measure of how proud I was, of how ecstatic I was about whatever amount of queerness it was that did reside within me that I wished there was simply more. I did not understand that the discomfort I often felt over my multigender attractions, the discomfort I felt at not being a lesbian, was a sign that I wasn’t actually proud, but still deeply mired in shame.
And I started to question the very notion of “pride” as an endpoint in the first place, of pride as a destination or a goal.
Because — well, look. After several years of actively confronting my internalized biphobia, I no longer feel ashamed of being bi. Am I “queer enough”? Who gives a shit, I’m me. I’m predominantly interested in women, but still attracted to men; mostly I am just trying to find some happiness in the world, and far too old to structure my dating life with an eye towards pleasing other people. That feels like a major accomplishment.
But am I proud? It’s hard for me to claim that these days. For starters, my bisexuality does not feel like something worth being “proud” of, it is a neutral quality that I have done nothing to achieve. I suppose a part of me is proud of having overcome my bi shame, but that doesn’t really make pride my dominant emotion when it comes to my sexuality. Pride feels too simplistic, too pat, to fully capture my emotional landscape.
What I feel now, far more than bi pride, is a form of bi rage. I am angry at the condescension I routinely receive from others, even my queer peers; I am furious at the smug assertion that bisexuals are the least oppressed queers — an assertion that defiantly refuses to confront the extensive data that demonstrates otherwise. And I’m mad as hell that any of this has to be a conversation, that I have to constantly advocate for something so stupid, so basic, as being left alone to fuck and date whomever I want, that years after “love is love” went mainstream, people still struggle to, you know, accept that bisexuals may not differentiate between love for one gender and love for another. (Honestly I sometimes have difficulty differentiating between friendship love and romantic love, especially since I’m pretty sure it’s all the same chemical signals firing in my brain.)
And frankly, I would rather be openly angry than “out and proud,” because I would rather be keenly aware of the injustice that requires me to even wrestle with this concept of “proud” in the first place. Pride, after all, is only an emotion that makes sense when you are overcoming oppression: to be “straight and proud” is at best embarrassing and at worst actively hostile. And if there is to be oppression, well — bi furious feels like a far more useful and engaged state than bi proud.
Could I translate the last few paragraphs (into hebrew) and share them with my bi+ group? I'll give credit of course. Important conversation to have with pride month and pride parades and pride events coming up.
It sounds like you read “out and proud” as being out as bi and proud of being bi. I’ve always thought of it as being out as bi and proud of being out, in a hostile world (and by the same token, proud of everyone else with the courage to come out too). Being out as straight takes no courage and that’s why there should be no pride in it.