Despite a youthful obsession with Michio Kaku’s* Hyperspace, I don’t know a ton about physics (apologies to my scientist parents, one of whom is a biophysicist (the other is a biochemist/virologist).). But I do know that there’s this thing called “quantum superposition,” where particles — even, sometimes, large particles — can exist in two places at once.
(Apologies to actual physicists for what is probably going to be me butchering science in service of metaphor.)
Anyway. You can probably see where I’m going with this, or at least where it’s going to start. The idea of something — the exact same something — existing in two places at once defies all human logic. If you are here, you cannot be there; if you are there, you cannot be here. This is the whole issue that people have with the bisexuals: what audacity to say that you can have straight attractions and queer attractions, to say you don’t have to “pick a side” when everyone else does?
And yet, quantum physics is out here telling us we can literally be in two places if we want. The spooky** physics proves it!
I suppose I could end the essay there: Physics proves bisexuality! But it feels a little unsatisfying. Because — quantum physics aside — people don’t particularly like accepting that you can be more than one thing at once, especially when it comes to love and romance. The entire American framework of love is constructed around this idea that, you know, you ultimately have to choose. Your heart is only so big, and someone must occupy the lion’s share of it, and that person must have a gender, ergo…
And it is true that time is a limited resource and that, short of constantly having group sex, you will be choosing individual people to have sex with and those individual people will have genders (and sometimes those genders will be no gender, but no need to get into that right this second). The classic way to explain how this can be true and how bisexuals can still exist is to point out all the other choices we make in life, choices that don’t necessarily negate our other tastes and preferences. I can like cookies and cake and yet choose between them on any given day; I can find blue and brown eyes equally appealing and yet that doesn’t mean I’m only going to be happy if I wind up with one of those rare folks with heterochromia iridis.
But this too — I dunno. It’s a metaphor that works for some people, clearly, and maybe it works for me on some days too. But right now I’m finding it unsatisfying because of how reductive, how consumption focused it is. People are not cake, you know? The connections we have that we call love, the passion we feel for people — to compare that to eating food just feels uncomfortable to me. It’s more complex than that, isn’t it? It’s more beautiful, more nuanced. (Maybe you are going to argue with this because you just really adore food though, it’s always possible.)
I like the quantum superposition metaphor, then, because it allows me — allows all of us — to be something more complicated, something more intriguing, than just a dessert lover who can never fully choose between cake and pie (and frankly shouldn’t have to). I do feel like someone who is spookily present in places they shouldn’t be, even as my own bisexuality feels so self-evident (women are pretty and men are fun and people are endlessly fascinating!) that it’s obvious to me that the mystical, magical spell isn’t my ability to contain these “contradictions” but the fact that society as a whole was able to be convinced that monosexuality (or, ugh, even just heterosexuality) was somehow “natural” and “normal” and everything else was wrong. (Intimate bonds with other people are fun! Fucking is fun! Plenty of animals do bisexuality, indiscriminately finding pleasure and love wherever it feels good, independent of the potential for reproduction (which, for many animals, happens during a pretty circumscribed time), so why should it be weird that we do, too?)
I fear I’ve gone off track.
The point here is that the world is full of weird shit that doesn’t make sense to our tiny human brains, that the universe is so complex, so surprising, that it breaks my brain to even attempt to comprehend it. And you’re trying to tell me that something as magical and intense as *love* can be broken down into some simple “you get to like one gender and one gender only and that’s just the breaks kid” framework? Lol, no thank you.
I will continue to exist in two places at once.
* Not to be confused with Michiko Kakutani
** I don’t remember what “spooky action at a distance” actually means in science terms but I like that phrase
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I don't know if this will make sense, but this essay basically explains how my obsession with "Everything, Everywhere All at Once" helped me embrace my queerness (even not related to the main queer character, though everything does relate to Joy.)
I contain multitudes