About eighteen years ago, I worked as a sex educator at an afternoon program for low income teens in New York City. It was a decent enough job (my favorite part was when my students would call me after hours to get advice or guidance) at a theoretically LGBTQ-friendly organization, and it was certainly better paying and more enjoyable than what I had been doing before, so I liked it well enough.
At one point, I wound up in a discussion with one of my supervisors (I had several supervisors, in part because I worked at multiple sites, but this was the sex ed-specific one) about my bisexuality and, more specifically, about whether or not I should disclose it to my students. Said supervisor urged me not to — not because I was bi, he insisted, but because as a sex educator I should remain a blank slate. To out myself as straight or lesbian or bi would necessarily impact how my students understood my lessons and received my advice. Better to keep my private life private, he said.
This all made total sense to me, and I would have been totally fine with it if it weren't for Mark.
Mark was another one of the program’s sex educators; while I was based at sites on the Lower East Side and in East Harlem, he worked up in The Bronx. He was also really fucking annoying and once told the citywide group of sex educators a (possibly fictitious?) story about crashing the NYC marathon right at the finish line, but that’s not actually relevant to this story.
What matters about Mark is that during the time that I was at this program, working as a sex educator with teens, he got married to a woman. And he got her pregnant (actually the pregnancy might have come before the marriage, I can’t remember). And he talked a lot about it. He brought it up a lot whenever we had our regular sex educator meetings, and he definitely told his students about it. (I know this for a fact because every month or so we’d have these clinic days where a bunch of us sex educators escorted some of our students to the clinic and then wind up hanging out there all day, and during one of those sessions I heard him talking to his students about his private life.)
Mark wasn’t actually the first coworker that I heard disclosing details of their private life to students. The social worker at one of the sites I worked at was engaged and very open about her fiancé (who I think even visited the site once), and various coworkers’ spouses would periodically come up in conversation. But it was Mark who pushed me over the edge because he was also a sex educator. If any straight person was supposed to be beholden to the same rules as I was, it was one of my fellow sex educators. But Mark didn’t keep his private life private — and despite his insistence to me that that rule wasn’t about my queerness, my supervisor never reprimanded Mark for putting his business all out in the open.
Anyway. I started thinking about this today after I came across a Pink News piece with a headline about “bisexual erasure” in the workplace. The piece is… fine — it’s Pink News, keep your expectations low — but the reaction it triggered in me feels worth exploring.
Because honestly? My initial reaction to the idea of “bi erasure at work” was pretty dismissive.
Here’s the thing about that story I told you: I don’t actually think my supervisor’s initial advice to me was wrong. While I can certainly see the argument that me being visibly out would have been a boon for my queer students, who would have had a queer adult they could look to for … whatever they needed to look to a queer adult for, I think there’s an equally good argument that presenting a tabula rasa, of intentionally reminding them that I could be anything, could have been useful as well. My problem wasn’t that my students didn’t know about my dating life. My problem was that my straight colleagues weren’t expected to be blank slates themselves — which is why, uh, my doing so felt pretty queerphobic. (And also why it didn’t work as intended — itmostly just led my students to all assume I was a lesbian. Which… sure.)
To be honest, it doesn’t actually surprise me that bi people are less likely to be out in the workplace than our monosexual peers. But I’m not entirely convinced that it’s solely about biphobia. I mean, biphobia definitely contributes, that’s absolutely clear, and there’s obviously erasure in the sense that even if we do, say, show up to a work party with a partner, our co-workers are likely to assume that they represent the entire spectrum of our attraction. Unless we announce our bisexuality, monosexuality is seen as the default.
But I also think that there’s a sizable contingent of bisexuals who actually just… want to remain blank slates at work. I mean, it’s an office job, not a meat market, people! Why do I need to announce my bisexuality every time I get a new gig, you know?
What I want — and I know this is a theme that I frequently return to — is not so much to be “out at work” as to simply be allowed to be, you know? If I show up to a work party with a dude, cool; if I show up to a work party with a lady, cool; if I show up to a work party with a person whose gender defies all known definitions, cool. I don’t think that my sexuality should matter to my coworkers beyond them just, you know, being chill about it. I don’t need to be Your Bisexual Coworker™️. I simply need to not be assumed to be monosexual. I simply need my bisexuality to not be an issue when it inevitably, organically, comes up.
So hilariously, this article may have resulted in me accidentally outing myself at work (accidentally tabbed over to my personal email while giving a presentation, where this article was at the top of my inbox).
People seem to have a great deal of anxiety that they cannot sufficiently put strangers into category boxes in their minds when they meet them. I wonder if this is part of the resistance of conservatives to the idea of new labels for gender and sexuality, thinking that we are demanding they memorize new boxes to put people in, rather than offering new language for people to describe themselves with. They sigh, if only we would just stick to the few boxes they recognize, they wouldn't have to do any additional thinking and they would know how to treat us.