Bisexuals by any other name

Or, Why are so many of us afraid of the B word?

For several years, I shied away from calling myself bisexual. If pressed, I would cop to the B word, but more often than not I’d opt for something else: queer, sometimes. No labels, if I could get away with it. One time I used National Coming Out Day (hey that’s today!) to “come out” as “attractiveosexual” which I said meant I was into people I was attracted to. I dunno, I was going through some shit.

In the past few years, however, I’ve felt the urge to reclaim “bisexual.” And once you do that, there’s one thing that becomes very, very obvious: there are a lot of people actively, aggressively, avoiding using the word “bisexual.” A few days ago, I heard a man describe himself as “queer,” noting that he was “somewhere between heterosexual and homosexual.” On Twitter, I routinely, repeatedly see people fishing around for some cool new name for an orientation that is clearly bisexuality, talking up, for instance, the hyper queerness of dykes who like to fuck fags (which, yes, is very queer and also very bi). Lest you think I’m just cherry picking a few anecdotes, I should note that I’m hardly the only one who’s noticed some reticence around this term: In September 2021, New York Magazine’s The Cut podcast devoted a whole episode to the anxiety people have around identifying as bi, convening a multi-generational panel to debate whether “bisexual” had outlived its usefulness.

I understand very intimately why it is that people do not like to call themselves bi — like I said, I once coined the term “attractiveosexual” just to avoid the cringe, the embarrassment, of deploying the word bisexual*. But I’d offer that, rather than retiring “bisexual” to the dustbin of history, or replacing it with queer (or pansexual or omnisexual or multisexual or polysexual or mspec), it’s worth embracing the cringe. Because, quite frankly, I think the very thing that makes so many of us want to turn and run from bisexual is exactly what makes it useful, powerful, even — dare I say it? — revolutionary.

Like, okay, let’s call a spade a spade: the reason so many of us hate the word bisexual is because it comes burdened with an inescapable whiff of heterosexuality. If “bi” is understood as “half gay/half straight”**, then you have to deal with this thing where you’re half straight — an understandably unappealing prospect for many, particularly if you hang out in the kinds of queer spaces where the straights are so last century. Under this framework, to be bi is to inherently be a kind of traitor, to have split loyalties, to refuse to pick sides.

Why else would so many folks insist on calling themselves queer instead? To be queer is to draw a line in the sand and plant yourself firmly on one side of it. To be queer is a declaration of allegiance — and emphatically not to the straights. To be queer is to recognize that there’s a war on, and you’d better pick a side. To be queer is to emphatically assert that you are not straight, that you may dabble with a hetero or two from time to time, but you’d never actually consider yourself one of them.

And while I would never be so cruel as to suggest that my fellow bisexuals are actually straight people in disguise — I mean, we’re just self evidently something different! — I do have to say that this whole Team Queer vs Team Straight dichotomy… it gives me pause. For starters, it’s just an expanded version of the age old gay vs straight divide, with “gay” replaced with LGBTQ2SIA+***, this attempt to put all the not straights, all the weirdos, into one bucket while the straights remain in their own bucket over there. It seems to aim for a kind of “separate but equal” future, one where the queers have their world, the straights have theirs, and that’s just how it is. You know those queers who brag about not having straight friends like it’s some major accomplishment? That’s the vibe it gives off.

And that… is not what I want.

It’s not that I’m against queer spaces — to the contrary, I find them very valuable! And to be honest, the majority of my friends are somewhere on the queer end of the spectrum (though not because I explicitly seek queer friends out). But this “us vs them” mentality, with its implicit logic of “good guys” and “bad guys”****, it just seems to cause more problems than it solves. I mean first and foremost, if I’m going to join a team, it’s going to be organized around something more interesting than who and how I fuck. But secondly… isn’t this willingness to sort the world into two neatly separated buckets just doing the work of the straights, who feel far more comfortable when there’s a place for everything and everything is in its place?

Which brings me back to the word “bisexual”: a few years into reclaiming it, I have to admit that I’ve come to like the implication of split loyalties, the refusal to “pick a side.” Not because I’m interested in playing the queers against the straights, or doing some selfish double cross, but because I don’t think there should be teams in the first place. In being bisexual, explicitly — perhaps queer and bisexual, but bisexual first — I’m flagging that, yes, I’ve dated queers and I’ve dated straights; I’ve traversed both landscapes and I may be among either group even now. I’m actively declaring an intention to muddy the waters, to bring queerness into straightness and straightness into queerness and to own the very “disloyalty” that so many bis have been derided for over the years.

To be bisexual is, fundamentally, to call bullshit on the border war between the queers and the straights, to call bullshit on these borders altogether. To me, that feels pretty powerful, pretty revolutionary, pretty worth claiming.

And you know what else? It doesn’t feel cringe.

* Although recounting that moment now fills me with an entirely different kind of cringe, so I guess cringe is unavoidable.

** No comment

*** I have a lot of thoughts about this ever expanding acronym, mostly that I feel like the more groups get crammed into it the less each of those groups is actually served, but I will get to that another day.

**** Who is who depending on if you’re Team Queer or Team Straight, I guess