There is an exercise that virtually every bisexual has engaged in at one point in time, this declaration that insists that while, yes, we are in fact bisexual, we are not like those other bisexuals. You know the ones I mean, the ones we all, at one point or another, attempt to disavow: the white girls we’re convinced are just claiming bisexuality to attract men, or maybe get some extra diversity cred at work. The unicorn hunters, the painfully cringey swingers whose bisexuality is not even just about sex, but specifically about party sex, group sex, sex in a way that is intended for other people’s enjoyment and consumption. I am not like those bisexuals, we like to say*: my bisexuality isn’t some crass attention grab, isn’t merely about sex. It is a purer, more integrated part of me, I was born this way, I am really, authentically queer in a way that is meaningful.
I have spent plenty of time doing this particular tap dance, trying desperately to get people to respect me, respect my bisexuality, by pointing and laughing at the certifiably bad bisexuals, in the hopes that my mockery, my disgust at their whole deal, would render me more trust worthy, more likable**, more — dare I say it? — convincingly queer.
Because there is another kind of bisexual who I am not like, though in this case I do not disavow them so much as desperately crave to be one of them (or at least have their approval). You likely know this type as well: the effortlessly cool, confident bisexual, the ones whose queerness is never questioned, who even manage to — gasp! — attain the coveted status of queer icon. The David Bowies, the Janelle Monaes, the bisexuals (or pansexuals or polysexuals or multisexuals or omnisexuals or just queers) whose queer cred is so firmly lodged within their deepest self that it can never be tarnished by a dalliance with a heterosexual partner. The kind of bisexuals who can tell you, “Oh but my mixed gender relationships have always been incredibly queer,” and you actually believe them.
I am not one of those bisexuals. I have known them, certainly: a dear friend has always struck me as a kind of queer Cool Girl™️, the femme life of the party whom every queer wants to fuck or at least be friends with. I could never imagine anyone questioning her queer cred, anyone deriding her as just a secret straight girl, no matter who or how she decided to fuck.
But me: I have always felt tenuously queer. Whether I am or not, whether other people look at me and think that, is beside the point, because I have felt this deeply. I cannot point to my gender expression and say, “Look, ah ha, I am obviously queer,” because my gender expression is, what, just some casually feminine woman who can’t particularly be bothered to make some aggressive aesthetic statement about how she is queer***, how she is bending or even breaking the rules, how sure she’s feminine but it’s exaggerated and intentional and therefore considered and thus queer. And I cannot tell you that I’ve queered my mixed gender relationships because, uh, I haven’t, not really. It is hard for me to see the relationships I have had with men as particularly different from those that some hip, open-minded straight girl might have, there is nothing I can grab ahold of to tell you that, no, this is how a bisexual woman dates men****.
I have worried, a lot, that I actually am one of those — gasp! — bad bisexuals, that even if I am not as bad as the swingers, the attention seeking white girls whose attraction to women seems theoretical at best, the unicorn hunters, and so on and so forth, I am still another kind of bad. What if I am the girl with the boyfriend who is sucking all the oxygen out of the queer room, who is boring everyone by daring to speak about her dull straight life, who obnoxiously imposes her effectively straight self on queers with no self-awareness of the burden she is placing on the less fortunate, less privileged, more genuinely queer queers? What if I am the girl who is tainted by the men she dates, who is “half straight,” a tourist, and inauthentically queer?
It should come as no surprise that the primary impact of those worries was me making myself smaller, me receding from queer spaces and queer people and queer groups, me withdrawing into isolation because if I didn’t ask for anything I could not be seen as an imposition.
Was, I say, because I don’t have these worries anymore, not really. I wish I could tell you it was because I magically managed to suck it up and start loving myself, to feel boldly, aggressively, proudly bi in all my imperfect expression of that identity. But I can’t because the truth is the thing that enabled me to shed my insecurity was this: I stopped wanting to date men. I stopped wanting to date men, and suddenly all the worries fell away. How could I be insufficiently queer? I did not want to date men. How could I be secretly straight? My romantic energies were exclusively directed at women. My queerness was self evident. I became the punchline to a joke I’d recited again and again in my head: the only real bisexual woman is a lesbian who used to date men.
I would like to think that I could have achieved this confidence, this stability, some other way; that a younger me might have found a way to be secure in her queerness regardless of who she was dating, regardless of the gender of her current slate of crushes. Maybe it wouldn’t have been possible — maybe my insecurity was a manifestation of some deeper thing I was working through — but I think if it had been, it would have started with a small, simple revelation:
Those bisexuals — the confident, the effortless, the indelibly queer ones — are, more often than not, just as insecure, just as grasping, just as anxious about their position, their worthiness, their belonging, as the rest of us.
* One does have to wonder who these frequently derided bisexuals disavow themselves, or if they disavow anyone at all. Part of me wonders if they’re actually real, anyway, or if they’re just a manifestation of our collective internalized biphobia.
** I don’t do it anymore though because I realized it’s just a manifestation of bi insecurity, which I will likely discuss in further detail at a future
*** And to be honest if I did, it wouldn’t feel like me, so what does that say?
**** In retrospect I do think that my male partners have treated me differently than they would treat a straight girl, but that’s about my objecthood not my subjecthood so it’s something slightly different.
This really hit home for me! I've struggled with the same things for a long time. Maybe one day I'll come to peace with them.