If you’ve spent any amount of time in queer spaces, you are likely aware of the affection sometimes bordering on obsession that many queers have for astrology. This notion that queers love astrology is so ingrained into people’s understanding of queer identity that the dating app Lex just defaults to showing users’ star signs without even asking, extrapolating the data from the birthday that they entered when they signed up (which, yes, I find hella weird).
As a queer who finds astrology fun but isn’t about to live her life by the guidance of Co-Star (or, uh, even download the app), I’ve always found this conflation of queerness and astrology to be somewhat odd. Or at least, I did right up until someone pointed out to me that many queers grew up in hostile Christian environments and, having left their faiths behind, turn to astrology (and tarot and crystals and all the rest) to fill a hole that remains when Christianity has been excavated from their lives.
And as a Jew, and specifically a Jew who grew up in a queer-friendly religious community, I just — that does not reflect my experience. Much as I may have struggled to accept my queerness, it’s never been because of my religion: I was always raised to understand Judaism and queerness as completely compatible (indeed, I’ve made many a joke about finding my future wife at my synagogue, where the rabbi herself is a bi woman). So while, yes, teen me did have a whole New Age phase, I don’t have the relationship to astrology, or to religion, that some other queers do. And I chafe at this notion that to be queer is to love astrology because you have religious trauma, that queerness and queer culture are necessarily outgrowths, not just of trauma, but of the trauma of being raised in a homophobic Christian environment. That’s not me, you know?
I bring this up in part because — well, over the past few days I’ve been exploring this idea that bisexuality is not one specific, discrete thing. There is no one way to be bisexual, and the very concept most of us have of “bisexuality” is a modern one that cannot be separated from modern, Western ideas of sexuality and gender, a concept that completely falls apart the second you step into a different place or time. And I believe that, deeply, but at the same time — if there’s nothing that truly binds us than what, exactly, are we brought together by at all?
The most obvious answer here — the one that had me thinking of queers and astrology — is trauma. Are we all here, brought together as bisexuals, because of the trauma of living in a world that tells us that we are impossible, that we are bad, that we should renounce our sexualities and “pick a side”? Are you reading this newsletter only because I, too, know what it’s like to feel that particular sort of pain?
And if it is trauma, well, bisexuals wouldn’t be the first group to be united in that way. Indeed, many marginalized groups are primarily bound by a shared understanding of marginalization more than some positive shared attribute. So it’s not like it’s shameful or anything, you know? But at the same time, I don’t want to turn a discussion of bisexual identity into a “queers love astrology!” type discourse. I don’t want to assume that the byproducts of trauma are some essential aspect of being attracted to multiple genders: I don’t want to reduce us to the abuse, the assault, the poverty, the poor health, the bad outcomes that have been inflicted upon us by a society that refuses to let us breathe.
But if we strip all of that away — if bisexuals are simply people who experience multigender attraction, existing outside of any specific culture or moment or oppressive framework — then what, exactly, is left? And part of me just says, well, I don’t know, and I can’t know. And part of me thinks that maybe the answer is honestly nothing at all: that we are here together simply because we’ve been told we should not be, that that alone is what binds us in the end.
But I would like to believe that there is something more than that. I’d like to believe that — even multigender attraction itself is no grand unifier — that the people who claim bisexuality, the people who choose to act on multigender attractions in a hostile world, the people who are willing to put the joy of human connection over a loyalty to past precedent, are united by a kind of bravery, an openmindedness, a commitment to joy. I’d like to believe that we are bound by that, even more than our trauma. Because our trauma is something that we can move past. And I’d like to know that once we do, there is something worth bonding over on the other side.
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