When I first came out as bisexual as a baby-faced teen in the long long ago era of 1997, one of the things I knew at my core was that, now that I was out I had to be proud. It was just a part and parcel of the whole deal, you know? I made my way down to Buffalo’s gayborhood*, bought a rainbow chain link necklace, and prepared myself to… I dunno, be an out and proud bisexual for the rest of my life.
It was only decades later that I finally came to terms with the fact that maybe this whole pride thing had been a bit rushed. The narrative I’d always had in my head was that accepting one’s queerness was the major hurdle, that once you could publicly tell people what you were, you’d conquered the Big Boss and were now officially Proud™️. But I had spent my whole adult life openly bi and… kind of ashamed of it, honestly. Ashamed that being bi made me uncool. Ashamed that everyone probably thought I was a straight girl who wanted attention. Ashamed that I was simply not queer enough.
Perhaps my whole journey to “pride” had been a little rushed.
These days, I am not so interested in bi pride. It doesn’t really matter to me if you feel proud of your sexuality — the thing I care about is that you don’t feel shame in it. And I think a lot of bisexuals, even (especially?) the most outwardly prideful of us, feel a lot of shame and defensiveness. And if we’re ever going to make progress, we need to confront it.
Fortunately, I have a suggestion as to how to do that. In addition to being a Professional Bisexual ™️, I am also a diagnosed obsessive-compulsive; one who (blessedly) was treated and is now largely able to successfully manage her OCD as it crops up in times of stress. And there’s a technique I learned during my OCD therapy that has been useful to me as I confront and dismantle my internalized biphobia. And it’s a technique I’d like to share with you.
In OCD treatment, one of the gold standard therapies is known as exposure and response prevention (ERP). The short version is that in ERP your therapist exposes you to one of your OCD triggers, and then prevents you from engaging in the compulsive response that your OCD has conditioned you to enact. If you have OCD, ERP can be incredibly painful at first (do not do it without a therapist!!!!), but over time, you start to recondition your brain. By leaning into the things you fear most, and refusing to self-soothe with your compulsions, you start to understand that they’re not actually that bad. For me, some of the scariest thoughts that lurked in my brain — at the milder end, the fear that hairdressers would be mean to me if I tried to do a walk in appointment; at the more extreme end, some really gnarly images of violent self harm — became defanged with ERP. Sometimes they even became funny.
At the heart of ERP is this suggestion that if we address, rather than avoid, the things that terrify us the most, we often find that they’re really … not that bad. And while bi shame is not quite the same as OCD (although if you have OCD and bi shame, boy howdy can they interact), I do feel that that general principle works here as well. So much of our shame is built around this idea that everyone thinks we’re the bad kind of bisexual, and that maybe we actually are, and we have to consistently prove we’re not lest other people find out the hidden truth and cast us out of the community. (That, or we just completely avoid all community out of fear of being found out.)
So what I want you to do now is imagine the thing you are most afraid of, the bad bisexual who you feel the most disgusted bi — the one who, if you’re truly being honest, you’re a little bit afraid you might be. Maybe it’s the slut who can’t commit to a partner, maybe it’s the basically straight asshole who just sucks all the air out of the room. Maybe it’s the closeted gay person who’s leaning on bisexuality as a way of maintaining an escape hatch. There are so many possibilities, I cannot name them all. But whatever it is: picture that person in your mind.
And then, once you have the image of this hateful, awful type of bi person locked into your brain, ask yourself: what if that were me? What if that is who I am? Would that truly be the end of the world? Would it truly mean I was not worthy of love, of respect, of compassion?
This exercise may be difficult at first. Painful, even. But I suspect if you commit to it, a couple of things are likely to happen. Firstly, it seems very likely that you’ll quickly realize that no, you aren’t that thing you are afraid of — that the fear looms large, that you are terrified of confronting it, because it is so antithetical to who you are.
And secondly, you may find yourself realizing that, no, all these bi horror stories aren’t that bad. Who gives a shit if a straight girl wants to make out with another girl at a party, it’s not a war crime. Who gives a shit if gay men struggle to come out and hold on to bisexuality as a security blanket? Who gives a shit about any one individual’s struggles to grapple with their identity and attractions? Why do we fixate on these supposed individual bad actors rather than building a world where the things that supposedly motivate them (usually, validation from the straight world) no longer have any currency?
We cannot move forward until we acknowledge what’s holding us back. And for far too many of us, bi shame is the monster under the bed that still needs to be flushed out, still needs to be revealed as nothing more than a pile of spare pillows and dust bunnies.
* Allentown, or at least it was back in the late nineties
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