In the sixth episode of Amazon Prime’s A League of Their Own, the Rockford Peaches spend a night at the movies, taking in a showing of The Wizard of Oz, which, yes, does become the basis for a metaphor. When Abbi Jacobson’s Carson arrives at her very first underground gay bar later in the episode, she compares the experience to stepping into Oz: prior to this moment, the only queerness she’d known was her own and that of the teammate she’d been secretly sneaking kisses (and more) with. Now, she finds herself in the midst of a queer utopia, one populated with possibilities — butches referring to femme partners as their wives! gay men! trans people! — she couldn’t have imagined even seconds prior.
I think that Oz can be a bit heavy-handed and overused as a coming out/queer discovery metaphor, but I have to admit it is rather apt. But it’s not the joy of having your world burst into full color that I want to discuss right now. It’s Kansas, not Oz, that I am thinking about; and specifically the way that Dorothy Gale, and everyone around her, manages to live a whole entire life without realizing that her entire world is in black and white*. And why should she? Before you have seen blue, you cannot conceive of its existence.
A League of Their Own maps this transition out deftly; it is clear that Carson — and her Black counterpart, Max, who goes on her own queer baseball journey in a separate storyline — cannot even imagine lesbianism as a possibility at the beginning of the series, cannot conceive of what she is outside of “wrong.” But what so many of us fail to grasp is that even as we step into Oz, we are still trapped in Kansas. There is always another, brighter, more colorful Oz awaiting us; there are undiscovered colors waiting to be found, if only we could figure out how to open the door they lurk behind.
Consider, for instance, the dramatic shift in how we understand gender and trans identity over the past few decades. Back in the 1990s, transitioning was spoken of almost entirely in medical terms, as a procedure one underwent: you had a “sex change,” and swapped yourself from male to female (and back then it was always male to female, few people spoke about trans men, and non-binary identities were almost entirely off the radar) — though even post-transition, trans women were largely framed as fetish objects and freak shows rather than human beings who’d simply figured out a different way to live their best life. It is understandable then back then many trans people simply could not understand themselves as trans: if you weren’t assigned male at birth and interested in being perceived by society as a woman, then you didn’t fit the established narrative. Even if you were, the exaggerated and often cruel caricatures of trans women that populated the media could easily frighten you out of ever coming out of the closet.
Yet now, in 2022, the way we once spoke of trans people seems nearly unfathomable — and the once unfathomable landscape of gender diversity now seems like common sense. Of course your genitals at birth aren’t the sum total of you as a person, of course gender is complex and individual and fluid. Of course there are people who don’t fit easily into male or female boxes, or who ping pong back and forth between the two. Of course the sky is blue, and not a dismal shade of grey. Now that we have opened the door to Oz, it feels impossible that there was a time when we didn’t even know that it existed.
I bring all of this up because truly, I think that most bisexuals are still in Kansas. We think that we understand the breadth, the extent, of bisexuality, but do we really? Ask most people who a bisexual is and they’ll likely tick off the following description: a white** cis*** person (and usually a woman) in a heterosexual relationship, one with a penchant for the occasional threesome, but little queer identity beyond that — though if she’s still in her twenties then she's probably single, sexually adventurous, and more than a little alt. Or maybe you see bisexuality as inseparable from polyamory, and imagine some corny little hippies with their happy little polycule. But beyond that — is there a beyond that? I mean I know that there is, but it rarely seems to enter into the conversation. We almost never talk about bi men; when we do, it’s inevitably with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, and a joke about how they’re just closeted gays (or, potentially, extremely horny straight guys who aren’t picky about where they stick their dicks). Bisexuality is rendered in flat, unappealing hues — is it really so shocking that so many people who could be considered bi avoid the label so aggressively? Is it really so shocking that so many people with bisexual urges aggressively oppress them in favor of a simpler, more appealing path (whether straight or queer)?
I have been trying to imagine lately what bisexuality might look like if we could step out of Kansas and into Oz, if we could perceive it in all its rich complexity and vibrancy. Certainly, my own revelation that I wasn’t a 50/50 bisexual or a heteroromantic bisexual but a woman-loving woman who also happened to enjoy sex with men was a baby step out of my own Kansan landscape. But what other possibilities await us, what other people could we be, if we stopped buying into the limited selection of bi archetypes that so many of us have grown up with, and started to imagine bisexuality as a blank slate?
I am sad to say that I don’t know the answer to that question. My own imagination is too stunted, too stuck in Kansas, to fully comprehend all the possibilities that bisexuality could offer us, all the different types of bisexual who are out there in the world, just waiting for the words that will allow them to understand that they exist. But I have to believe that it’s possible to find ourselves opening the door to that bisexual Oz. And when we do, I know it will feel like freedom.
* Okay, sepia, if you’re going to be a nerd about it
** POC are more likely than white people to identify as bi
*** Trans people are more likely than cis people to identify as bi