Don't Say Bi

What "bi erasure" actually means.

Last week, Congressional Republicans introduced what is officially known as the Stop the Sexualization of Children Act — but which you’ve more likely heard referred to as an attempt at a national Don’t Say Gay law. The bill, which is closely modeled off of a Floridian law passed earlier this year, claims to “protect” children by barring federal funds from being used “to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10, and for other purposes.” You can probably read between the lines and see what the bill’s actual goals are: the removal of any mention of queer or trans identity for kids in elementary school, the abolishment of drag queen story hours (which apparently get a special callout in the bill!), the conflation of being LGBTQ with deviance and sex, and so on and so forth.

I’m not really here to talk about the specifics of the bill though. The Stop the Sexualization of Children Act — which, I should note, has no chance of passing so long as Democrats retain control of one or both houses of Congress — may employ updated language and modern references to, well, drag queen story hours, but it’s not actually new. For decades now, states have been pushing what have variously been called “No Promo Homo” or “Don’t Say Gay” bills. Though they vary in their specifics they tend to have one goal in mind: discouraging discouraging discussion of LGBTQ identity, with occasional exceptions made for discussions that are disparaging or explicitly negative.

There is a word for the phenomenon where discussion of a marginalized identity is actively suppressed, or only negative discussion is allowed. And yet interestingly, it’s not a word you hear very much when people are (rightly) taking issue with Don’t Say Gay bills. The word, as you may have guessed, is “erasure.” At the end of the day, no matter what fancy words or cutesy rhymes are employed, every No Promo Homo or Don’t Say Gay bill is, fundamentally, legally codified erasure, a formal system set in place to create a culture of shame around queer and trans identity.

I find it interesting, then, that many people who are — rightfully! — up in arms about Don’t Say Gay laws are relatively mum about bi erasure, if they’re not outright disdainful of the entire concept. Bi erasure, as I’m sure you know, is always assumed to be a trivial concern, just whiny bis complaining about not getting attention, about not being recognized as the special little snowflakes that each and every one of us is. Yet if we see bi erasure as not merely about whether you or I or that lady over there is rightfully recognized as bisexual, but as a systemic erasure of bisexuality from the cultural conversation — the kind of erasure that I discussed here, the kind of erasure outlined decades ago by legal scholar Kenji Yoshino — well, it’s hard for me to see a substantial difference between that erasure and a teacher being instructed to avoid any and all discussion of “sexual orientation” (which we all know means “the gays,” wink wink nudge nudge).

I mean what are we to make of the fact that the text of Obergefell v. Hodges, one of the landmark gay rights decisions of the past decade, makes absolutely no mention of bisexuals, preferring instead to speak only of “gays and lesbians”? How are we to feel about the fact that Bostock v. Clayton County, an even more recent Supreme Court decision about employment discrimination, speaks only of protecting people who are “gay or transgender” from unlawful firing, with bisexuality only being deemed of mention in the footnotes of Alito and Kavanaugh’s dissents? It sure feels to me like a situation where bisexuality is absent from the conversation unless it is being disparaged — a set up which, yes, mirrors the exact intent of those Don’t Say Gay and No Promo Homo laws.*

The primary difference between bi erasure and Don’t Say Gay bills is that no one is writing laws that formally encode bi-specific erasure into the books (except to the extent that Don’t Say Gay bills also ban discussion of bi identity, which… they do, they’re not pro bi!). Except why would they need to? Even in ostensibly queer friendly environments, bi erasure is de rigeur. You don’t have to pass laws to enforce things that people are already doing — notably, No Promo Homo laws didn’t arise in America until after the gay rights movement began to gain ground post-Stonewall.

Yet the thing that sticks with me, really, is that if we can understand the harm that banning teachers from “saying gay” can do to young queers — if we can understand that being denied access to representation, to information that helps you feel more normal, can have a horrifically damaging effect — then why do we struggle to take bi erasure seriously? Why do we have such a difficult time understanding that reducing human sexuality to a homo/hetero (or, in modern parlance, straight/queer**) binary leaves young (and old) bisexuals feeling out to sea and unmoored? Why do we consider it acceptable for major Supreme Court decisions to largely elide the very existence of bisexuality? Why do we continually insist that all of this is no big deal?

Obviously, I know the answer: it’s biphobia, the same biphobia that reduces these bills to Don’t Say Gay, or sometimes Don’t Say Gay/Trans, when they’re also a ban on acknowledging bisexuality as well. But I’d like to think that we can use this moment to better explain what it is that biphobia is actually doing, how it actually unfolds — and why, if you can understand why it’s a problem when the law forbids you from “saying gay,” you should be equally capable of understanding why it’s an issue when the way our culture structures its understanding of sexuality and identity strongly discourages from saying bi.

* I should note here that the as of yet unpassed Equality Act and many of its state level counterparts do mention bisexuality, and sometimes asexuality, so at least there’s some progress being made.

** It could be argued that the straight/queer binary includes bisexuals in the queer side of the equation, but that ignores the complications this causes for bisexuals who partner with straight people in relationships that don’t feel particularly queer. Sure, you can insist you’re still queer… but also maybe you’re actually some secret third thing?