A few months ago, I made decision to start going to Shabbat services at my synagogue more regularly. I can’t recall what sparked that desire — maybe it was that I was feeling lonely and Shabbat services felt like a way to connect more deeply with community? — but in the wake of losing my dad, it felt smart to double down on this commitment. Jewish religious practice is, shall we say, very aware of the omnipresence of death: every time you go to synagogue on Shabbat, there is a moment carved out at the end of services for people who are in recent mourning, or acknowledging the anniversary of a death, to remember their loved ones. In my current state, it’s a space that feels useful to have.
Anyway. I bring all this up to explain what it was that brought me to synagogue this past Saturday, a Saturday that was — in addition to my first time back at synagogue since losing my dad — my congregation’s Pride Shabbat. If I had any hesitation about attending a Pride celebration in the midst of my grief I can’t quite recall; to be honest, I mostly felt like being among other Jewish queers would be good for me in this raw and vulnerable moment.
But. The actual point of this essay isn't really about my mental state, or my grief, but rather this: because it was Pride Shabbat, my synagogue’s rabbi opened the proceedings with a personal disclosure about her own queer journey. When she was younger, she said, back in the 1990s and 2000s, she used to pray to be different. It’s a story that many queers can resonate with (though, she was quick to note, not a mandatory part of the queer experience) — and yet the story my rabbi offered had a little twist. It wasn’t simply that she prayed to be straight, she said. She also prayed to be gay. She prayed to be cohesive in her desires — because being as she was, she felt, meant that she would inevitably hurt other people. Though she did not say the word “bisexuality” it was obvious that this was what she was talking about: that being bi felt like a guarantee of betraying the people that you love, that a younger version of herself had tried to pray the bi away in the hopes that it would make her more trustworthy.
Sitting in the pews, listening to another bi woman speak, not of hating her queerness, but of hating her position between queerness and straightness, it struck me that this was as good an explanation of the particularities of the bi experience, of bi pain, as any other. What my rabbi described was not internalized biphobia as an extension of homophobia, but internalized biphobia as a unique experience unto itself; one that can coexist with an acceptance of same gender love.
So it was interesting then that immediately after my rabbi offered this personal disclosure, her co-leader — another queer rabbi — offered his own opening words, ones that pulled from the text of the Torah portion that would be read that day. His interpretation of the text isn’t particularly relevant here; what is, however, is his choice to talk about the fight against “homophobia and transphobia,” full stop.
I don’t think that he was being intentionally exclusionary — certainly, he was leading a Shabbat service with a bi woman who he clearly recognized as being in community with him and other queers. And I suspect that, if pressed, he would have gestured to “homophobia” as encompassing biphobia, would have noted that bisexuals, as people with homosexual attractions, are also fighting against homophobia and benefit from its extinction.
To which I say, well, yes, BUT
To have biphobia lumped in under the umbrella of homophobia right after a bi woman spoke of youthful prayers to be made gay just seemed odd, you know? A bi woman had just succinctly demonstrated why the eradication of homophobia does not necessarily solve the woes of bisexuals in particular, and immediately after, the unique experience of bisexuals just fell out of the conversation.
And certainly one could argue that expressions of homophobia and transphobia are currently more violent, more state sanctioned, than bi-specific aggressions are. Certainly. But it still seems odd, you know? And I don’t want to be the irritating cis white bi lady shouting “well what about me???” but I do think it is worth asking folks to think about what they are saying, what they are erasing, when biphobia is not seen as its own unique concern. I do think it is worth asking whether biphobia deserves a separate mention alongside homophobia and transphobia — and how our conversations might change if we made that small linguistic shift.
When I saw the summary in my email, I hoped that you would address biphobia from within the gay community and was not disappointed.
Your rabbi's story sounds so familiar. I think that many gay and lesbian folk do include bi people under the umbrella of people who share same gender attraction, they might still do things in their actual social lives which are exclusionary, like being vocal about not dating bi people, or conveniently forgetting that some of their friends are bi rather than gay, or even dropping friends who are dating people of other genders.
Super powerful, thank you for sharing!