Regular readers of this newsletter are likely aware that at this point, Insider essays about bisexuality are basically a running joke for me. The site runs a fair number of them, and they’re usually bad: almost always cis white women with male partners whose gaze is so firmly affixed to their own navels that it’s a wonder they even managed to type an essay.
But this week, oof. This week they ran a bisexual essay that I don’t hate.
It opens with some fairly familiar territory: in 2020, Jenna Bloom was a seventeen-year-old whose life had just been derailed by the isolation of the COVID-19 panemic. Newly isolated, she found herself drawn into TikTok, and specifically Gay TikTok, and after a few months of obsessing over queers online, she put two and two together and decided to come out as bi on Instagram. And once she found herself in a queer relationship, she did the same thing she saw the other queers around her doing: she documented her love life obsessively, sharing updates online with all her followers.
And now? Well. Now she’s not super comfortable with how she turned her sexuality into, sigh, “content.” And boy, do I relate to that on multiple levels.
For starters, there’s the simple fact that when I was a teenager I was hyper online in a way that now feels prescient: so much of modern social media, so much of the constant sharing that’s now normal, feels like a more technologically advanced version of how I lived when I was in my teens and early twenties, a way of life that, well, twenty years later I have mixed feelings about. So one part of my reaction is just this “Girl, I get it;” a shared awareness of the complex and specific pain of realizing you’ve gutted your personal life by performing it for other people.
But there’s also a more queer specific reaction, too. I think there is this sense many of us have, wrapped up in a notion that’s roughly referred to as “visibility,” that if you are a queer person in a happy (or at least superficially happy) partnership that you owe it to your colleagues, to the youth, to be public about that partnership. Your marriage as inspo porn, more or less, your marriage as a reminder to the youth that #ItGetsBetter, a fuck you to the queerphobes who insist your deviant ways will render you unhappy. If you’ve found love it is your duty to loudly crow about it, right? To show that queer love is not merely possible, but thriving.
And I feel — I feel very uncomfortable with that.
As a general rule, I think that being a public figure is a suffocating feeling. For all its benefits (and there can be quite a few!), it comes with the unavoidable experience of having your complex, multidimensional self rendered into something flat and cartoonish for other people to consume. It’s bad enough to experience that as an individual, but to do it as a couple? Once you’ve proffered your #QueerLove as inspiration for the youth, it ceases to belong to you. It becomes, well, content: a fairy tale story for strangers to cheer on, to get invested in, to — and here’s where it gets really horrific — write fan fiction about. People who know nothing about you, who have never met you, suddenly become experts on your intimate life.
And if your relationship suddenly goes south? I mean… good luck to you.
I feel like there has to be a better way to push back on pervasive queerphobia, to remind the youth that #ItGetsBetter, that love is possible, than by asking people to make their personal lives the subject of public discussion. Like, can’t we just make more art full of happy queer couples? Can’t we offer up queer role models who really are just flat dress up dolls for the public to play with, rather than expecting real queers — real vulnerable people — to offer their own relationships up as fodder for strangers’ consumption?
I mean, especially when it comes to teens. Keep those tender developmental relationships locked away from the internet, kids; they are for you and your paramour(s), not the public’s prying eyes.
I know the cow has left the barn, hailed a cab to the city, rented a sketchy and possibly illegal studio apartment in Queens, found a job behind the bar of a swanky pub, developed a drug habit, banged a few models — wait where was I going with this? I mean, look: I know it’s too late to turn back the clock. I know we cannot refill the Pandora’s box of the internet with all its original horrors, cannot put it back on the shelf and pretend we never opened it. But I wish more of us could take that Insiderp essay’s message to heart. I wish we could stop treating the most tender, vulnerable parts of ourselves and other people as, sigh, just content for the content mill’s hungry gaping maw.