I don’t quite remember when I first started making a concerted effort to unlearn my bi shame, to quiet the voice that told me that identifying as bisexual was embarrassing, uncool, nowhere near as revolutionary as identifying as queer. Certainly the process must have started by the summer of 2019, when I tweeted what was, at that point, my most popular tweet of all time:
But I know for sure that it was over a year after that tweet before I really started to dig into bi history, until I made a concerted effort to engage with bi writing, to chat with bi elders.
And I also know exactly why it was that it took me until well into my thirties to seriously engage with bi thoughts and theory: to put it simply, I just assumed it was all going to be cringe. Bi activists, I felt convinced, were the kind of people who talked about their own personal sex lives as the fundamental basis of their politics, who penned navel gazey essays about how horrible it was when people described a pairing as “lesbian” or “straight” when one of the members of the couple was bi. They were the kind of people, I was sure, who were going to tell me over and over that I really should make an effort to stop by the next poly munch, who always seemed on the verge of inviting me to another board game night.
And don’t get me wrong, I like board games*, but, you know, not like that.
So I had this baggage, you see, where I was deeply convinced that everyone who built their public persona around bisexuality was just incredibly corny, and I was so convinced of that belief that I never actually engaged with any bisexual writing in order to test out this theory. But then, as the summer of 2020 rolled into autumn, I decided to actually put my belief in the inherent corniness of public bisexuality to the test.
The first thing I read was 1996’s Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, which, I gotta be honest, was not for me**. It felt too academic, too detached, too up its own ass with this idea of bisexuality as a theory rather than an ingrained part of real people’s real lives. Or that’s what I remember — there may have been something else that was bugging me about it, but in the end, it simply did not dissuade me from my “bi == corny” belief.
But then I turned to 1991’s Bi Any Other Name and friends… it was like a light switch went off in my head. I’d been skeptical of this one going in (I’m always gonna be skeptical when a bi pun is in play), but as I began to page my way through the intro, I found myself gobsmacked by the radical bi politic found within. Here, in this 30 year old essay anthology, were bisexuals positioning their identities, not as some third sexuality in need of validation and legitimization, but as a threat to a hetero/homo dichotomy, a force able to upend the very foundations that heterosexuality, and heteronormativity, are built upon.
One line in particular stuck with me: “Heterosexuality needs homosexuality, to be reassured that it is different. It also needs the illusion of a dichotomy between the orientations to maintain the idea of a fence, a fence that has a right (normal, good) and a wrong (abnormal, evil) side to be on, or fall from,” Loraine Hutchins and Lani Ka'ahumanu wrote in their “bicoastal introduction.” It was that line that got me really thinking about heterosexuality, not simply as a phenomenon where men fuck women, but as a project of categorization and labeling, of insisting everyone be knowable, even if they are freaks. Under this rubric, the perpetual discomfort of the bisexual, the permanent outsider status — it’s no longer a sign that there is something wrong with us, that we are doing our identities wrong, but instead a measurement of the powerful threat we pose to heterosexual order.
There are other things to love about Bi Any Other Name as well. Though the essays themselves are a bit of mixed bag (it’s a personal essay anthology, what do you expect), the underlying ethos is a powerful one, reading as cutting edge and fresh even decades later. Trans people figure into the text with surprising regularity, as do discussions of racial identity, disability, and other components of what we now refer to as intersectional politics. Bi Any Other Name does not purport to encapsulate who a Bi Person™️ is; to the contrary, the fundamental argument throughout the volume is bisexuality is, at its core, a plea for freedom from the restrictions and expectations that come with identity labels in the first place.
It cracked me open, that book. It made me less ashamed to call myself bi, made me feel proud to be a part of a longstanding radical tradition. It also made me feel motivated to read more bisexual writing: though I have not had the time to dig through the entirety of the Anything That Moves archive, when I dip in and out, I am always pleasantly surprised by what I find — like Bi Any Other Name, this zine’s take on sexuality and gender identity still feels vibrant and modern over twenty years later. Kenji Yoshino’s Stanford Law Review paper “The epistemic contract of bisexual erasure” was a similarly gratifying read, its analysis still relevant more than twenty years after it was first published.
Which brings me to the flip side of knowing your history: on the one hand, it is gratifying to realize you’re part of a long tradition of radical political thinkers. On the other hand… when you start reading all these essays from the 1990s that are saying all the things that you are saying now, it starts to become clearer than ever that simply having the ideas, simply saying them publicly, isn’t actually enough. I think, in a way, that my conviction that all other bis were just annoying and cringe was a form of self-protection: if I could write off the rest of “my people” as navel gazing embarrassments, then I didn’t have to ask myself why it was that we hadn’t made much in the way of political progress. But if we’ve been cool and cutting edge this whole time, if we’ve been advocating for groundbreaking forms of justice, only to languish in obscurity… well what then?
It’s a pretty uncomfortable thought, this idea that we can be right and still be ignored***. And yet, it’s not without a solution. It’s clear to me that one of the biggest reasons why so much bi thought, bi theory, goes unread and undiscussed is because bisexuals ourselves are not reading them, because, like that past version of me, so many of us are knee jerk dismissing our own culture, our own heritage, as self-evidently embarrassing without even attempting to engage this. If we want bi thoughts and theory to actually have substantial readership, we’ve got to start by becoming readers of bi thoughts and theory ourselves. We have to be invested in our own liberation, our own history, if we actually want anyone else to be.
(Is this a good time to remind you to share this newsletter with your friends? Pretty sure it is!)
* John, if you’re reading this, we gotta do another Raccoon Tycoon night
** To be even more honest, I didn’t finish it. My tweets from that era reveal that after a full chapter on Tiresias I didn’t have the stomach for 30+ pages on “Androgyny and Its Discontents.” Sorry friends! Some people love this book!
*** I mean for me, a person who is constantly right and only occasionally paid attention to it’s a familiar thought, but an uncomfortable one all the same