Over the weekend (Pride weekend), The New York Times Opinion section ran an essay titled “As A Gay Man, I’ll Never Be Normal,” which, interestingly enough, was written by a one time colleague of mine (not that that has any bearing on anything that follows). The essay was, shall we say, controversial amongst some of the queers, which I suppose is only to be expected when the Grey Lady runs an opinion piece about being a gay man.
I’m not actually interested in weighing in on the discourse that populated Twitter, et al, over the weekend. What I do want to hone in on, however, is the fourth paragraph of the piece, which gave me pause:
The percentage of Americans who identify as L.G.B.T.Q. or “something other than heterosexual” doubled from 2012 to 2022, soaring to a little more than 7 percent, according to Gallup polling. More than half of those nonheterosexual Americans (57 percent) are bisexual — by far queer America’s sexual majority, despite its persistent ridicule in supposed safe spaces. That majority aside, when we discuss self-identifying gay men, lesbians, asexuals, pansexuals, two-spirit, nonbinary and transgender folks, it’s just roughly 3 percent of the population. Heterosexuals make up a greater percentage of the country than white people do on the Supreme Court.
(Emphasis mine.)
There’s a weird little rhetorical trick going on here. Normally when people bring up the fact that the majority of LGBT people are bisexual, it is to highlight the fact that despite our (relatively) vast numbers, we are still ignored at large — that there tend to be far more open gays and lesbians than open bisexuals in positions of power; that we blend into the background of queer spaces rather than dominating them, as one might expect given our population size. In other words: generally speaking the number of bisexuals is considered significant because our relatively invisibility would suggest there are fewer, not more of us. The number of bisexuals matters because it highlights our experience of marginalization.
Yet here — here we’re seeing those statistics wielded to opposite effect. Bisexuals, the writer seems to think, are fundamentally “more normal” simply by virtue of our numbers; a majority who can be cast aside in order to make the case that the real queers (which apparently includes pansexuals but not bisexuals for some reason?) are vanishingly rare, a tiny blip on the demographic radar. It’s a framing that renders “normal” in terms of raw numbers rather than degree of social acceptance — a framing that, honestly, I find deeply, deeply bizarre.
The assumption that “normal” is driven solely by population numbers ignores that, for instance, straight white men are a relatively small percentage of the population and yet treated as the default human; that white people are given a global sense of “normalcy” despite making up a relatively small percentage of the global population.
The question of whether bisexuals are more “normal” than other queers is one that I think we can debate. But the answer, quite frankly, does not lie in what percentage of the population we make up.
It definitely seems like the only reason he's excluding bisexuals in that statistic is to superficially make the rest of LGBT seem like an even smaller minority. I'd think a gay man would have a lot more in common with a bi man than some of the other groups he kept in the statistic. He still included pansexuals, as you mentioned, which at least in terms of big picture things like discrimination and community isn't that distinct from bisexuality.