If you’re invested enough in bisexuals and bi issues to have subscribed to a whole hecking newsletter about biphobia, then I’m willing to bet that you are aware of the horrific — and, I should note, very obviously untrue — idea that bi men are vectors of disease, that they channel STIs (and specifically HIV) from the gay community into the heterosexual one (which would, of course, be otherwise disease-free were it not for those pesky bisexuals). It’s a nasty little bigotry that has popped up in many places — it’s the reason, for instance, that the “straight” porn industry long had a stigma against bi male performers even as bi women were de rigeur. If you crossed over from the gay porn world to the straight one, or went back and forth, it was assumed you were bringing AIDS with you — never mind that every porn performer takes the exact same STI tests before they’re cleared to perform, regardless of their behavior on or off set.
What you may be less familiar with, however, is a similar line that was once wielded against bi women, particularly during the height of the HIV crisis. Women who had sex with men and women were also considered to be conduits of HIV — though in this case, the logic was that we were bringing AIDS from the straight community into the lesbian one, rather than queering up the hetero joint.
It is possible that right now you are scratching your head in confusion. Bi women bringing HIV from the straight community into the lesbian one? Setting aside the fact that within the US, straight people have never been seen as high risk for HIV*; you may also be thinking about sex acts traditionally coded as “lesbian” being relatively low risk for HIV transmission.
While all of these things are true, I would caution against thinking too literally about this “contamination” accusation, because I don’t think any of it — not even the fear of bi men porting HIV from the gays to the straights, which may sound more rational to some of you** — is actually rooted in any genuine public health concern. I think this rhetoric about disease is much more metaphorical than that, much more about the fear of a bleed between two supposedly cloistered worlds than any actual pathogen.
Because while, yes, this “vector of disease” idea comes packaged with a whole host of other prejudices — that bisexuals are slutty, that bisexuals are careless about STI prevention, that bisexuals are just constantly throwing caution to the wind when it comes to sex*** — the thing that sticks with me is not the various and sundry stereotypes about individual bisexuals and our sex lives, but this fear that we are a vector, a contaminant, something that breaches a previously sterile environment and brings something toxic within its borders.
Even as lesbians have largely abandoned this line about bi women being carriers of disease (bi men, I’m sad to say, still get blamed for bringing disease to the straights), the contamination accusation hasn’t actually gone away. Everyone may be too polite, too sensitive, too HIV aware, to accuse bi women of infecting lesbians with literal disease. But we are still seen as carriers of a different kind of infection, bringing the poison of heterosexuality into supposedly pristine lesbian spaces, what with our constant talking about our current boyfriends, our ex-boyfriends, our future boyfriends. (Apparently bi women like to talk about boyfriends?) So many complaints about bi women center on this conviction that we simply cannot be chill, that we cannot respect the spaces we are in, that we — yes — contaminate them simply with our existence. Is any of this based on the real actions of real bi women? I mean sure, some bi women are total drags with no personality or conversation topics outside of boyfriends, just as some bi men have contracted STIs from other men and transmitted them to female partners. But to present this as some kind of broad analysis of all bi folks? Pretty clearly just biphobia!
The contamination accusation, I think, is just a perpetually evolving screen for the real threat that bi folks represent: a collapsing of borders, a destruction of the walls that get erected between “straight” and “gay,” a reminder that the insistence that you can simply segregate everyone by sexuality and call it a day is futile, because humans and human sexuality simple do not work like that.
I’ve mentioned before that I get a little uncomfortable when “queer” is positioned as somehow more modern, more progressive than “bi,” and I think part of it is because of the way that this particular usage of “queer” seems intended to evade the contamination accusation, to frame your sexuality as incapable of contaminating a space because you, yourself, exist firmly on one side of the dividing line. But this, honestly, makes me far less interested in IDing as queer. Because if the contamination accusation is going to stick around, then let me be a contaminant. Let me be the virus that collapses your firewall, the Trojan horse who brings the thing you fear the most into the sanctity of your walls. The fear of the other makes us weaker, not stronger. And the shunning of bi folks is just an ignorant attempt to blame bi folks for your own refusal to engage with the fact that human sexuality does not break down into some binary black and white.
* Which… I mean do I need to remind you that there’s nothing about gay men, in particular, that makes them more susceptible to HIV and that in many parts of the world it is straight people who face the highest risk of HIV, because it’s really more about which population it took root in than any behaviors? Probably not but I’m saying that anyway.
** It’s… not? Like even explaining why it’s not feels almost offensive to me, sorry.
*** All of which also suggests some pretty loaded ideas about morality and STIs when STIs are just… infections.
This is super interesting to me as bisexual woman with an STI!!