I feel, sometimes, or actually very often, like the majority of personal essays about bisexuality are basically the same essay again and again and again. For the most part, they are written by white cis women with male partners; more often than not, their fixation is on not being read as queer, and the personal pain of this experience. I’m sure I have linked to essays like this before, I am thinking about them now because I just read one again. This woman came out as bi during the pandemic, now she thinks about the fact that she will have to come out over and over and over again because everyone defaults to assuming they’re dealing with monosexuals and she has a husband.
Okay.
I don’t want to fault the individual writers of these essays, or even pick on them too much, because we’re all allowed to have our own bisexual experiences, you know? No one is less valid than anyone else, etc and so forth. If I’m going to blame anyone, it’s gonna be the fucking editors who keep signing off on these essays, the editors who seem convinced that, well, this “I’m so sad that no one sees me as queer/I have to keep coming out again and again and again” experience is just, like, the full spectrum of what it is to be bi. Like, really? You really think there’s nothing more to it than that? How deadly dull. How disappointing.
(As I’m writing this, fully aware that I’m a cis white woman who has mostly dated men, I find myself wondering how I feel, personally, about these questions. To be honest, at forty I have ceased to give a shit whether or not people read me as queer; what matters to me is whether a woman I hit on reciprocates my affections, and if I’m hitting on her, well, she’ll know I’m into women. As for this “what a pain to have to continually come out” thing — here I would just say that there are many things about me that are not immediately legible, that I have to “come out” about again and again, and like… I am no more stressed that someone might not immediately know that I am bi than I am stressed that they might not immediately know that I am Jewish, or a dual citizen*, or a former roller derby girl, or any of the other numerous things that you cannot detect at first blush. To be immediately comprehensible from the jump? Sounds awful.
But I digress.)
The reason why I used to feel ashamed to call myself bi, the reason why I shied away from it, was because I could not fathom a bisexuality, a bi identity, that was not — forgive me for saying this — just about, like, petty whining. I go back to that headspace sometimes, when I read one of these deadly dull essays; and I find it so frustrating that this is just, like, the sum total of what so many people know about bisexuality, about biphobia. There is a rich and complex landscape of bi experience — I mean by definition bisexuality is fundamentally more diverse than any form of monosexuality, there are just so many varied and different ways of being bi — and yet we’re still getting the same monochrome photocopy of the same monochrome painting over and over and over again.
It’s depressing, is what it is.
I write this newsletter in the hopes of injecting a little color back into the spectrum. Hopefully it works! I hope that I can inspire other bisexuals to do something similar; to push back against the idea that the tiny little slice of bi life that gets highlighted is the sum total of what we go through. You have your own story, and you should tell it. You should puncture the narrative that bisexuals (even white cis lady bisexuals) are all trodding down the same deadly dull path.
Also seriously, can we stop making it seem like having to “come out” again and again is some terrible burden? It’s called getting to know a person, Jan. It’s okay if your life story doesn't get dumped on the table all at once.
(That said if you tell someone you’re bi and they refute it or don’t believe you then they’re an asshole. That much is clear.)
* #TwoTerribleCitizenships
I try to be generous and compassionate, but as someone in the same situation as the author of said article, it still made me role my eyes just reading the subhead. I don't know, like we have a lot of privilege actually? "I will never go back in the shadows feels very #HashtagBrave.