There’s this experience that feels common to being a marginalized person, an experience of performance when you are in a space among people who are not like you. I think of it as tap dancing: this demand that you put on a show, that you prove you fit in, that you explain your lifestyle and worldview, that you entertain the others around you for no reason other than because you are different and confusing to them. The tap dancing can take a number of forms — sometimes it’s a literal performance, like when a bilingual person is called on to serve up different words in their native language for the entertainment of monolinguals — other times it’s a demand that you justify your value, that you prove that you have earned respect, that you prove that you are good enough. Whatever the specifics of the tap dance, the underlying point is that you will never be allowed to forget that you are different, and that because you are different, you will never be allowed to rest.
I am forty, and — just like all of us — I have lived for years in a pandemic that refuses to fully die, and quite frankly, I am too tired to tap dance anymore. To be honest, I was too tired to tap dance well before I entered my forties and survived the havoc of a global pandemic. In my early thirties, I made a decision that I would no longer publicly disclose the details of how I had been abused by my first serious boyfriend — a vicious tap dance demanded of anyone who publicly identifies as a survivor of rape or abuse — because I could see, very clearly, that doing so served only to replicate the experience of abuse. If I shared that this happened, or that that happened, there was always going to be someone who would insist that it wasn’t actually abuse, that it wasn’t bad enough, who would minimize what I went through because it didn’t fit their own narrative of What Abuse Looks Like™️ — which is, of course, exactly how my ex-boyfriend got away with abusing me for so many years. He just insisted that it wasn’t abuse.
And truly, in spite of the Believe Women of it all, this question of whether some random asshole on the internet did or didn’t believe that I was emotionally damaged by living with a manipulative liar for three years ultimately felt beside the point. Why should I tap dance to convince a total stranger of something that I know, in my heart, to be true? What did it matter whether other people — people who didn’t even know my abuser! — believed that I had been harmed, and how did exporting the question of “abuse or not?” to a third party actually help me access healing and happiness? I mean, it didn’t. The whole point of the “abuse survivor” label was my internal experience and journey: adopting it allowed me to understand the bad things that had happened to me as bad things, and to learn how to avoid them going forward. Other people’s opinions had no relevance to that. The tap dance served only to exhaust me, to keep me from doing the work I needed to do for myself.
The contours of the bisexual tap dance are, perhaps, familiar to you. Yes sir, we are capable of being monogamous — but also if we’re not that’s fine too! No ma’am, we’re not actually straight! No we’re not all sluts, we’re not a contaminant, we’re not we’re not we’re not — we’re just like you, don’t you see, just like you. People it is fucking exhausting, and the most exhausting part of it is that it feels like there is never any respite. It is not new to say that in the straight world we’re too queer and in the queer world we’re too straight, but more than simply feeling ostracized, it’s also that we constantly have to prove our worth as people. Even if you do feel queer enough (and some bisexuals do!), you always have to define yourself against the vicious stereotype of the Bad Bisexual™️, always have to engage with the tweet about this shitty bi girl’s boring boyfriend and explain how hahaha that’s not you, you’re too cool for that.
It just feels inescapable sometimes. And I fucking hate it.
I think a lot of us are so used to the tap dance that it doesn’t even occur to us that we ever could just… not. For a variety of reasons — internalized biphobia, the cooptation of the nascent bi movement by the LGBTQ+ umbrella, the fact that a lot of us loathe to be defined as bisexual first — very few bi people have ever experienced a bi only space. I’ve gotten glimpse of it in the shape of hanging out with other queers with multi-gender attractions (regardless of whether or not they personally identify as bi) and it’s — it’s just nice. You can feel the tension going out of your shoulders, finally feel like you don’t have to explain yourself, don’t have to worry that someone is judging you based on the gender of your present partner(s), don’t have to worry that you’re being seen as a question mark in need of further explication instead of, you know, a human.
Which isn’t to say that one has to be in a bi only space in order to stop tap dancing (nor is it to say that there aren’t other forms of tap dancing that might occur in such a space, as trans folk feel the need to tap dance for the cis bis, as POC feel the need to tap dance for white colleagues, and so on and so forth). I think one only needs to be around people who understand the exhaustion of the tap dance; who want to create a space where the people around them can feel comfortable and at ease. I don’t think it requires anything beyond simply being invested in letting people exist — and anyone, of any background, can embody that quality so long as they choose to.
The other day I was hanging out with a straight cis dude friend (yes, some of my friends are straight cis men), and we got to talking about online dating apps, so of course I mentioned Lex, the text-based queer dating and community app that is simultaneously the bane of my existence and seemingly my only shot at ever finding a girlfriend*. And of course you can’t just tell someone about Lex without showing it to them, so I grabbed my phone and opened the app and let him take a look.
What I did not expect was for him to shift over to the tab with my profile, and my ads, and start scrolling through to read the things that I had posted — the self that I craft for a queer space, for a queer audience, the self I don’t always show to straight cis men. And for a moment I was anxious, but as he paged through the ads (I have posted a lot of ads, I’ve been on this dumb app for over two years) I felt myself starting to relax. Because it didn’t feel like my friend was objectifying me, or like he was getting off on my queerness, and it didn’t feel like he was put off by seeing this utterly foreign side of me, this side that was decidedly not created for him or someone like him. It felt, instead, like he was simply curious, like he wanted to know me, in all my dimensions, and there was an intimacy, a comfort in that.
I don’t want to tap dance anymore. Not as a bi person, not as a woman, not as an abuse survivor, not as Jewish person, not as any of the aspects of me that are weird and unfamiliar to a lot of folks. I just want to exist. More than anything, I simply want to live my life and just be allowed to be me.
* Well, unless I meet one in the real world 😱
Autistic masking is a similar dance <3
I think if I hadn't had people who understood the tap dance, I honestly may never have come out or realized my own queerness. A lot of people thank their elders, but I felt so much gratitude toward my PEERS. Early on in my process, I sent texts to two or so friends, who were the first people close to me to come out as queer (in a way that wasn't monosexual.) This isn't ALL liberation is, of course, but it includes the freedom to not have to tap dance.