The bi tipping point that never comes

And two vintage magazine covers.

There’s a famous Newsweek cover from 1995 — you may already know which one I’m talking about, but on the chance that you don’t, well, here you go:

Bisexuality, it declares in a giant font. Not Gay. Not Straight. A New Sexual Identity Emerges. It’s easy to make fun of now, of course. The earnestness. The insistence that bisexuality is a “new sexual identity.” The fact that the cover models look straight out of central casting, like a triad you met at the munch last weekend. The story itself is not much better, at one point referring to bisexuality as “the hidden wild card of our erotic culture.”

I should note, by the way, that this story isn’t just something that became funny in retrospect: even back in the 1990s, bisexuals were mocking Newsweek’s wide-eyed treatment of their sexual orientation. For balance, here’s the cover of Issue 10 of Anything That Moves, an alt bi zine that ran from 1991 to 2001.

But as ridiculous as it read then, and as ridiculous as it reads now, that Newsweek cover is still incredibly significant. Not because of anything it said about bisexuality, or because it was particularly revelatory about the community or the time, but the fact that it was written at all. Bisexuality may not have been new in the 1990s — I mean none of this stuff is new, not ever — but the 1990s were still a very notable time for American bisexuality. A burgeoning bi activist movement was finally gaining ground, and this magazine cover was supposed to be hailing a new era (not unlike a certain Time cover featuring Laverne Cox that debuted almost two decades later).

Except… that era didn’t come. The world got more progressive, queer identities became more acceptable, and yet bisexuality remained a sideline, a joke, a curiosity, still (I’m sorry) “the hidden wild card of our erotic culture.” There was no major explosion of bi visibility, no rush of openly bi elected officials, no major movies about the bi experience — and there certainly wasn’t some harsh backlash to bisexuals, the kind that might suggest that bi people had finally gained enough ground to be considered a viable threat. Things just continued apace.

There are some obvious reasons for why that happened. Most notably, there was a concerted effort on the part of cis lesbians and gays to peel off cis bisexuals from their alliance with their trans peers*, while cis bisexuals were promised that this act treachery would lead to greater attention for their own issues, it didn’t. The resulting LGB coalition (which quickly became an “LGBT umbrella”) continued to privilege the needs of cis white gay men (and sometimes cis white lesbians) while giving everyone else in the coalition little more than a nominal nod, telling them to wait, that their day would come eventually (although in the case of bisexuals it was usually more, “What are you even complaining about you’re basically straight”). In making bi and trans people symbolically visible, it was easier to dismiss our actual concerns: they gave us a letter, didn’t they? What more could we possibly want?

I should note, too, that the 1990s wasn’t even the first “bisexual moment” to achieve media acclaim: thanks to rockers like David Bowie, the 1970s were their own moment of bisexual chic (if you want to get a sense of what that was like, check out this wildly offensive New York Times piece by Jane Brody, who really should apologize for it one of these days). Bisexuals, it sometimes feels, are destined to keep reliving this cycle: “discovered” by the media only to disappear from the public eye the minute we approach the tipping point, without ever really securing any kind of meaningful progress or change, any cultural revelation beyond “bisexuals: they exist.”

On some level, it feels like we are once again in a bit of a bisexual moment — or maybe we’re perpetually in a “bisexual moment,” one that’s never quite died down since the 1990s. The pandemic sparked a rush of queer coming outs, and in the media and entertainment, bisexual visibility is at an all time high. Cardi B is bi, right? And Cynthia Nixon and Alan Cumming** and Janelle Monae*** and Anna Paquin and a whole host of other fame-os. Surely if all these famous people are out as bi then it must mean something, right?

And I mean, sure, but — as I said last week, we’re also still very much in crisis. A handful of prominent bisexuals (many of whom people routinely forget are bisexual, I mean again, Alan Cumming) does not “fix” the problem of biphobia anymore than the election of Barack Obama “fixed” racism. It may point to some positive movement, some erosion of the most virulent forms of bigotry, but the success of a handful of exceptional individuals is still just individual success.

And I can’t help but feel that the reason we find ourselves in this position, where we keep reaching the brink of normalization only to watch it slip through our fingers like grains of sand, is because bisexuals do not have a concrete ask. What do bisexuals want from society, anyway? The broader queer community had some very concrete asks: first and foremost, the overturning of sodomy laws that rendered most queer sex illegal, as well as the removal of bans on queer military service, the enforcement of employment and housing non-discrimination acts, and, of course, the crown jewel of marriage equality****. Trans people also have their share of concrete asks: to have access to gender affirming healthcare (both in the sense of it being legal to access and in the sense of it being covered by insurance and offered by a wide variety of doctors), to be able to play sports, to be called by the correct name and pronouns, to be able to piss in peace. All of these asks are important because they are things that the community desperately needs, but they are also important because in fighting for them you are able to work through the other, more nebulous things that you might need. A fight for trans bathroom access is not simply about poo and pee, it’s also about breaking down the deeply ingrained assumptions we have about how we organize societal functions by gender. Marriage equality, too, was about a slate of legal rights that were crucial for many couples to have access to, but also about the redefinition of not just marriage, but romantic intimacy, repositioning queer love as, well, love, one that is equivalent to, perhaps identical to, straight love*****.

But what, exactly, do bisexuals want?

It feels like the beginning of a standup act, one that winds up leaning heavily on jokes about legalized group marriage******. But it’s a deadly serious question. Obviously, bisexuals want, and benefit from, all the marriage rights and non-discrimination laws and access to polite society that the broader queer community has fought for and won, and trans bisexuals are a part of the fight for trans rights. But what is the bi fight, the one that helps us chip away at the suicide rates, at the rape and abuse, at the stress that leads to increased rates of substance abuse and health problems both mental and physical?

I keep asking myself this, and I keep coming up short. What I want is to be taken seriously, to be left alone, to be able to pursue sex and love with whomever I choose without being forced to explain myself, without being forced to conform to anyone else’s expectations. What I want is to feel comfortable and welcome when I’m predominantly queer and predominantly straight spaces, what I want is to feel community with other bisexuals as well. What I want, really, is to get rid of the hitch in my chest that I feel whenever I’m worried that someone sees me as straight or sees me as a lesbian, that they’re making assumptions about who and how I love rather than actually letting me introduce myself.

But these are all such nebulous requests; they hardly feel worthy of organizing a political campaign around, even though they are the very basis of so much of our distress. And so I keep asking myself, what is the concrete ask, what is the campaign, what is the thing we can build that will help address all of these concerns, all these feelings, in the process?

The closest thing that exists in my own life is the swell of relief I feel when I am at the doctor’s office checking in and the question about sexual orientation allows me to identify as bi. It’s such a small thing — literally a line of code, a single checkbox — and yet its inclusion somehow speaks volumes all the same. And maybe this is what we actually want when we talk about “visibility,” about “awareness” — not to be visible as individuals, or make the world aware of what goes on in our own personal bedrooms, but for the world to demonstrate a broader awareness that bisexuals are everywhere, even when we are not speaking up. Is a campaign for more checkboxes enough to guarantee that? I honestly don’t know. But for many folks, it might feel like a start.

There’s also another issue that could form the basis of both a concrete ask and an entry point to broader discussions of all the squishy, feelings-based bisexual woes — although this one effects far fewer people than broad requests for “awareness.” Though it’s rarely discussed, bi asylum seekers often face hurdles that their gay and lesbian peers do not. To those deciding asylum claims, discrimination against bisexuals isn’t always viewed as a valid claim — after all, can’t bisexuals just live heterosexual lives in their home countries? In order to get their asylum approved, bisexuals are frequently told to identify as gay or lesbian instead of bi — as was the case with Apphia Kumar, who wrote about her experiences as the first bisexual granted asylum in the US back in 2017. 2017! We went through all those almost bi tipping points and it still took until 2017 for the US government to consider that a bi person might be unsafe in their home country because they are bisexual, and not simply because they are half gay.

Anyway. Bisexual asylum seekers are obvious a relatively small population, and most bisexuals in America will never experience their fate. But raising awareness of their plight offers something powerful for all bisexuals, no matter how privileged we are. Their plight is a concrete harm that happens to bisexuals specifically because they are bi, and in raising awareness of the ways that biphobia denies them access to the safety that they deserve, we open the door to talk about the more nebulous effects of biphobia that the rest of us experience as well. Maybe that would be enough to help this latest bisexual tipping point actually tip.

PS I strongly endorse reading the cover story of that Anything That Moves issue (you can find it here, on page 24 of the PDF), which honestly feels like it could have been written in 2022 rather than 1996. Let’s hope things actually change this time!

* I mean this very literally, I’ve heard stories from 1990s bi activists about literally being put in separate rooms from trans activists while they were pressured into accepting a movement platform that felt more acceptable to cis lesbians and gays

** I feel like Alan Cumming is one of our most prominent male bisexuals, and one who is constantly erased into “gay man,” so here he is, on his own website, identifying as bi. In case you doubted.

*** Yes she’s pan but I’m using bi in the bi+ sense

**** All of these advancements benefited bi people, absolutely, but they are not really bi-specific asks.

***** I honestly hate the whole “love is love” stuff but you can’t argue with success.

****** Obviously legalized group marriage is more a polyamory-specific concern than a bi-specific concern, but I feel like I should mention here that even most of the polyamorous folks that I know don't want legalized group marriage so much as they want a decoupling of marriage from the slate of rights associated with it — i.e. instead of legalized group marriage, how about universal health care and open borders?