When you are as deeply immersed in the world of bisexuality as I am (read: when you have some Google Alerts set up for “bisexual” and “bisexuality”), you get a lot of updates about people coming out. Sometimes it takes the form of a quick quip on a late night show, sometimes it’s social media post (often, sigh, a TikTok), most recently it was Minnesota state legislator Zack Stephenson coming out in a piece for The Advocate. I always have mixed feelings about these comings out, mixed feelings I periodically write about here. On the one hand, who cares about whether this person or that person is bi? But on the other hand, more bisexuals being more visibly bisexual is a net good, right?
Anyway. It occurred to me recently while thinking through the story of that Minnesota state legislator coming out — something that matters a lot to me as someone who’s despondent over the relative paucity of out bisexuals in elected office — that there’s kind of a paradox to the bisexual coming out, one that you don’t necessarily have with other comings out. You need to have a critical mass of out bisexuals in order to normalize bisexuality, but once you’ve normalized bisexuality, what is the goal?
I mean to me, it’s kind of… an end to coming out.
You don’t really have that with being gay or lesbian, not really. Even if your queer little goal is to build a world where no one is assumed straight at birth, where everyone has the freedom to figure out who they are over time, there’s still this expectation of a sexuality debut, shall we say. There’s still this expectation that as a kid, or an adolescent, you’ll figure out what your sexual attractions are and you’ll announce them and that will be that. You’ll figure out which way you were born, and tell everyone, and get to settle into life as that kind of person, who dates that specific gender, for the rest of your life.
But that’s not really what I want. Even if we broaden the model to include bisexuality, the idea of kids just figuring out at 12 that they’re bi, announcing it to the world, and then being bi for the rest of their lives — it still feels too limiting, too constricted. What I want, really, is a world where no one has to “come out” as anything — not straight people, not gay people, not bisexuals, not aces, not anyone. What I want is a world where your relationships and sexual experiences (or lack of interest in either) aren’t anyone else’s business; where you’re allowed to pursue attractions because they feel good to both you and the person you’re attracted to, without any baggage pertaining to who you have or haven’t been attracted to in the past.
What I want, really, is for these labels to just be things we can acquire and drop as feels good to us, as helps us make sense of our current state of being, and not as some shackle that we must chain our self-image to for the rest of our lives. What I want, you see, is freedom. Freedom for me, for you, for everyone.
But I don’t think you can just wave a magic wand and get that, you know? I think you have to normalize the very possibility of fluid sexuality in the first place, I think you have to chip away at the belief that you just are who you and that’s how it is for your entire life, I think you have to promote the idea that sexuality is private and personal because for many of us it is always in flux and not at all fixed. And I think the way you do that is… by having more out, vocal bisexuals.
It’s weird though, right? Because the whole thing that I want is to just live my goddamn life in peace and privacy, right? And yet the only way for me to achieve that is, apparently, to adopt the mantle of Professional Bisexual™️, to shepherd other bisexuals to a level of comfort with owning the label publicly, so that at a very minimum we can loudly shout that we exist and, you know, it’s complicated… and, ideally, help more and more people realize that maybe it’s complicated for them, as well.
I don’t know. It’s just funny to me that in order to achieve my goal I have to do the exact opposite of said goal. In order to make my bisexuality not matter at all I have to argue that it matters so goddamned much. A part of me is loath to do that. And yet it seems like one has to if one wants to get results.
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I’m here for Bi/pan to be the default, and if folks want to “specialize” then that’s their kink, nothing to see here <3