The Visibility Trap

I'm not pro invisibility, but

Here we are in the middle of Bisexual Visiwareness Week, that special time of year when… actually I have no idea what happens this week anymore. For a brief period of time it was the one moment a year when media outlets would remember that bisexuals exist and have issues that are worth highlighting, but now… I guess it’s a week when bisexuals talk about being bi?

Which, you know, that’s cool and all. I don’t hate it. Certainly it is better to be comfortable openly talking about who and what you are than to feel ashamed to identify publicly as bisexual. And I’m not pro-invisibility — especially not when it comes to automatically assuming that someone must be monosexual unless otherwise specified.

But I still feel this catch in my chest whenever “visibility” is positioned as the key to bisexual liberation, because… visibility always feels like a bit of a trap.

I should back up here and establish a few things. It’s one of my firm beliefs that biphobia functions differently than homophobia or even transphobia, that it’s not simply a societal disgust at one’s behavior, but also a fundamental disbelief. To be visibly gay or trans is to publicly own a status that has been socially condemned, to claim gayness or transness in spite of being told that that makes you sick — and through your willingness to do that, you are confirming the validity of your own identity. Who would lie about being gay or trans just for attention, you know?

But bisexuality — it’s just different. It’s always positioned as a way of claiming gayness without fully claiming gayness; either keeping a toe firmly planted in heterosexuality in case you need an exit route, or dipping a finger into the pool of gayness in order to seem edgy and adventurous. To publicly claim bisexuality — to be “visibly bi” — achieves far less than being visibly gay or trans because the very nature of biphobia is set up to invalidate visible bisexuality.

So. There’s that. But there’s something else, too — though this one isn’t limited to the bisexuals. When visibility is not guaranteed — when visibility requires a public statement in order to be enacted — then it is often the most privileged people who wind up being visible. It’s not just a question of who can come out (though it is definitely partly that), it’s also a question of whose story the media amplifies. There’s a reason why many people’s immediate association with trans identity is Caitlyn Jenner, just as there’s a reason why many people hear the word “queer” and immediately think of a white cis gay man. “Relatable” people are often the ones who become the face of the movement. Which is why it’s not really surprising that the bisexuals that most people are aware of are the bisexuals who align with their preconceived ideas of a “privileged bisexual”: namely cis women (and frequently white ones) who are partnered with men.

Or, to put it more plainly: visibility can reinforce the stereotypical ideas about who bisexuals are because the stereotypes were originally derived from the identities of the people who have the most liberty to be visibly bisexual.

I think there’s one more component to my hesitation, too, and it’s this: visibility doesn’t really solve our problems or dismantle misconceptions about us. An awareness that many people are bi doesn’t challenge the notion that bisexuals are midway between straights and gays thus experience less oppression than gays rather than a wholly different type of oppression. Visibility doesn’t upend the idea of sexuality as one’s defining characteristic. Visibility doesn’t even automatically create more bi-specific resources intended to address bi health problems and bi poverty and bi vulnerability to abuse and assault.

Visibility just kinda says “we’re here.”

I do not think that that’s enough.