I should probably begin this essay with a little bit of context about my own backstory:
By the time I arrived in New York City, just three weeks shy of my seventeenth birthday, I was on my sixth city, third state, and second country. The longest I had lived anywhere was eight and a half years, and I was traumatically uprooted from that home town just a few months into my first year of high school. All of this contributed to my fanatical devotion to New York — I had been bounced around so much that I was ready to simply find a place I liked and commit — but it also, I think, made the concept of “community” a complicated one for me. To this day, I struggle with the question of where I am “from”: Are you asking where I was born? Where I spent the bulk of my childhood? Where I graduated high school? Because all of these have different answers and they all highlight different aspects of my journey and of myself. I think it is hard to master this sense of “belonging” when you don’t even have the most basic sense of geographical origin that so many people cling to as an identity.
I was thinking about this after reading a recent Autostraddle advice column in which the letter writer talks about coming to understand herself as bi/queer in as a mom in her early 40s with a cishet husband, about struggling with the desire to make her queerness a Big Deal™️ (a pretty natural urge in the aftermath of coming out, I think!) while knowing many people will eye roll a married mom with a straight husband making a big deal of realizing she’s bi now that she’s hit middle age. The answer itself is largely fine (though I did chafe at “We can’t get rid of biphobia and monosexism – I wish! – but we can work to do our best not to let them get us down too much” — defeatist much?), but I was struck by how much of it centered around this idea of community as a way to feel comfortable with and find oneself.
Community seems, so often, to be the solution that is proffered to queer people, like the thing we need the most is just a bunch of new friends. And I get it on some level — if you’re surrounded by straight people, it can be refreshing to spend time with other people who understand your experiences, your worldviews, your desires, your sense of otherness. But I think, as with so many aspects of queer life (see also, coming out), this knee jerk reference to “community” often forgets the actual origins of the idea. Queer people used to need community because it was literally illegal to be queer, because queers were dying of AIDS with no support from the medical system or even their families, because the stakes for being queer were so high that we had no option other than to recreate the world in miniature among ourselves. I think it is often hard to express the sense of danger that accompanied being queer in the 1990s and earlier; the modern trans experience comes close but even that is not quite it.
And without that sense of danger, that real need for protection and safety and structure — I don’t know, it feels sometimes like “queer community” gets watered down to a party invitation, a fashion show, a meat market. At best it’s something along the lines of a support group — and I think that, nods to “bi activism” aside, that’s kind of what the Autostraddle response is positioning it as, but even then, there’s a part of me that’s just… is that all there is? As a bi person in particular, with so much of my identity assumed to be about a desire for, I dunno, cool points or cred, the idea of having my queerness “verified” by acceptance in a “community” — it feels like it just reifies this idea of queer community, of queerness, as an affectation and aesthetic rather than an experience of oppression.
And look, this newsletter is clearly its own kind of “community building” project; I am writing it to inspire, to bring together, people (usually bi people but not necessarily) who want a different understanding of what it means to be bisexual, what it means to experience biphobia. But as someone who doesn’t really “get” community, well — I do find myself asking what the end goal is, you know? Because a bi brunch (which alternately sounds exciting and nightmarish to me, I mean which bisexuals will be there) is all well and good, but what is it ultimately building to beyond some bathroom hookups and a mimosa-fueled hangover?
And maybe it comes back to that line that irked me so much: “We can’t get rid of biphobia and monosexism.” Really? Because if we can’t, then what even is the point, you know? If bi community is just a support group for people who feel sad about biphobia, it feels preemptively self defeating. I would much rather bi community be an actively political effort to end biphobia — both in the queer community and in society at large. If bi people aren't getting together to talk to one another about the ways that the medical establishment utterly erases our lives and identities — to the detriment of our health! — then what exactly are we doing? If we’re not educating one another about the specific dynamics that both make bisexuals more vulnerable to intimate partner violence and the unique, bi-specific ways that abuse and sexual assault can unfold, then what are we even working towards? If bi community is just some rah rah, feel good pep rally — one that doesn’t reckon with and strategize to defeat the structural barriers that hold bi people back and imperil our lives — then aren’t we just spinning our wheels?
I mean, I dunno. Like I said, I don’t really “get” community, this whole concept of belonging as significant in and of itself is kind of lost on me. But I just don't feel like I hear enough about bi community as a conduit to bi political action. And without that, it’s just hard for me to see the point.
Have you read anything from the Boston Bi Women's Network, Robyn Ochs, or the Bi Women's Quarterly? This essay would fit fabulously I think, in the next issue about the history of Bi experience (deadline to submit: May 1). https://www.biwomenquarterly.com/submission-guidelines/call-for-submissions/
“We can’t get rid of biphobia and monosexism.”
Yeah, fuck that! While there will always be some monosexuals, there's no reason why monosexism needs to exist and it's awful to suggest that it will. I find it hard to imagine a world without it, but otoh in the 1990s I found it hard to imagine a world with same gender marriage and trans folk who were out and proud instead of stealth, and look where we are now.