Over the weekend I started reading the winter 1991 issue of Anything That Moves — the first ever issue of this groundbreaking bisexual magazine — because, yes, it’s the first monthly reading pick for The B+ Squad book club and I’m going to be writing about it all month (Join the book club so you can read my thoughts! This is my plug for the book club, which helps me pay my bills!). There’s a lot to say about the issue, which is why I selected it for the book club in the first place, but what I wanted to say over here, right now, is that a thing that surprised me was that the magazine had an entire column on bisexual politics.
I would wager that most people reading this don’t think of bisexuality as something with its own politics. I often don’t. If you asked me what gay or queer politics were, I could tell you about marriage equality and non-discrimination acts (or maybe marriage abolition and open borders if I’m feeling particularly feisty); if you asked me what trans politics were, I’d be able to talk about access to gender-affirming healthcare and bathrooms and legal recognition of non-binary genders (or potentially the removal of gender from legal documents all together). But bi politics? Even knowing that there have been bi-focused advocacy groups and political organizations, I still kind of come up short. What do the bis even want, you know?
Anything That Moves offers a couple of suggestions: bis want a more liberal SCOTUS (now more than ever, oof), bis want gays and lesbians to pay attention to bi issues — though what “bi issues” are goes unnamed, bis want to be recognized as a group deserving of protection in civil rights law, bis want to fight against the apathy that makes so many of us think that there’s no such thing as bi politics.
It’s the last point that kind of stuck with me, this idea of apathy. As I note in the very subject line of this email, the first thing that comes to mind when I, personally, think about what I want as a bi person is simply to be left the fuck alone. True bi freedom feels like an absence of expectation, an absence of policing — the kind of thing that one wants to believe one can simply will into existence, right? If what I want is for people to simply not give a shit about who and how I fuck, then shouldn’t I be able to just… not give a fuck my way to that ultimate outcome?
Except, you know, of course not. In the same way you can’t dismantle systemic racism by simply “not seeing color,” you can’t passively, apathetically, fall backwards into a world where bisexuality is treated as a truly valid way of being a person. There’s too much rot that has to be rooted out, too much of a mess to clean up, before we can get to that beautiful blank slate that so many of us crave. (Now feels like a good time to send you over to that essay I wrote about biphobia being a structural oppression.)
But if we can’t just apathy our way to the desired end goal then how do we get there? How do you organize your way to full personhood when your full personhood is bound up, not in access to a slate of legal rights, but in simply being left the fuck alone?
I’m not going to pretend I have some obvious, immediate answer (though this is definitely a question I have wrestled with repeatedly over the course of this newsletter). But the list that comes to mind when I try to find an answer goes something like this: Advocacy for bisexual asylum seekers to be approved for asylum on the basis of biphobia as an oppression specifically! Medical professionals and especially therapists being educated about the precarious mental and physical health of bisexuals, and learning cultural competency around these populations! More openly bi politicians and especially members of Congress*! I’m sure there are more answers, this is only a start. But at their core, they’re all united by that point made 31 years ago (!!!!!!) in Anything That Moves: if we want to make things better for the bis, then first and foremost we must begin by not being apathetic.
* I have a fantasy of starting an Emily’s List type group for openly bi political candidates and calling it 21 Reps, which would be the number of openly bi members of Congress we’d need to achieve proportional representation, if any rich political types want to do this hit me up