What era of bisexual acceptance are we in now?

It's hard to tell when you're in it, I guess.

There is a Newsweek cover from 1995 that periodically makes the rounds. It’s so (in)famous that I’m willing to bet you already know what cover I’m referring to — but if you don’t, you can see it here, in a Reddit thread that weirdly misidentifies it as a Time cover. (I mean, I get it, I always misremember it as a Time cover, but I’m also not misremembering it while I’m looking directly at it.)

On the off chance that that Reddit thread ever gets nuked from the internet, I’ll describe the cover for you here: it’s three white people — one woman and two men — standing staggered against a white background. In the left foreground is the woman, wearing a black blazer over a black top, her blond hair cut in an asymmetrical bob. Her facial expression suggests that either she’s got an uncomfortable (or perhaps sexy?) secret or she’s got bad gas; the placement of her right hand just below her heart suggests it might, in fact, be heartburn or IBS. Right behind her, on the right side of the cover, is a bearded man in a white t-shirt who looks like every interchangeable white bearded man in a white t-shirt you’ve ever met. And then, in the back, there’s a stern faced giant towering over his two companions, his blond hair severely parted in the middle and possibly pulled back into a ponytail, or maybe just glued to his head with some sort of pomade. He’s wearing a grey t-shirt and — you know I have never been able to tell if the black stripes on his shoulders are a vest or the straps of a backpack. I don’t know if it matters.

But. Questionable fashion choices (even by 1990s standards) and uncomfortable facial expressions aside, the reason this Newsweek cover periodically makes the rounds is the text that accompanies these three people: “Bisexuality: Not Straight. Not Gay. A New Sexual Identity Emerges.”

It’s that line, of course, that leads people to circulate the cover, chuckling over the notion that Newsweek thought bisexuality was some new thing that had just been invented in the 1990s. Except if you actually read the piece — which you can do here — Newsweek doesn’t think bisexuality is new. Just a few paragraphs into the piece, it walks the reader through a brief history of modern bisexuality, from Freud’s belief that everyone has the capacity to be attracted to multiple genders and some of us simply repress it to the 1948 introduction of Alfred Kinsey’s eponymous scale into the 1970s, when Margaret Mead urged folks to see bisexuality as normal, Newsweek wrote a piece on “bisexual chic” (apparently in this issue, though I can’t find the article online), and — though it’s not mentioned in the Newsweek article, I’m just tossing it in for fun — New York Times journalist Jane E. Brody wrote this mess of a piece.

What's new, in the eyes of the Newsweek piece, is not bisexuality itself, but bisexual visibility. Bisexual openness and activism. And they kind of had a point! The 1990s were a particularly vibrant time for bisexual activism, the peak of a movement that began to flourish in the 1980s, when a) bisexuals realized that many of the lesbians and gays they’d fought alongside for years weren’t interested in combatting biphobia and b) the HIV crisis brought both the existence of bisexuality — viewed as a vector that transported HIV between straight and gay communities — to the forefront while also amplifying biphobia (what with that whole “bisexuals are a vector of disease” thing). The 1940s gave us Alfred Kinsey’s scientific documentation of bisexual behavior and fantasies, and the 1970s may have been a moment when bisexuality, and the chicness thereof, was being talked about, but (save for Fritz Klein and his Bisexual Forum), bisexuals weren’t really carving out space for ourselves as bisexuals until bi activists started splintering off from the gay rights movement into the 1980s and 1990s — a splintering that gave us projects like Bi Any Other Name and Anything That Moves.

Anyway. I’m thinking about all of this because of that YouTube video I briefly referenced the other day, the one that analyzed the 2000s as an era of “bisexual chic.” As someone who turned 18 in 2000, it is interesting to think of the decade of my young adulthood as a return to the bisexual fetishization of the 1970s — especially coming, as it did, so quickly after the 1990s surge of bisexual visibility and activism. I don’t think that read is wrong; honestly in a lot of ways it makes sense. Bisexuals “emerged” on our own terms in the 1980s and 1990s only to have our values and identities coopted by mass media and capitalism, not unlike the way that the edginess of riot grrl gave way to the toothlessness of “girl power.” Anything That Moves folded in the early aughts; in its wake came the TERFy Chasing Amy Social Club (heads up for dated language re: transgender stuff in that link). In a parallel trend, the once bi-exclusive gay and lesbian groups nominally became LGBT groups — with the catch that while bisexuals and transgender people were in the name, we were mostly expected to just support cis gays in their pet quests (like for marriage equality) while staying mum about whatever needs we, personally, might have, and sometimes actively getting thrown under the bus (flashback to the time when trans people were removed from an employment non-discrimination act).

All of which has me wondering, well… where are we now, you know? I know there’s no actual answer that can be properly assessed; that we’re too in the thick of it to actually have an answer. Even the 2010s feel too recent, too fresh, for a proper post mortem re: the treatment of bisexuality — though it seems pretty obvious that that decade gave us a slow but steady evolution of bi characters on TV, with How I Met Your Mother’s Lily Aldrin (ugh) eventually giving way to Brooklyn 99’s Rosa Diaz (as well as Petra on Jane the Virgin, Valencia on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Darryl on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, David on Schitt’s Creek, and, uh, others!). Also I’m sure Tumblr factors in there somehow.

But it does feel fair to say that right now we are in a moment of both backlash and reclamation; a moment when bisexuals are once again getting pushback from both straight society and our queer peers who assume we’re not committed enough to the cause, a moment when many of us are rediscovering the vibrant and radical bi activism that Newsweek was nodding to in that article that always gets mocked. We’re in a moment when trans lives are being criminalized and schools are outlawing discussions of “sexuality,” and yet we’re also in a moment when you are reading this newsletter — a newsletter I definitely would not have been capable of writing a decade ago, for many reasons (for fun, here’s a piece I wrote about my queer identity and Glee back in 2010. It’s been cited in many academic papers! I don't hate it!).

Hopefully the activism will win out. Hopefully, we’ll continue to push forward with a radical bisexual politic, one that asks for the relatively basic (yet somehow inconceivable?) courtesy of simply being allowed to exist, simply being allowed to love and fuck whomever we choose, simply being allowed to not be shoved into a box.

Hopefully.