Let’s begin at the beginning: I first came out as bisexual over a quarter of a century ago, back in the 1900s (1997, to be exact). It was two years after Time’s now infamous bisexuality cover story (not that I knew that when I was fourteen) and a few months before the release of Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (a movie that is very clearly though never explicitly about straight men’s fear of bisexual women, and which I was very excited for from the first moment I heard about it*). In some ways, I came out at an auspicious time for bisexuals — an era when a nascent bi activist movement that had first formed in the 1980s was finally beginning to gain ground, a moment when the internet was making it easier than ever to connect with queers of all stripes, a moment when the country was just finally beginning to shed its most virulent forms of homophobia.
And yet.
It’s been over twenty-five years since I first came out as bi, and in some ways the world feels no closer to actual bi acceptance than it did when teen me furtively confessed to my mom that, actually, I liked boys and girls. I’m forty years old, and yet I still feel the same catch in my chest that I did at fourteen, the same fear that to be bisexual is to be not enough and yet too much and also nothing at all.
For years — decades — I avoided topics like “bi pride” and “bi awareness” and “bi visibility” because my relationship to it all felt too complex to reduce to a single day of cheering: I was bi, and I was proud, but I was also embarrassed and confused and ashamed and burdened by a complex cocktail of emotions that felt unbecoming of someone who’d been out for five, for ten, for twenty years. I felt like other people had it all figured out, this bisexuality thing, and then there was me: too slutty, too straight, too queer, too something to really pull it all together.
I’ve spent several years mulling through my thoughts about what it means to be a bisexual person, and a bisexual woman in particular, more than half a century after Stonewall and almost a decade after marriage equality and yet still in a moment when bisexuality feels somehow accepted and stigmatized, fine if you are but you could maybe not, actually?
So hey, let’s do a newsletter about it.
* I have a lot of thoughts about this movie but I will spare you for the moment