When coming out isn't enough

Or, will the bisexual Ellen DeGeneres please stand up?

I was in high school when Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian. To say that it was a big deal is almost an understatement. DeGeneres’s coming out was national news, a Time Magazine cover story in an era where Time Magazine actually mattered. And the cover itself was instantly iconic: DeGeneres, clad in black with white loafers, poses in front of a white backdrop while smiling into the camera. “Yep, I’m Gay,” the cover declares in bold red text — a statement so eye catching it completely distracts from the fact that DeGeneres is squatting awkwardly, contorting her body uncomfortably, in order to fit the frame of a magazine cover.

If you are too young to remember the late 1990s, it may seem like a no brainer that DeGeneres’s big reveal was a major story: I mean, it was Ellen DeGeneres coming out. An A-list celeb announcing her lesbianism to the world? Of course it was a massive deal! But the Ellen DeGeneres of 1997 — the Ellen DeGeneres of Ellen — was not the Ellen DeGeneres of 2022, not the former host of The Ellen DeGeneres Show who pals around with George W. Bush and winds up the subject of scandal because she’s actually an abusive boss. No, the Ellen who came out was a much smaller deal: the star of her own sitcom, sure, but one with a relatively modest national profile. When Ellen came out, I had never seen Ellen, and mainly knew her as the stand up I had seen on TV, the one who made jokes about airplane food while I sat on my bed in a Salt Lake City hotel room. (I’m trying to think of a modern equivalent to the pre-coming out Ellen, and maybe it’s Jim Gaffigan? If you have thoughts leave them in the comments.)

Ellen’s coming out wasn’t big because Ellen, herself, was big. It was coming out that made Ellen DeGeneres a star: a lesbian with a modest national profile who decided to use her public standing to advance a swelling queer rights movement. Before the Time cover, DeGeneres was just a sitcom star. After, a bona fide national figure. Her sitcom itself suffered — the final season, in which the protagonist also comes out as a lesbian, had the lowest ratings of the entire series — but DeGeneres herself likely benefited quite a bit. Would there even have been an Ellen DeGeneres Show without that Time cover? It’s difficult to say — and certainly DeGeneres brought other talents to the table beyond just “famous lesbian” — but it’s certainly possible that without that coming out, without that magazine cover, she’d have remained a modestly popular sitcom star, the kind of actor you think about every so often with a “Remember that show from the 1990s? Whatever happened to the star?”

Anyway, I bring all of this up for a very simple reason: in 1997, merely stating “I am gay” was, itself, a radical act. The simple admission of homosexuality was enough to launch a cover story, a national conversation, to be a major news story even when the person admitting said homosexuality was not, by most people’s standards, a major deal herself. And we see echos of this even today: it’s a big deal when people come out in sectors where gayness is treated as a liability — pro-sports being an obvious example here, among others. So why has coming out never felt quite as significant, as momentous, for the bisexuals? Where is the bisexual equivalent of Ellen DeGeneres?

I started thinking about this over the weekend when mulling over the recent slate of bisexual coming outs (or, sometimes “coming outs”) that have come across my desk. Emily Ratajkowski — or even Madonna — casually suggesting on TikTok that, yep, she’s bi, doesn’t have anywhere near the weight of what happened with DeGeneres. Indeed, I struggle to think of any bisexual coming out that managed to feel as major, as political, as what happened with Ellen back in 1997. The closest I can come up with is Janelle Monáe coming out as pansexual in the pages of Rolling Stone, which certainly feels like one of the bigger bi+ coming out stories and yet still pales in comparison to we saw with DeGeneres*.

I’ve been trying to figure out why, exactly, this is the case: why have we not had own landmark coming out, the one that changed how people understood bisexuality, the one that felt like a massive, major deal? Why do bisexual reveals often feel like an also ran, something titillating but not political, a fun fact that people are likely to quickly forget?

One possibility immediate springs to mind: At this point in time, coming out itself is a bit passé. Yes, it makes the news, but it hardly carries the level of impact it did back in the late 1990s. If bisexuals wanted to make a splash, we should have come out earlier, right? And there’s some truth to this, I think, especially when talking about someone like Madonna — and yet it also ignores that, for instance, David Bowie came out long before Ellen did, and yet his public acknowledgement of his bisexuality didn’t really hit the same.

Another possibility — and this is the one that’s stuck with me — is that coming out as bi can never serve the same function for the bisexuals, specifically, that coming out as gay does for the queers at large because homophobia and biphobia are significantly different in their mechanisms, and as a result cannot be combatted in the same way.

To wit: the central function of homophobia is to insist that same sex contact is depraved and disgusting, something to be ashamed of. Coming out challenges homophobia by rejecting that notion, by positioning queerness, not as a shameful secret, but as a part of who we are, as something we are, dare I say, proud of (#Pride). It mattered that DeGeneres was willing to pose on a magazine cover next to the phrase, “Yep, I’m Gay,” because she was directly challenging commonly held notions of who a lesbian was (someone sick and depraved) and what being a lesbian meant (disgusting, bad things).

But the central tenet of biphobia is not that bisexuality is depraved and disgusting. Yes, when bi people exist in a homophobic society, we are burdened by homophobia in addition to biphobia, and must combat the belief that our same sex desires are a sign of sickness. But biphobia, as a separate consideration from homophobia, is something all together different. What biphobia does (as we have previously discussed) is insist that bisexuality is not real, or is, at best, a sign that you’re a slut who’s delusional enough to confuse your hypersexuality with an oppressed identity.

So what does it mean to come out as bi, then? What political weight does a bisexual reveal carry?

Certainly, coming out as bi helps to push back on homophobia wherever it exists. Bisexuals — and especially bisexual men — still battle the insistence that our same sex encounters are deviant acts, and publicly pushing back on that is definitely worth doing. But when it comes to challenging biphobia, specifically — I guess I have to wonder if “coming out” is the right tactic, if coming out could ever be enough.

If the central conviction of biphobia is that bisexuality doesn’t exist, then I’m afraid that simply saying “I’m bi,” is not actually going to do much. As we’ve seen, again and again, celebrities who come out as bisexual are assumed to be actually gay and afraid to admit it (David Bowie, Alan Cumming) or actually straight and doing it for attention (see, almost every cis white woman who’s come out, especially when they come out on TikTok). If someone believes that all self-identified bisexuals are deluded, then saying, “I’m bisexual” isn’t going to change that conviction. It’s just going to make them think that you’re deluded.

I don’t say this to discourage bisexuals from coming out, or make it seem as though openly acknowledging one’s bisexuality is a bad thing (it’s not, it’s great). But so many of us seem to think that combatting biphobia requires nothing more than simply cribbing the gay/lesbian playbook and replacing every mention of “gay” with “bi.” And it’s just not that simple.

Ellen DeGeneres didn’t get accused of coming out as a lesbian for attention — even as she got much, much more attention from her coming out than pretty much any bisexual ever has — because it was broadly understood that becoming the nation’s most famous lesbian came with a significant amount of stigma and public rebuke (see: falling sitcom ratings and a cancelled show). But bisexuality doesn’t exist in the same framework. We’re not fighting for our desires to be seen as acceptable, we’re fighting for them to be accepted as real. And as we’ve seen again and again, bisexual myth busting and celebrity coming outs just are not getting the job done.

Of course, if coming out isn’t enough, then what, exactly, is? Unfortunately, I don’t have an immediate answer here. But I suspect that the bisexual Ellen DeGeneres — the celebrity who is able to create a cultural moment, to change the way that people think about bisexuality — is going to have to do more than simply announce their bisexuality and star in a myth busting sitcom episode**. They’re going to have to find a way to render biphobia itself visible. And that, I’m afraid, is a task far more complicated than simply landing a magazine cover.

* Another contender is Cynthia Nixon, but her case is a weird one; starting more as “The Sex and the City star is a lesbian actually!!” and then turning into a sheepish “well no I’m bi” after that awkward “I chose to be gay” gaffe. If you have no idea what I’m talking about don’t worry about it.

** Though I very much appreciated Stephane Beatriz for doing this!!