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Over the summer, my alma mater* sent out an email celebrating the university's role in a bunch of queer shit (it was June). Included in this missive to alums was a link to a Columbia Magazine article from 2016, documenting the history of the Columbia Queer Alliance — a group which, I was excited to learn, was actually the first queer campus group to exist I clicked through to learn more about my own college's role in queer history, only to stumble upon this absolute turd of a passage about Robert Martin, the founder of what was then referred to as the Student Homophile League:
Martin, the gay activist, wasn’t gay. Not by the rigorous definition of the word, at least. Wildly adventurous sexually, yes. Crazy about men, sure. But exclusively gay — no. “He always claimed to be bisexual,” said Dynes.
There are several horrific things about that passage (the use of the word "claimed" being an obvious one that jumps out), but the one that bothered me most was that someone writing about the history of queer campus groups — someone ostensibly knowledgeable enough to be qualified to write about this topic — would express such shock at the idea that a queer group in the 1960s, a "homophile league," might be headed up by a bisexual man. It's a reaction that displays such utter ignorance of what it meant to be same-gender attracted in the mid-twentieth century, of how at risk anyone with an interest in queer sex and love would have been, regardless of whether they also experienced hetero attractions. It's a reaction that ignores that, back in the mid-twentieth century, the division between "gay" and "bi" was not nearly so clear as it became once gay people began loudly clamoring for visibility, for acceptance, to be seen as a legitimate other and not merely a sickness (a loud clamoring that was, in part, fomented by organizations like the Student Homophile League).
Which brings me to this: There's a question I keep circling back to every time I write this newsletter, every time I'm confronted with a different eras standards and mores around sexual identity. Who is a bisexual person? What is the essence of being bisexual? Obviously there's the simple answer — bisexuality is being attracted to multiple genders — but I know in my heart that there is something deeper, something more, that we're supposed to be flagging with our little bi label (why else the endless debates over bi v pan v queer v mspec v etc etc etc?).
And yet: it's a question that I continue to resist answering, in part because — well firstly, the loud voice in my head screaming, "I don't fucking care," but also because you cannot answer this question without situating yourself in a specific place and time. There is no Universal Bisexual Identity™️ because even the very concept of bisexuality (and especially bisexuality as an othered and marginalized identity) requires so much cultural context and prior assumptions.
To veer away from the topic of bisexuality for a second: consider, for instance, that you cannot really have the concept of a "same sex marriage" without first establishing the concept of a love marriage. If you exist, as many people throughout history have done, in a culture and community where marriage is explicitly about procreation, about merging two families into a newer, better unit and sealing that contract with the creation of children, then a marriage that does not — that cannot — result in children is a functionally a marriage that is, well, non-functional. It is only when you reframe your conception of what a marriage is — when it becomes, not about procreation and business mergers between families, but about two people choosing to spend a life together and unlocking a suite of legal rights in the process — that a "same sex marriage" can even remotely begin to make sense.
Which is, for the record, something I think about whenever I see discussions of whether this or that historical figure (Alexander the Great, say), was gay or bi. The argument for these people's gayness is always "well there's documented evidence that they did same sex fucking, ergo gay;" the argument for their bisexuality is often "well, yes the gay stuff, but also they were married." Except in eras where marriage was exclusively heterosexual and generally obligatory for the wealthy set, then someone's marriage doesn't really say anything about anything beyond the fact that there was a social obligation to be wed, and someone's affairs don't necessarily point to the breadth of their attractions. It's possible that a bi person in this era might have enjoyed fucking their spouse and only stepped outside of the relationship for queer entanglements; it's also possible that a bi person might have hated their hetero spouse and yet only have had same sex extramarital affairs because of who they had access to. It's also possible that a person might have been gay, married out of obligation, and pursuing only same-sex encounters because that was the only thing that turned them on. Who the fuck knows!
There's this thought experiment that I sometimes do, one where I try to imagine who or what I would have been, how I would have identified, if I had been born fifty or one hundred or three hundred years earlier than I was**. What would it have meant to be a woman whose sexual attractions spanned genders but reserved romantic love for other women exclusively? I have no answer to this question, but it's nevertheless fascinating to imagine myself as, perhaps, the Emily Dickinson of AppleTV+'s Dickinson, the woman who seems to flirt with (some) men while remaining passionately dedicated to her best friend; the woman who refuses to wed out of a commitment to independence and her art. (More likely I would have just gotten married to a man and tried to make the best of it, but who knows.) The me who I identify as now, the me I understand myself as now: could she have existed in an earlier era? And what might she have called herself at the time?
There's one more factor worth bringing up in this discussion, too: namely, that it is not merely time, but also place, that shapes these conversations. I've been thinking about that a lot over the course of the World Cup, as Qatar's anti-homosexuality laws have become the subject of controversy and debate. So much of the conversation has been framed as this (queer positive, socially advanced) West vs (homophobic, backwards) East debate, with white queers somehow managing to insert themselves as the real victims (don't do this). There's little consideration for how queer Qataris might understand their situation, their identities, and what they might want to advocate for; little understanding of them as anything beyond voiceless victims waiting to be rescued by the white West (which is, for the record, not unlike how women in these countries are discussed!). I cannot speak authoritatively on any of this save to say that the one person I know in Qatar — a bi woman who grew up in several Muslim majority countries — has a dim view of the way queer Middle Easterners are often denied the ability to understand their desires and relationships outside of a Western lens. (Is now an appropriate time to mention that many of the worst anti-queer laws in the Middle East are a legacy of British colonialism, which enforced a rigid cisheteropatriarchy on people who'd had a more complex, or at least different, understanding of sex and gender prior to the arrival of the British?)
Does this essay feel like a scattered mess? Well, welcome to the difficulties of truly, honestly, trying to reckon with the meaning of Being Bi™️. It means something, I think, except that it also doesn't mean anything outside of the ways our society decides it means something. There's no true core of "true bisexuality," no actual Bisexual Person™️. There's just us, fumbling through the dark, bumping up against social constructs that insist they know us better than we know ourselves.
* Roar lion roar
** We all did this after watching A League of Their Own, right?
PS Speaking of bisexuals throughout history: The B+ Squad book club is going to be kicking off on Thursday with the first issue of the 1990s bi zine Anything That Moves. Want in on the action? Join today!