Who cares if I'm valid

Not me!

First and most importantly:

IT’S MY BIRTHDAY

I’m 41, which, yes, I know is shocking given the condition of my skin and how tapped in I am to youth culture. I would lie about my age more but then I wouldn’t be able to talk about my favorite topic of all time (namely, what it was like to turn 18 in the year 2000). If you appreciate me, or this newsletter, or just birthdays in general, please feel free to gift me cash. It’s been a shit year, I deserve nice things.

Now that that’s out of the way…

My inbox, she is swimming in bisexual headlines. Would you like 10 signs that prove you’re bisexual? Or perhaps a servicey article on what it means to be bisexual? Perhaps you’re wondering what percentage of people think bisexuality is a choice! Then this article is for you.

It is not, however, for me.

It feels, sometimes, like the discourse around bisexuality has not advanced in decades. Not even feels like: it simply hasn’t. The way we talk about gays and lesbians and trans people has changed quite a bit over the course of my lifetime (for better and for worse, in the case of trans people); but the mainstream discourse around bisexuality has remained… stuck. People are still putting out surveys asking people whether bisexuals are cheaters, for god’s sake. Is this really the best we can do?

And I cannot help but think that part of the problem here is this fixation on validity as a metric. It makes sense, I suppose: so much of the fight for gay and lesbian rights hinged on getting people to see same-gender relationships as equivalent to mixed-gender ones, of helping people understand that “love is love.” Given the relatively successful track record of that strategy, it makes sense that so many of us are still trying to employ that tactic, still trying to explain why bisexuality is just as valid as monosexuality.

Except —

Well, it’s a couple things. First and foremost, I just don’t think the strategy is working very well — we wouldn’t be where we are now if all we needed was a little Bisexual Myth Busting™️, would we. But I’m also struck by how meager its aims are, honestly.

There was a time when I thought that validity carried more power than it actually does — when I thought that it had the ability to enact broad scale freedom. If we argued for the validity of gays and lesbians, then surely we were arguing for the validity of all sexual preferences and identities, right? Except, no: we were arguing for the validity of cis, monogamous gays and lesbians. Even cis, monogamous bisexuals got left out in the cold.

So to argue for the validity of bisexuals — what does that get us, one more group under the umbrella of acceptability? One of the reasons why people are so focused on this whole bi vs pan debate — on splitting people with multigender attractions into ever more bespoke groups — seems to be so they can decide who the good ones and the bad ones are (“pansexuals are better than bisexuals because they’re attracted to non-binary people” etc and so forth) and I am simply so tired of that.

Because, look: what if we just magically erased biphobia? What if people suddenly accepted bisexuals? Would that mean we’d finally achieved real freedom — or would it simply mean that monogamous bisexuals with a desire for marriage and children had suddenly been accepted into the fold, while every other bisexual (and pansexual and omnisexual and whoever) still had to deal with a bunch of bullshit? And, you know, what about the aces? What about them?

The problem, for me, is that this desire for validity still plays into this belief that there are a limited number of acceptable ways to love and fuck, and that the best we can hope for is to expand the criteria just enough so that we, ourselves, are included and can live without fear of judgment or violence*. But that framework means that someone will always be left on the outside — that there will always be someone struggling to give voice to their own identity in order to have it deemed valid.

And I would just rather not.

I am trying, these days, to care less about whether my sexual desires and identity are “valid” and more about whether they feel good and fulfilling for me personally. I am trying to simply not assume anything about anyone else’s identity or relationship history — to simply not give a shit if their desires make any sense to me. It is honestly freeing to start from a place of “humans are messy and confusing and sex is even messier and hey as long as everyone in a relationship feels good about what’s going on it’s no one else’s business,” because really: it is nobody’s business who anyone else fucks, or doesn’t fuck. It simply does not matter at all.

And it’s so weird to me that something so basic as “truly, other people’s sex lives are none of your business and don’t define who they are as people or what their past or present choices might looks like” is still so revolutionary even in 2023 — like, seriously, this revelation was pretty obvious to me 30 years ago, before I’d even come out! — and yet, it somehow is. But I’m gonna keep trying to push the message out. I think it’s the only way to achieve actual liberation for everyone.

* This is also how I feel about marriage equality, a phrase that’s kind of funny given that the whole point of marriage is to privilege monogamous couples above everyone else