I started this newsletter on 9/23/2022 in a fit of pique, because I was angry that the many media publications who had spent 2021 making a big deal of Bi Awareness Week, with a whole host of packages exploring the bi experience and biphobia, had suddenly gone quiet, with bi issues dismissed as not compelling enough to cover.
Or maybe:
I started this newsletter because I had a backlog of writing and thinking on bi issues that I had been sitting on ever since I had given up on my — roundly rejected over two separate rounds of pitching — book about the social construction of bi womanhood and the biphobia that shapes bi women’s lives.
I felt good about that book proposal, especially the second version, which felt more thoughtful, more refined. In the pitch meetings I ended up in — meetings, which, as noted above, did not result in an offer — I would tell editors that the reason why I was compelled to write this book because I wanted to answer a simple query: if everyone was convinced that bi women were the most privileged members of the LGBTQ community, then why did repeated studies routinely show that bi women are at an elevated risk of poverty and poor health and rape and relationship abuse and suicide compared to our gay and lesbian peers? How could bi women be both uniquely privileged and standouts when it came to suffering? It simply did not make sense.
And yet I ultimately suspect that my proposal was felled by the very dynamic I was seeking to highlight: no one* wanted my book about bi womanhood and biphobia because it was assumed that, as the group seen as the most privileged members of the LGBTQ community, bi women could not have problems worth devoting a book to — not unless I wanted to put together something servicey, something that would tackle basic questions like “how to come out to your parents as bi” or “are you still bi if you’re in a straight relationship,” which, no thank you.
But really:
I started this newsletter because I knew I was sad and I wanted to know why.
I hadn’t always known that I was sad. I’d been good at hiding it, even from myself. Any time I got a twinge of longing, of discomfort, I convinced myself that it was because I was bad. If I felt at sea in WLW spaces, it was clearly because I did not belong. If I felt shame over my long history of dating men, it was clearly because it was shameful, because it must inherently mean that I was a straight girl faking my attraction to other women for attention, a straight girl who, at best, merely fetishized sapphism rather than truly embodying it. Nevermind the women with whom I had been in love. Nevermind the women who had broken my heart.
But then I knew that I was sad, and that this sadness was hurting me. And I knew that there must be a reason why I was sad — a reason beyond my own personal failings.
And I knew that if I was sad, and that sadness was hurting me, and if the sadness had a reason beyond my own personal failings, then I must not be the only one who felt that way.
That’s why I write this newsletter.
* No one with the budget to pay me the kind of advance I would need to be able to afford to write the book, anyway
Thank you for keeping it alive. I know it’s frequently more a responsibility than a joy.. hope you’re doing as well as can be.