Bisexuality Explainer
I like the wine and not the label
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September 23, 2021 is Celebrate Bisexuality Day!
It’s a super-important celebration, because bisexual folks are certainly important members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and yet they are the most likely to experience health disparities, substance misuse, and mental health issues. They face discrimination both from straight people and from the queer community, and myths and misconceptions, like “My partner can never be satisfied with me because part of them will always want a different gender partner.”
Let me start with the good news: It’s getting better.
Just by looking at the language available to people who are sexually or romantically attracted to people of various genders, we can tell that “bisexuality” is being recognized in all its complexity.
The term “bisexuality” is a holdover from the times, not so long ago, when the conversation around sexual orientation was still stuck in the gender binary. “Bi”-sexual because there were two genders. These days people may still identify that way, or they may identify as queer, pansexual, bi/pan (my preferred term), or any number of other labels that express “Ya know, it’s just not about the person’s genitals or gender,” like “sapiosexual,” where what turns you on is the partner’s intelligence, regardless of what body that intelligence lives in or what gender expression or identity that intelligence is accompanied by. Be the person high femme or a bear, you enjoy the idea of putting your mouth on their bodies, because that body is home to the mind.
And let’s not forget the “sexual” part of bisexuality, which makes it different from “biromantic,” which some asexual folks experience. That is, they are attracted to and fall in love with people of different genders, even while they have no interest in putting their mouths on basically anyone’s body. (Asexuality is a whole thing of its own, which will get a post of its own.)
Language around sexual identity has evolved beautifully, with a whole range more complex and subtle identities or labels to claim or resist. With that evolution, these days I would say it differently. I would say that if there weren’t homophobia, people would hold their labels lightly and switch them around freely, because, as the pansexual character David Schitt says in Schitt’s Creek, “I like the wine and not the label.”
I like the wine and not the label.
So: bisexuality is one of a variety of identity labels that express a person’s erotic attraction to people of various gender expressions, gender identities, and/or genitals. And the diversification away from the “bi” part is a sign that non-straight yet non-gay identities exist, just as non-transgender and non-cisgender identities exist, as gender variant, gender non-conforming, and nonbinary identities. Yay! People vary! Also people change!
Oh but wait… people change?
A key reason that bisexual folks sometimes face discrimination or distrust is that sometimes people struggle to believe that another person’s internal experience is what it is, simply because that internal experience isn’t like our own. For example, part of the resistance in the gay and lesbian community to bisexuality is the perception that it is a “phase.” And it is true that some people, as part of their evolving understanding of themselves, identify as bisexual for a while, not wanting to abandon wholesale the compulsive heterosexuality they’ve been surrounded by their whole lives. Gradually, as they release compulsive heterosexuality and the internalized homophobia that comes with it, they create space in their hearts for their full, gay identity. That’s one way some people experience their coming out process.
But other people are just bi. They’re not at some sort of “phase” in their coming out process, they’re just genuinely sexually attracted to people of different genders. And that’s hard to accept, if you’re a gay person who had to let go of a lot of cultural bullshit in order to love and accept yourself as you are, ya know? It’s hard to meet a bi person and not assume that they too identify as bi only because they haven’t yet freed themselves fully from compulsive heterosexuality.
This “phase” myth has shown up in uncomfortable ways. I talked with sex education Jane Fleishman (about her book Stonewall Generation, which I’ll have a whole post about soon), and she told me that in the 80s, lesbian separatists up here in New England would cross the street to avoid bisexual women. When she was called to facilitate a meeting of lesbians and bisexuals, the very first thing the group did was the simple task of going around the room and introducing themselves. Except the bisexual women wouldn’t even say their names, so intimated were they by the discrimination by the lesbian community.
Twenty-ish years later, when I was in grad school, I participated on the bisexual speakers panel organized through the campus’s GLBT Student Support Services Office (now the LGBTQ+ Culture Center – you can tell this was a while ago because the names of all the groups and organizations have evolved). I participated on a panel for the then (I think?) Gay-Straight Student Alliance (now the Queer Student Union). I talked about my experiences as someone who identified as bi. Toward the end of the hour, someone in the audience said this: “I think if there weren’t homophobia, no one would identify as bisexual.”
(See? It’s the “phase” myth. If we didn’t have to overcome homophobia, we’d be able to step right into a fully one-or-the-other identity.)
To which I replied: “I think if there weren’t homophobia, almost everyone would identify as bisexual.” After all, in the famous (often misinterpreted—but that’s another post, and feel free to put your critiques in the comments) Kinsey Scale from 1947, just 4% of research participants reported exclusively “homosexual behavior,” and as of 2017 about 4-5% of Americans self-identify as LGBT. But even back in 1947, 37% of men reported some homosexual experience to orgasm at some point between adolescence and old age (p. 650), and in 1953’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, around 20% of women reported sexual contact with other women by the age of 45. There’s a lot of us out here, including our grandparents, who’ve been doing erotic things with a variety of people for generations.
I don’t think anyone has an obligation to put a label on their internal experience, but I know that community can save lives, literally. While there are still places in the world where “homosexuality,” however it’s defined in that context, is punishable by death, we need labels to help build community and political movements and bubbles of love for people who live in the midst of compulsory heterosexuality
Bisexual folks (and queer and pan and sapio and all the rest) complicate the story.
It’s easy to fight for a group’s rights when you can say they’re just “born this way,” or that they’re just like the mainstream group, with this one small difference. Gays and lesbians: just like the straights, except in married, monogamous partnerships with people of the same gender!
Sexual identity is fluid, especially for people who identify as women. Lisa Diamond’s paradigm-shifting work opened the door to a new way of thinking sexual orientation as dynamic across a person’s life, not static or fixed at birth. Sexual Fluidity changed the narrative around sexual identity, complicating it in ways that better represented people’s lived experience of their sexual orientation, but also in ways that made a simple, politically persuasive story more difficult to tell. Since its publication in 2008, and before, intense research and theory has been happening around gender/sex, with thrilling new discoveries and thinking about human embodiment of identity, full of detail, nuance, and neurochemistry. If you’re interested in that depth and detail of review, maybe start here (PDF). This post does not go into that kind of depth, because, quite honestly and sincerely, most of us don’t need to know the neuroendocrinological origins of who people love. All we need to know is that when someone tells us a truth about their internal experience, it’s our job to believe them and love them.
I love that for us. I love that we don’t have one linear narrative, that we’re complex, we vary, we change. Celebrating bisexuality is celebrating that nonlinearity, all that colorful, fluid, unpredictable variety.
Cover photo credit: Peter Salanki (Creative Commons License)
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