Who chooses the parameters of bisexuality? What executive force polices the sexual orientation on Facebook profiles? Bisexuality erasure is a unique problem in that it unites both straight and gay people in questioning another group’s orientation. If someone bisexual is in a relationship with the opposite sex, it’s seen as their resigning to having an opinion on the LGBTQ community. A community they once thought their own. Being in a relationship with the same sex, however, brings the expectations of living a full queer life: PRIDE events, writing long think pieces on the state of the community and waving a rainbow flag when they actually want to wave a pink, purple and blue one. (Guess which one I’m doing now.) You’re told some of your experiences don’t count due to an unspoken set of rules between the threshold of straight and queer.
Being bisexual is having had a boyfriend who said “that’s hot” whenever you mentioned a girl and a girlfriend who said she was the only “real queer” in the car to end an argument. It’s having friends all but drown you in tequila until its truth serum properties reveal which equipment you “prefer.”
Bisexuality is a fan dance you never signed up for; a performance for people who lead black or white lives, but like to poke those who live in the gray areas with a stick. Because it’s funny. Because they don’t have the capacity to imagine desires outside of their own.
Bisexuality is Violette Leduc, Marlon Brando, Gillian Anderson, Oscar Wilde, Megan Fox, Lord Byron, Alice Walker, Tamara de Lempicka, Billie Holiday, Cary Grant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sir Alec Guinness, Marilyn Monroe, Francis Bacon, James Dean, Billie Joe Armstrong, and so many more.
Bisexuality is a lot of beautiful and uncomfortable things and I couldn’t possibly begin to name off all of them. I’ll be discussing bisexuality in the upcoming weeks and am opening that discussion to all of you.
Submit your own experiences, your stories, your poems, etc. You will not be erased here.
Gem Blackthorn is QMT's Sex Columnist, and the author/curator of Lust Thrust Thursdays. Send her your submissions and questions at sexsexsex [at] queenmobs.com