As Jen pointed out in a comment a few days ago, The Bisexual Index has a great take on which two things the “bi” in “bisexuality” really refers to:

Bisexual isn’t about there being only “two sexes”

Some people get hung up on the ‘bi’ and protest that gender isn’t binary. In traditional dictionaries:

• Homosexual is defined as “attracted to the same sex”
• Heterosexual is defined as “attracted to the opposite sex”

So why then dismiss bisexuality as being about “men and women” when the definitions of hetero- and homo- don’t mention those? In this modern age with a wider understanding of gender some would re-state those as:

• Homosexual means “attracted to people of broadly the same gender”
• Heterosexual means “attracted to people of broadly a different gender”

In fact many people say there’s more than two genders, but if two options are either “the same as me” or “different to me” then we think it’s clear that “both” can refer to those two options rather than two perceived sexes.

I love this. Really love it. I’ve written here before about finding the word “bisexual” problematic but feeling strongly about using it anyway. In the past few days, as this way of thinking sinks into my psyche, I’m feeling less like the word is really all that flawed.

There are a lot of genders different from my own (and each other), and several that are similar to mine as well. But I’m perfectly comfortable describing my sexuality as attraction to both similar and different genders. It’s not always the similarities or differences that I get off on or that draw me to someone (though sometimes it is), but as a way of describing the group of people I might potentially be interested in, it works for me. It’s big enough to not make anyone invisible or deny their existence.

If I continue to have a problem with the word, it’s that it implies one is both hetero- and homosexual in a way that encourages people to refer to a bisexual’s “queer portion” or “straight half”. As far as I’m concerned bisexuality is a complete identity in and of itself, not a mishmash of other things. It doesn’t look like a pie chart unless you want it to. But, while it’s something to keep thinking about, I can deal with that for now. I don’t think any of the other words at my disposal are much better.

My very sincere thanks to The Bisexual Index for pointing this out to me. It’s delightful.

I saw a great comment on a Bilerico post a day or two ago that really resonated with me.

I think this represents a fairly common and rather large misunderstanding of why a lot of (but not all) younger folks use words like queer ….  For me it’s not about neutralizing an offensive word, it’s about aligning myself with a radical political identity …. It’s really not young folks who are trying to change the  meaning of words — it’s participants in the assimilationist, mainstream gay rights movement who are fighting to transform the word gay into something indistinguishable from the word straight. That’s where the real language shift is occurring. But I want a word that won’t slide smoothly down anyone’s throat. Something that says, yes I am different for all of these glamorous and tragic reasons, and I don’t have, or want, any place in this violently racist, anti-womyn, queerphobic, culture we live in.

I love this, because it helped me see one of the reasons I’m drawn to “queer.” It’s true that I want to reclaim the word, in the sense that it’s quite a powerful word and I want its power to work for me rather than against me. I may even want to neutralize it, the part of it that people call on when they react to us with hate and violence, and make “queer” into a place of love and welcome and solidarity. But it’s a word with a lot of kick, and I’m not trying to neutralize that. I’m trying to make it my own.

And I love the idea that the real change in meaning is happening with “gay,” that it’s coming to mean “just as white and middle-class and conventional as any straight person, and ready to cast aside the less conventional and socially acceptable segments of my community to get there” when it, too, used to be a radical thing to claim, a political statement in and of itself. That’s what I want from “queer.” I don’t really want everyone to start using it. Broad and welcoming as it is, it means some very specific things to me. It means setting myself against what society expects of me as a soft-spoken white girl on her way from and most likely to the middle class. It means radical lefty politics, and standing against racism, sexism, class-based oppression, ableism, fatphobia, etc. as much as I can and ideally as much as I do against heterosexism, biphobia, etc. It means being drawn to queerness in others, and building a community of people who share those values and convictions with me. Placing myself in a history that has involved riots and marches and protests and angry people of all colors and genders who’ve had enough, not corporate-sponsored parades attended mostly by white people claiming to be inclusive. Fighting for immigration righs and universal health care and the right to decide who makes one’s medical decisions and inherits one’s property regardless of whether one is coupled, rather than a few more coupled people’s right to access those things through marriage. And it means all of that much more than it means being attracted to other girl-creatures, though that’s a part of it and part of how I got here. “Gay” used to mean some of those things, I think, but it doesn’t anymore. I’m glad we have a word that does.

I’ve found myself, a few times in recent months, dumbing down my queerness so it will be visible at all. This mostly consists of allowing people to perceive me as a lesbian in situations where I know bisexual girls will be viewed as straight girls with a sexy, exotic add-on rather than as genuine queers. Even though  I am so much queerer than many lesbians. As an example, recently when a waiter mysteriously brought an extra order of sausage to our table at a friend’s birthday dinner and the classic straight girl next to me declared “Everybody always wants more sausage,” all I could think to do was tell her that I don’t. Even though, comparisons of body parts to sausages aside (ew! Wrong on so many levels I can’t even count them!), I’m a big fan of that particular body part. Store bought or factory-installed, on boys or girls, I could not be less grossed out by it. But here I was pretending to be, just to register on the queer-o-meter at all. And even then, at first she thought I was referring to being a vegetarian and just couldn’t take a joke.

Sitting around talking to a couple of coworkers a while ago, I was remembering just how alien my sexual views and practices are in Heteronormativeland. After a general condemnation of anal sex in which I refused to participate (there’s a big difference between “I don’t want to do that at work” — “that” in this case being a massage technique, legal in a few states, that approaches a hard-to-access muscle attachment through the rectum — and “Ew, how can people touch each other there ever?” although apparently it wasn’t a leap at all for these two), Coworker A turned to Coworker B and asked him, “Would you give a blowjob for a million dollars?”
“No way” he denied instantly.
“I would,” I piped up. I would, too. I’m not really cut out for sex work, I have the wrong personality for it, but everyone has a price. Mine is just higher than anyone ever actually offers.
“Nuh uh,”he said. “I’d have to live with myself afterwards.”
“Yeah, well, I’d be living with my million dollars,” I pointed out.
To which this genius says, “Yeah, but you’re a woman.”
“I’m a dyke!” I protested. (There it is again! I figured they’d been assuming it anyway; they know I have a girlfriend.)
“Yeah, but you’re still a woman!” WTF? “That’s what women do!” Again, all I have is WTFuck? “Even if I were gay, if a woman offered me a million dollars to lick her pussy, I’d do it.”
“I think you’re a little confused about how exactly this gay thing works,” I told him. But he continued to insist that, sexual orientation aside, it’s perfectly natural for women to suck cock. That’s just how the world works, folks. (Now, of course, I’m wondering what would have happened had I pointed out that this blowjob could have been given to a woman. Maybe I had heteronormativity poisoning at the time and that’s why I didn’t think of it; more likely I just have too strong a boundary between my personal and professional lives to seem so knowledgeable about “alternative” sexual practices while at work. Amusing aside: I’m typing this on my netbook, sitting on the subway on my way to work. The woman sitting next to me was quite obviously reading over my shoulder, and she just quite obviously got up and moved to the other side of the car. Shouldn’t snoop if you can’t handle it…)

So, yes, most of what’s jaw-dropping about that conversation is the casual sexism. Women suck cock! Men’s cocks! That’s what women are for! Whoa there, Turbo. The level of heterosexism is pretty out of control, too. But leaving that aside, what’s going on with me here? Am I the only one who makes this kind of compromise, or do other bisexuals find themselves doing the same? I spend rather a lot of my time exploring and defending the complexities of queerness, my own and that of others. And yet here I am, distilling it down not only to a sound bite, but to an inaccurate one. I’m letting my queerness be defined by a lack of interest in men, rather than a positive interest in all of the variety I’m actually hot for. Women; people who push the bounds of the gender binary in some way; radical lefty politics; a certain air of authority…and, yes, men. I feel guilty of contributing not only to bi invisibility, but also the idea that all sexuality (especially women’s sexuality) revolves around men, by defining mine in terms of whether I’m interested in them. The way I approach sexuality is so much more nuanced than that.

Part of this is…not internalized biphobia exactly, more awareness and weariness of the biphobia I’m likely to encounter. Sometimes I don’t have the energy to deal with being treated like a straight girl who just wants attention. Even with a recent determination to stay on the front lines, there’s only so many times I can bear to be asked whether I’m sure or whether I think I’ll pick a side someday. But which one do you like more??? as if it worked like that or there were only two options. Let alone being told that all I need is a thorough enough fucking to turn me all the way straight, or asked if I’d like to help a girl explore her curiosity about women in the nonthreatening context of sex with her boyfriend. Given my choices of partners in the past few years, there are probably just as many people who’d be happy to tell me to just suck it up and admit that I’m a lesbian now (or “really” have been all along).

I’m also a clergyman’s daughter, and I definitely have that clergy’s kid politeness drummed way, way into me. So I instinctively pick and choose my battles, smooth over awkward situations, and avoid pointing out when people are wrong if I think it will embarrass them. I only realize a bit later, when it would be even more awkward to bring it up again, that I had an opportunity for an easy bit of eye-opening. (When a coworker was reading about the compatibility of Aquarians and Cancers I told her it was all wrong about my relationship, that my partner’s the unpredictabe extrovert and if either of us errs toward hesitant and insecure, it’s me. She said,”Well, remember we’re talking about a man here.” And I was so floored that it didn’t occur to me until several minutes later that I could have just said “No, actually we’re not.” But the next time someone tried that — apparently the book was getting around at work — I started out with “Well, my girlfriend is a Cancer.” Because I learn fast. And now, of course, they think I’m a lesbian.)

And part of it that there really is a time and a place for long, drawn out conversations about identity and the complexity of sexuality and gender. In response to a throw-away comment at a friend’s birthday party often isn’t it, and work almost never is. That’s my aversion to conflict and controversy speaking, and I feel guilty saying such a thing in a world where some people can’t hide their distance from the norm and don’t get to choose when they have these conversations. On the other hand, I also believe it. There are times when people can be reached and communicated with, and times when I’m going to leave them thinking “Wow, that girl has no sense of humor,” and they’ll never think about anything I said again. Which hardly matters if my goal is to express myself authentically, and sometimes it is and I do and to hell with it. Sometimes, however, my goal is to educate people and try to get at some of their more dearly held misconceptions and biphobia, and then I’m likely to choose more carefully what to say and whether to say it at all.

But this is the wrong question. I should be asking not what’s wrong with me that I don’t always have the energy, but what’s wrong with the setting I’m in that the only way to get my queerness to register at all is by simplifying it to the point that it’s inaccurate. We live in a world where people hear “I have a girlfriend” as telling them everything they need to know about me, rather than hearing what it actually is — one piece of information, that leaves most of the picture blank. Where saying something true leads people to assume all sorts of other things that most likely aren’t true, and then consider it my job to explain myself fully and make sure they haven’t misunderstood. And that’s the real problem here, not anything I’m saying or leaving unsaid. The onus is considered to be on bisexuals, and all sorts of other people who fall outside of binaries, rather than on the people listening and making assumptions right and left to fit us into their boxes; otherwise, we’ve “misrepresented” ourselves. As long as that’s the case, there are going to be times that I just don’t have the energy to engage with it all, and settings where the only way to register as queer and subversive at all is to let people read me as gay. And given only the two options, I’d always rather be taken as queer than straight. But most of the time I do engage, and I insist on all of the complexities, even if that puts me entirely outside any context the person listening might have thought they had for me. Most of the time I do fight that idea of bi girls as straight girls plus a little something extra. Good enough, for now.

Happy Coming Out Day, everyone! I’m sorry things have been so slow around here lately; Sarah’s being eaten alive by grad school, and I’m being eaten alive by moving. But I’d like to introduce you all to my shiny new Eee PC, which is my new favorite toy and is also very effectively distracting me from the despair of moving. It should mean that I can continue to keep things running around here even while I have to spend every spare minute at home going through and packing up my belongings. I’ve been writing on the subway (as right now) and during slow times at work, and I’ll definitely be making better use now of those long bus rides to and from DC. Yay!

It’s hard to say exactly what my coming out story is; it happened over so many years to so many different people. And I’ve talked about some of it here already. I don’t really remember when exactly I came out to my friends. I know that, with several of my friends, I was talking about it as I figured it out and so was already out by the time I realized myself. I waited much longer to come out to my mother; I put it off until I had my first girlfriend at 20 (even though my sister had been out to her since she was 12, when I was 16). I still feel a little bit badly for springing it and my polyamory on her within a week of each other, but I was dating a dyke couple, so both were really relevant to understanding my life. She took it pretty well, too, although she did ask me if I had any other bombshells to drop on her. And these days I’m out to pretty much anyone I interact with meaningfully – I used to slip in a mention of my ex-girlfriend, and lately I talk about my girlfriend or this blog. A friend and I call this the slip-out, and I absolutely love it. With people who haven’t known me my whole life, my sexuality is just not such a big deal that it needs a whole announcement and production. An off-hand mention suffices to let people know where I’m coming from. I love that the world has changed enough to allow for that.

At the same time, there are people I’m not out to, for various reasons. Most of my clients, because I don’t generally talk about my personal life with them. Really, in my line of work it’s better if my clients don’t think about me *having* a personal life. I’d rather they never think of me and sex/sexuality in the same sentence, in any context and for any reason. On the other hand, I wonder how much of not “coming out” is about it being inappropriate to talk about myself to clients I don’t have a long-standing relationship with (and many of my oldest clients do know) – and how much is a worry that male clients will be inappropriately intrigued, while female clients might no longer see me as “safe” in whatever way requesting a female massage therapist makes them feel safer. Still, while it’s a good part of my life’s work to combat that kind of sexism and homo/biphobia, I just don’t think while I’m at work is the right venue. I’m out to my employers and coworkers, but coming out to most of my clients feels inappropriately personal in a way I just can’t get past. Maybe because it is inappropriately personal, or maybe because even I am vulnerable to societal pressure to stay closeted. I honestly couldn’t tell you.

I’m also not out to most of my father’s family (specifically my grandmother; I’ve been mentioning it to aunts and cousins whenever I have the opportunity), and that’s definitely about societal pressure to stay closeted. This is a woman who still doesn’t know that my parents lived together before they were married – not because they didn’t tell her, but because she didn’t hear them. And she’s old, and it would make her unhappy, and it just doesn’t seem worth it. I’m fairly certain she’s pro equal rights for queers in general, and just wouldn’t be terribly pleased that her granddaughter is one. But I wonder about this impulse in myself, whether Kant would say that if everyone stayed closeted just to their own grandparents, no staid old people would realize they know any queers (and as little as I think of Kant, the universal imperative always made sense to me. I just thought he applied it too broadly.) And there’s an uncle on the other side I also need to do the slip-out around, and that’s going to lead to one of those conversations where family members question my choices and my knowledge of myself. In that case, though, I’m ready and just waiting for the right conversational opening, so I can be casual about it and don’t have to do the big announcement. So I’m still thinking, still in process. I strive toward being totally out with everyone, and maybe someday I’ll get there, but right now there are still things holding me back.

Here’s my favorite coming-out story: I was working in a bookstore in one of NYC’s gay gay gay gay gay neighborhoods. My boyfriend at the time had come and picked me up earlier that day to have lunch with me, and I’d greeted him with a quick, chaste kiss – pretty indistinguishable from the way I greet some of my platonic friends, really. The event that night was for a photography book of male nudes, and *all* of my gay male coworkers (who were legion) were standing behind the audience watching. “Wow,” I observed, “all of the fags who work here have found some excuse to be at this end of the store.”

“You know,” a coworker scolded, “in the south where I come from, that’s really not a polite word to call someone.” I responded that I’m allowed ’cause I’m queer myself (it’s since been pointed out to me that the way we talk in public around people who aren’t intimately acquainted with our identities and politics still matters, and I buy that, but that’s neither here nor there.) To which this charmer responded, “You’re not queer – I saw you kissing your boyfriend earlier!” Um, yeah. Can’t fool you, you’re sharp as a tack. If you’re not careful, you’ll cut yourself. A quick “Yeah, he’s queer, too” shut him up, though – he suddenly had something to do at the other end of the store. I was amused. And that was always my major frustration in that relationship; as indviduals and as a couple we were about as queer as it’s possible to be, but people looked at us and saw one boy and one girl, and that makes a straight couple.

How about you? I’m totally going to use today as an excuse to get to know some of our lovely commentors. It’s Coming Out Day – what’s your story? Your coming out story, or anything else about yourself you’d like to share.

I was talking with my girlfriend the other day while she and her wife Lee drove through West Virginia, and we were speculating as to why a guy in a pick-up truck had given them the finger. The relevant information here, which I’m sure you all were about to figure out for yourselves, is that my girlfriend is a lesbian and her wife is bisexual.

Me: Maybe they were like, “Fucking lesbians, wasting it on each other.”
GF: We weren’t smooching or anything.
Me: But you were being gay, weren’t you? Well, you were, anyway; Lee wasn’t.
GF: Yes, it’s true, I was being gay. And Lee was, too, she was just half-assing it.
Me: Oh! You’d better watch it! I have a blog now!
GF: A blog! Now I’m scared. I’ll never have dinner on the internet again?

Hmph. Half-assing it indeed. At first I just thought I’d share the giggle, but this also reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to write about.

Every once in a while GF refers to ours as a lesbian relationship – which, what with it being between two girls, makes a certain amount of sense. And it’s a phrasing Lee doesn’t have a problem with, so of course GF used it with me without thinking it might be problematic for me. But I can’t quite figure out how I feel about it.

(Note: this entry is not to be interpreted at “My girlfriend does this thing I hate, and I’m airing it on the internet because I can do that now.” I really haven’t figured out how I feel about it. I’m thinking it out here, where I can get feedback and opinions from other bisexuals and queers of various flavors.)

The thing is, obviously, that I’m not a lesbian. And yet, does that necessarily mean that what I’m in is not a lesbian relationship? It is a relationship made up entirely of women, which seems to fit the definition. I understand why it doesn’t bother Lee; it seems accurate. Hell, even I defaulted to the phrasings “fucking lesbians” (even if I was speaking for a most likely straight dude who most likely wouldn’t know any better) and “you [collectively] were being gay” before I specified. And I’m not coming up with anything when I try to brainstorm other things it could be called – while I always refer to “same sex marriage” rather than “gay marriage,” to say I’m in a “same sex relationship” seems awfully cold and detached. But I manage to get by somehow not only never referring to it as a lesbian relationship but also never thinking “This would be so much easier if I could just give in and refer to it as a lesbian relationship!” I refer to my girlfriend, or say “relationship with a woman,” and I can’t remember it ever coming up in such a way that my vocabulary seemed lacking. Possibly I’ve even referred to it as a queer relationship, which is true on so many levels. And I tend to think that referring to relationships that contain at least one bisexual as “gay” or “straight” erases bisexuals in a way I’m not comfortable with. Bisexuals are so invisible already that it never crosses anyone’s mind unless you say it straight out. You hear someone say “lesbian relationship” and you think, “Aha! Two lesbians!” I’m not willing to play into that. It reminds me of the commentary on all of the straight allies at Pride, which misses the possibility that many of those supposed straight allies are actually queers in different-sex relationships.

And there’s another particularly awkward construction for you – “different-sex relationships.” And yet all of this is complicated by the fact that I would never, in a million years, refer to (or let anyone else refer to) a relationship I was in with a boy as straight. (And I’m not going to refer to an opposite-sex relationship, since that assumes that there are only two sexes and they’re, um, opposites.) There’s just nothing straight about me, including my relationships with boys. I used to walk around with my cock-sucking faggot boyfriend and think with frustration that, if the people around us thought anything disapproving, it was probably that he seemed a bit old for me. And yet we were as queer an item as it’s possible for a (mostly) cisgender man and a cisgender woman to be, and the sex we had was completely unrecognizable as straight. And that’s pretty typical, really, of my past relationships with men; I don’t think I’ve had anything that could be recognized as straight sex since I was 19, and I’ve been with precious few straight boys. I want that to be reflected in the language I use to discuss those relationships. I don’t want to tuck it away into “straight” because it was with a boy.

“Lesbian” at least recognizes my queerness, seems less to erase my identity than “straight” would. But it still seems to overlook not only my bisexuality, but all of the other ways I’m subversive and queer. Perhaps I could fold all of those into “lesbian,” or use it in conjunction with other words, if I only dug chicks. But that’s not the case, and it just doesn’t feel like the kind of word that speaks about me. I don’t know if the way it leaves so much out as a description of me also leaves a lot out in its description of my relationship. I just can’t tell.

And can you imagine the reaction if someone referred to their “bisexual relationship”? I imagine a lot of confusion, and I wonder if all of it is due to the way that the name doesn’t tell you anything about the gender of any of the participants. That is the kind of thing many people are uncomfortable with, and I think that’s worth challenging. I also imagine the non-bisexual partner (if there is one) objecting (although that seems less likely from my particular non-bisexual partner), and that in and of itself tells me that I’m not crazy to object myself. I think your average non-bisexual person would not only have a problem with the way “bisexual” in regards to their relationship failed to describe their identity, but would also strenuously object to the possibility of being mistaken for a bisexual. And whether something could be turned around is a great litmus test for whether it’s acceptable.

So what do you all think? Do you have a better way to refer to a relationship between two girls than the cold “same sex” or the sometimes inaccurate “lesbian”? Is this one of those things I should just let go, accepting that a description of my relationship is not the same as a description of myself and we’ll never have all of the language we need to represent our varied, uncategorizable selves? What terms do you use, and how well do they work for you?

(PS: reading this, GF suggested both “queer relationship” and “sapphic relationship.” I use the former, and am absolutely delighted with the latter. I want to go out and use it right now. But I still want your opinions and suggestions.)

In her last post on the cabaret duo The Wet Spots, Aviva wrote:

The Wet Spots play up their queerness in a way that’s engaging and hilarious, and don’t seem at all self-conscious or apologetic about doing so while being in a different-sex marriage. It’s refreshing to see them appearing to avoid the trap even I sometimes fall into, of preferring to be seen with someone of a similar gender and assumed gay than seen with someone of a different gender and assumed straight.

I want to use this as a jumping-off point for my post on different-gender relationships and straight privilege, because I often wonder why you don’t see that many couples like Cass and John in the public eye, and why different-gender relationships seem to lead so many bisexuals to feel their queerness has been rendered invisible.

I definitely fell into that trap of invisibility for a while, and I think a huge part of it came from my obliviousness to the privilege I reaped from being assumed to be straight. I could have been more visibly queer then, but being seen as straight was so easy, I barely even noticed it was happening at first, and being out seemed impossible and scary. Why? Because I would have lost some of my privilege, and I think the prospect of losing privilege that you don’t even understand is much scarier for a lot of people than understanding your privilege and voluntarily giving some of it up. Sometimes I wonder if this is what is going on when some bisexuals pass as straight. But I ultimately can’t speak for anyone else, so here’s how it was for me.

For two years, I was closeted at work. It’s odd now to remember how little I had actually considered how I was going to negotiate my sexual identity as an adult in the working world. I closeted myself on my very first day, though it took me quite a bit longer to realize what I had done. I was eager to impress my boss and my new coworkers; they all seemed (and turned out to be) incredibly kind, caring people, and I wanted them to like me. I was young and inexperienced, I was desperately grateful for the job after almost a year of post-college temping, and I was afraid that my oddness and social awkwardness would hurt me now that I was working in an office and had to be a team player, as it were. So I wanted to prove I could interact with “normal” people, that I could fit in with them and not freak anyone out too much. I had never really been required to do that before, and I had no idea if I could.

That’s what was in the back of my mind when I went out to lunch with my boss and someone else in my department. Over the course of the conversation, I brought up my roommate twice. And then I panicked, thinking that they must have assumed I was a closeted lesbian whose “roommate” was her girlfriend, and so I made sure to mention my boyfriend at some point, to “even things out.” And you know, once I mentioned him, everything did seem more relaxed. I may have been perceiving the conversation differently because I was relieved at how easily I had passed as “normal,” but I swear they seemed more at ease, more gregarious, like they had me figured out and were back on familiar ground, where they knew what questions to ask and what predictable answers they would receive.

Looking back on it, that is some fucked-up shit. It’s hilarious how badly I judged the situation. My references to my roommate? They probably didn’t even notice. Passing as straight to look more “normal?” I should have been appalled at myself. But I didn’t think in these terms, not consciously. That’s exactly how privilege works: the first gift it gives you is its very invisibility. You slip into it. You don’t see it until you look for it, or someone else points it out to you, or you brush up against its margins.

My current partner is the first boyfriend I’ve had since high school, and those high school relationships were short-lived and generally meaningless. So when we first started dating, I was giddy with the privilege our relationship gave me. Yes, I was ambivalent about it, too, and I hated when people assumed I was straight, and I thought the system that granted me privilege was fucked up and unfair, but I have to admit now that in those early days of our relationship, part of me loved holding hands in the street without thinking twice about it, mentioning my relationship to whoever I wanted to without considering the consequences, and this strange overall feeling of fitting in, of being in the club.

I’m a geek. I don’t have a long history of fitting in. It was intoxicating.

And I was still in this phase when I mentioned him on that first day at work. For a few months, I kind of liked being seen as straight for eight hours a day. I was struggling to socialize with my coworkers because I hadn’t yet found the ones who shared some of my interests and I was still insecure about my social awkwardness. So I had to rely on general small talk, which I am terrible at, but my coworkers could always ask me about my relationship, and we could talk about what we had done for my birthday, where he lived, what he did for a living, and I could answer their questions and ask polite ones of my own, and presto! Respectable socializing! I felt like I was in drag, wearing modest, drab, button-down shirts with black slacks every day, talking about respectable things with respectable people, being responsible and orderly and extremely polite on the phone. It was kind of thrilling, acting like a completely different person and getting away with it. Until it got really old.

And so I started to wonder if there was anything I could do about it. I couldn’t think of a way to bring up my ex-girlfriend. I certainly wasn’t going to say I was bisexual; my office was fairly conservative and I wasn’t about to say “sexual” in front of my boss.

(Side note: I think it’s interesting that some kinds of sexual behaviors and identities are desexualized enough to be seen as “appropriate” for public or professional conversation. Opposite-sex marriage is certainly at the top of this list, but nonmarried opposite-sex relationships are also up there, and in plenty of circles, the words “gay” and “lesbian” no longer immediately provoke the response of “Why are you telling me about your SEX LIFE?” I think “bisexual” is still pretty sexualized in the popular imagination, considering how many stereotypes of bisexuals revolve around our supposed sluttiness or (for women) exhibitionism.
I don’t really think it would be progress to cut off bisexual identity from sexuality or to defend ourselves by claiming we’re actually quite normal and non-slutty, because plenty of us ARE slutty or non-normative in our gender presentation or sexual practices, and we have every right to be. It’s far more productive to challenge the notion that any adult’s consensual sexual practices should lead to discrimination against them and push the limits of what sexuality is considered “acceptable” to discuss and what is not. Ok, that’s clearly another post. End digression.)

So anyway, there I was, passing as straight, wondering how the hell I was supposed to make my queerness known, and once I finally thought about it, I decided to stay closeted. To this day, I have no idea if coming out would have hurt me at work. I don’t think it would have cost me my job, necessarily, but I do think it would have made my days awkward and unpleasant for a long time.

Once I decided to hold on to my privilege, I started to see how much privilege passing had given me all along. I could wear butch clothes to work and cut off my hair if I wanted to, and nobody would bat an eye, because to them I was still reassuringly straight. I could talk about my relationship whenever I wanted. I didn’t have to plan what I would answer if someone asked me what I had done that weekend or where I had gone on vacation. I could be confident that nobody looked at me and saw a representation of a deviant, immoral, or just plain weird kind of sexuality. I never had to fear that judgments of my job performance would be biased. This privilege, combined with the privilege I already had from being white and middle-class, made my daily life much, much easier.

But the straight privilege also had a price. I had come to really like many of my coworkers, but I felt like they didn’t actually know me. For all the freedom passing gave me, it took a lot of freedom away; I couldn’t talk about much of my politics, I couldn’t talk about large chunks of my past, and I couldn’t let anyone I worked with really become close friends with me. Hell, I couldn’t even friend them on Facebook!

And ultimately, I just got so tired of keeping up the “normal” act. I felt resentful and alienated and really guilty for all this lying, and I started to dread going to work. I ended up quitting for an unrelated reason, but this was a big part of why I was so relieved to go–and why I vowed to never, ever be closeted at work again.

I don’t want this to go into a long rant about how terrible and alienating it was to pass as straight. It did cause me a whole lot of angst, but it was still helping me the whole time. I was benefitting from a fucked-up system, and my angst didn’t change that. I am still benefitting from this same fucked-up system when I hold hands with my partner and don’t get harassed or beat up for it. And of course, this very same system will sometimes protect me and sometimes leave me vulnerable, depending on the genders and gender expressions of my future partners, or simply depending on my own gender presentation as I walk alone.

It’s not terribly ground-breaking to say that bisexuals have a complicated relationship with straight privilege. But still, I think it’s interesting that I was so clueless about its role in my life until I had to really face it head-on. Now I’m much more aware of what assumptions people are going to make about my identity in the absence of confirmation, and I try to out myself as early as possible with new acquaintances (and now I usually do it by mentioning this blog! Thanks, blogging!) And I’m trying to think of ways I can use my part-time privilege for good, rather than for evil (though I suppose using it for awesome would also be acceptable…)

I’m not a fan of denying or rejecting privilege unilaterally, because that sometimes isn’t even possible, and too often it’s used as an attempt to avoid coming to terms with or admitting that you are in fact privileged. So I am not going to try to rid myself of all straight privilege. However, I do want to think about when my privilege really is unavoidable and when I can choose to forgo it in exchange for more honesty (for me) and more visibility (for bisexuals/queers in general.) I want to remember the ease and safety I feel when navigating the world with a male partner and demand the same when with a female partner. But there’s got to be more I can do.

I think that one of the biggest lessons this whole experience taught me is that when you’ve been granted a privilege under some circumstances and denied it under others, you get to know its workings really well. So what can we do with this knowledge? And what should we do with our privilege?

Sarah has already posted here about how she came to identify as bisexual, and introduced herself some in the process. I guess it’s my turn now.

Unlike many of the bisexual-identified women I know, I never identified as a lesbian. I always assumed I was straight, since the culture around me assumed so. I had crushes on boys, and there were other things I could point to to explain why I’d always felt different. It was only when I was 14 or 15 and my crushes started to be more serious and have more of an explicitly sexual component that I noticed some of my “friend crushes” on other girls were sexual in nature, too. This bypassing a lesbian identity and going directly to a bisexual one might explain why, even to this day, I sometimes feel not queer enough and therefore not cool enough to hang out with the dykes. (And oh, the people who know me are laughing incredulously to themselves right now. “Aviva,” they’re thinking, “you’re so much queerer than most of the dykes.”) Of course, there’s a healthy dollop of internalized biphobia in that as well, a lot of not taking myself seriously, but that’s another post entirely.

I don’t remember the timeline exactly, but by 16 I was definitely identifying as bisexual. I wondered if I could be straight after all for about a week before I started dating my first girlfriend; I wondered if I was really a lesbian for about another week when I was ambivalent about the man I was seeing and the sex we were having. But those things happened right after each other, and I figured out that my basic sexuality doesn’t change because I’m attracted to a particular person in a particular moment. Even being the kind of bisexual who goes through phases (which I am) doesn’t mean I’m gay some days or months or years and straight others.

My queer consciousness took longer to develop. I didn’t spend my adolescence reading all of the 20-years-out-of-date books on lesbianism I could find in my local library, like most of those aforementioned friends who identified as lesbian in high school. I think that evolving a queer identity was at least partly a response to the popular images of bisexuals in our culture. I knew that I wasn’t blond and tan and slim, that my attraction to women wasn’t primarily about arousing men, that I didn’t want to have threesomes with couples and didn’t need both a boyfriend and a girlfriend to be fulfilled. But I never went to college, and so I didn’t take the path of women’s and queer studies courses. When I was 19 I moved into a vegetarian, eco-friendly lefty wack-job intentional community (and I say that affectionately, and certainly include myself) where most of my housemates were queer. I encountered articulated queer identities probably for the first time and recognized myself in them. At least, that seems like how it must have happened. I don’t remember any “Aha! that’s what I am, I’m a queer!” moment, and by now queerness and queer identity and ideology are so much a part of my psyche that I find it difficult to remember that it hasn’t always been this way, let alone remember when it happened. But I made out with another girl in front of my boyfriend when I was 17 and was too busy performing to really enjoy it, so clearly there’s been a fundamental change somewhere along the line.

So I moved in with a bunch of queers; got to know the professional dominatrix down the hall (and started borrowing her books); befriended and then began dating the legally married lesbian couple upstairs; met my current roommate, who’s now one of my best friends and with whom I’ve since had hundreds of hours of conversation about queer identity; and let’s say I encoutered queerness in a way I hadn’t heard it articulated before, and started learning about it and making it my own. That feels right.

These days, when I can get three words instead of one (but am not invested enough to give the whole paragraph), I say I’m a queer-identified bisexual. I was thinking about this the other day, because of Sarah saying she never identifies as queer anymore without specifying bisexual. I come at it from the opposite direction – I rarely identify as bisexual without specifying queer. This is partly about there being other aspects of my sexuality that fall under the heading of “queer” that “bisexual” doesn’t cover. For me, it’s a more complete description. And it’s probably also about that lingering fear of being seen as too straight for the cool kids. But I think it also might be about presentation. Sarah has said that she likes for people to hear a hairy-legged feminist identify as bisexual, that that in and of itself queers the label. My gender presentation is much more typically feminine, and I feel as I move through the world like I’m usually read as straight. (A few friends have told me that they would absolutely read me as queer if didn’t know me, that straight people don’t only because they don’t really get it about femmes – and I’m grateful to them for saying it, true or not. Being femme feels very much like a queer gender to me, and it warms my heart when others agree.) It’s important to me for people to see a girl with shaved legs and dangly earrings — who admits to sometimes liking boys, no less — identifying as queer. Both because it expands what “queer” can mean and, more selfishly, to keep from being mistaken for one of those mythical hot bi babes who lives to be your girlfriend’s first time with a girl and let you watch. I like for people to think “queer” and “bisexual” in the same thought, to link them in their minds rather than considering them mutually exclusive.

But the “bisexual” part of “queer-identified bisexual” is as important to me as the “queer.” I won’t pretend the word is perfect. While the people I know who identify as bisexual also embrace gender in all of its non-binary permutations and possibilities, the word itself does imply that there are two genders — or, I suppose, that I’m only attracted to two of them. Either way, not true. The word “pansexual” would perhaps be a more accurate description of the range of my attractions and the way I see the world, but it’s never felt right to me. There are a lot of other associations that seem to go with it that just don’t describe me, and at this point I’m invested in “bisexual,” flaws and all

I avoided identifying as bisexual for a long time, sometime in the years between 16 and now. Not because it didn’t accurately describe me, but because all of the negative associations that came with it. And it’s important to me to do something about that. Not to let stereotypes scare me off my own identity because I don’t want to be berceived as shallow or because I don’t want people assuming I’m nothing burt a sex toy to help liven up their relationship. I think it’s important to be out in the world identifying as bisexual, being a complex human being, and obviously not fitting the stereotypes. With respect for gender variance; with the ability to have meaningful relationships and to commit; with genuine sexual and romantic attraction to other women even when there are no boys around to see; with a conscious, articulated queer identity and a place in the queer community. These are all things I want people to think of as possibilities when they hear the word “bisexual.” And that won’t happen if I’m too afraid to use it and be misinterpreted. If everyone who does bisexuality this way takes refuge in “queer” and no one speaks out against the way bisexuals are represented in our culture, those images will never change. There would be nothing to replace them.

So I’ve come back to the bisexual identity I’ve started with. Along the way I’ve developed analyses of queerness, gender, and biphobia, and become committed enough to the identity to decide it’s where I want my activism to center. Maybe in ten years or so I’ll even write a book. As far as I can tell, no one has yet written the book I want to read about bisexuality. Someone has to.

Well, it must have had to do with my subversive feminist upbringing, or perhaps a quirk of the DNA, or maybe was just the radon in the basements of New Jersey… no, don’t worry, I have no interest in explaining my queerness. I’m interested in exploring why I have chosen to label my queerness with the word “bisexual,” despite my serious problems with this label. I really dislike how the the very structure of the word assumes a rigid gender binary and ignores the actual diversity of genders and presentations out there. I don’t like its place on the hetero/homo/bi system of identities that leaves out every other possibility. I don’t like how it places the focus squarely on the genders of one’s partners and leaves out the tradition of sexual transgression and liberation implied by “queer.” Identifying as queer would be so much closer to my politics, so why am I so enamored of the imperfect “bi?”

“Bisexual” was actually the first label I ever claimed, and what I first came out as when I was sixteen. (Years later, I still find myself highlighting this fact, as if proof of my “consistency” would somehow prove the authenticity of my label. Never mind that I think it’s ultimately futile and obnoxious to debate if someone is “really” a given sexual identity or not.) The bisexual label simply made sense at the time; I was clearly attracted to girls, but I couldn’t explain away my attractions to boys, either, and I had never been exposed to the larger world of queer politics or of genders beyond male or female, so I had no reservations about it whatsoever.

At least, not until I started coming out. Most of my friends were wonderful and supportive, which I wasn’t sure I could expect in my rather homophobic high school, but I still remember hearing from one friend that another had said she simply didn’t believe me, that she thought I must be a straight girl just trying to shock people or be trendy. Well, shit. That was the first time I’d even heard that stereotype! Did I mention I grew up pretty sheltered?

So anyway, after high school, I followed a pretty typical trajectory for my generation and spent my freshman year of college being Very, Very Queer. I went to every single meeting of the campus queer group, even though the group never really did much of anything. I mentioned my queer identity in one of my very first papers I wrote in college (I sort of cringe when I remember this, but on the other hand, I went to a women’s college, and I can’t imagine my paper was the first of its kind that my professor had seen.) I came out to my roommates, put up a rainbow flag in my dorm room, and stopped shaving my legs (well, I still don’t shave- at least some things never change!), but throughout all of this, the queer identity that I was so loudly espousing was no longer what it had been before; all the sudden, I was saying I was a lesbian. How did that happen?

I don’t remember much of a conscious thought process behind this shift, and I certainly never came up with a good explanation for my very real attractions to men, but I remember thinking that “bisexual” didn’t feel radical or visible or queer enough. I wanted a queer gender presentation and a visibly full-time queer identity, and I wanted a sexuality that was consciously informed by queer thought and practice and experience. Now, of course, when I think of these things, I cannot for the life of me imagine how they could be incompatible with bisexuality, but I now understand what was going on in my head at the time: the vast majority of images of bisexual women that I had seen in popular culture were of women who presented as traditionally feminine, who didn’t have a political dimension to their identity, and who kissed girls for a transgressive thrill but saved real intimacy for men. I looked at this image, and I thought, “Well, that’s not me,” and I concluded that I couldn’t possibly be bisexual.

This is, in short, why I identify so loudly as bisexual these days. After about two years of identifying as a lesbian, I adopted “queer” or just “I don’t like labels” and returned to talking freely about attractions to people of all sorts of genders, and then, finally, I decided that someone out there needs to hear a hairy-legged queer feminist say she’s bisexual and counter all of those stereotypes that don’t seem to have changed much since I was in high school (Katy Perry, anyone?)

Politically, I still vastly prefer “queer,” but I have found in practice that if I don’t provide more explanation, “queer” is still often read as “politicized lesbian,” and I no longer want to pass as such. I think another huge reason behind this shift has been my relationship with my boyfriend. I don’t want this relationship to be seen as some sort of hiatus from queerness, and I respect my friends too much to think they would look at me this way, but ultimately, I wanted some assurance that I could say to the world, “This relationship doesn’t contradict or complicate my queerness. This is PART OF my queerness.” And this identity also provides me a way, in less radical or queer social spaces, to counteract the near-instant assumption that my relationship means I am straight.

And you know, finally, claiming this label allows me to simply believe my kind of sexuality exists, and demand that others take it seriously. It allows me to finally believe that I’m not a straight girl trying to show off or a lesbian clinging to straight privilege. Those stereotypes go deep, I’m afraid.

I still don’t have a solution to the problems posed by the word itself. I wonder if it can take on new and less binary meanings if more people claim it while simultaneously challenging its more problematic implications. That’s certainly one of my many hopes for this blog.