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firefly124I'm not sure how much sense it makes for Celebrate Bisexuality Day to fall in the middle of Asexuality Awareness Week, but there it is. Then again, there is the fact that these are two orientations that have to contend with people not believing they even exist, so perhaps the overlap isn’t quite so illogical as it seems. Also it was a flister who recently came out as asexual who kind of lit a fire under me to actually do this, so there’s that bit of resonance as well.
Between work and school, I won't be making it to any CBD events, but it seemed like today might be a sensible day to make this post I've been meaning to write for, well, a really long time.
I'm bisexual.
There are a number of reasons this doesn't usually come up, one of which is that it's taken me awhile to realize there's any point to acknowledging that when I'm in an opposite-sex marriage. Hell, it took me awhile to acknowledge that as a fact about myself in the first place (which, in retrospect, just makes me shake my head and wonder how I could be so thick-headed), and even then (which was about 12 years ago), my follow-up thought was pretty much, "Well, it's not like it changes anything, right?" To which the answer is it both does and doesn't. More on that in the tl:dr version under the cut.
One of the other big reasons that has repeatedly held me back, though, is the periodic bouts of major biphobia in fandom. (And in other areas of life as well, but insofar as LJ/IJ/DW, that's the realm where I've seen it most often and most loudly.) I'd planned to write this post months and months ago but at the time was planning to put it under a really tightly filtered flock because of some of the backlash I'd seen bisexual fic writers receiving. I've since decided that kind of defeats the purpose of making a post like this, which is mostly just to be counted, for whatever increased visibility that creates. You can't increase visibility whole lots in a tightly filtered post, y'know? :D
For a bit longer than the past year, after getting hit over the head with a really bizarre clue-by-four, I've been doing a lot of work around figuring out how to integrate my bisexual orientation, because simply ignoring it proved to be a Bad Plan, and basically boiled down to some internalized biphobia. You see, some part of my brain still bought into the idea that bisexual=promiscuous, and since I wasn't planning to go have an affair, therefore it was obviously irrelevant and best ignored.
Go ahead and roll your eyes. I did several times just writing that sentence.
The most obvious comeback to that ridiculous notion is that if it's possible to be straight and "married but not dead," i.e. able to acknowledge attraction to others while remainng monogamous, then obviously it's possible to be bisexual and "married but not dead." The difference is that it's not only men I may find attractive.
That was also one of the things that held me back from even acknowledging my own orientation. I went to an all-girls high school, which was undoubtedly a factor, as we were all very invested in assuring one another how straight we were. I can remember a particular discussion in which someone pointed out that if, statistically speaking, 10% of the population is homosexual, then the odds were at least one person in our class (there were a whopping 12 of us) would be. Smile plastered on my face, I thought, "Well, that's probably me. Except, no, I like boys! So I can ignore the crush on So-and-so." The idea of being attracted to both wasn't even on my radar. The only time I can remember it even coming up during that time frame was a conversation with a friend who said something along the lines of, "I can understand how someone could be gay, but I can't believe God would make someone bisexual, because how can you be monogamous if you need both?" So, not only did neither of us "get" bisexuality, we also had no idea that polyamory existed, two separate issues that sometimes but not always intersect.
I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing more people discover their bisexuality later in life, a trend I read about someplace recently, though I don't recall where. If you've been brought up to expect that you're straight, and at least some of your attraction is to the opposite sex, it is possible (though unwise, ime) to simply ignore the rest of your orientation, at least for awhile. I was 30 when the lightbulb finally went off, or at least started to go off. For some, it's even later.
Unfortunately, that's one of the things people cite when they talk derisively about bisexuals. "If that were true, wouldn't they have figured it out sooner?" Which, if you think about it, is probably the opposite of logical, or at least so it seems based on my own experience.
In fandom, there has been a lot of vitriol around “allegedly bisexual” fic authors, particularly slashfic authors. There seems to be this belief that people claim insincerely to be bisexual in order to get “cool cred” of some sort. I’m not clear on how that’s supposed to work. If anything, it seems more like you get crap from both the straight community and the queer community. There may be bisexual authors who think they should get a pass for writing slash that is disrespectful of gay men, which is where I gather this notion comes from. That’s not the same thing as being dishonest about their own orientation.
For myself, I’m very clear on the fact that I am mostly granted straight privilege because, unless I announce it (kind of like this), I’m pretty much assumed to be straight. I’m married to a guy, so it’s obvious, right? (Well, I had also assumed that one of my flisters was lesbian, because she’s married to a woman, but that was an incorrect assumption too.) And I’ll acknowledge that sometimes I very deliberately make use of that privilege. Before marriage equality was achieved in CT, I wrote lots of letters to my assorted state-level government types, and I would make it a point to include that I felt my heterosexual marriage was under no threat by extending marriage benefits to same-sex couples. In retrospect, I think saying something more like, “Dude, I’m a bisexual in an opposite sex marriage, and I’m not planning to up and get a divorce so I can go find a woman to marry instead, so surely straight people aren’t going to either” might have been a better idea. At the time, though, I felt that framing the message as being from an apparently-straight ally was likely to be more effective. Now, that makes me kind of cringe.
So, yeah. Definite straight privilege. And yet, in arenas where I’m out, sometimes suspicion from both straight and queer people, which is weird.
You may have noticed that I’ve mentioned being involved in the Gay-Straight Alliance at my college. That was one of the things I decided I needed to do in order to better figure out where I actually fit. It’s been an awesome experience, though not remotely what I’d expected. The friends I’ve made and the projects I’m finding myself up to my elbows in have all helped, both directly and indirectly, with working on accepting and integrating my bisexuality.
Part of which is figuring out how to deal with coming out in areas I haven’t yet. This was one. (Or three, if you count LJ/IJ/DW separately.) *ticks box* Another is my family. Living in a different state makes being out to everyone but them weirdly possible. I still haven’t figured out if/when/how to deal with that. I’m not even out of the broom closet to them, never mind the closet, thought it’s a coin toss which would be a bigger bombshell. The only member of my family I feel close enough to that I’d even want to know is my sister. Otherwise, I’m actually kind of good with just doing the occasional birthday/holiday visits and not really getting into anything real. Which is also straight privilege, as deciding whether to be honest about who I’m in a relationship with isn’t part of that equation. Wow, this got scrambled.
You know, for a post I’ve been composing in my head for months, this is awfully scattered. Probably because I didn’t sit down and actually start writing until about an hour ago. Now it’s almost time for work, so I guess I’ll stop here, even though it doesn’t really feel done. Instead of editing this to bits and probably taking another couple of months to actually post it, I’m just going to send it out into the wilds of the internet and ask if there are any questions.
Between work and school, I won't be making it to any CBD events, but it seemed like today might be a sensible day to make this post I've been meaning to write for, well, a really long time.
I'm bisexual.
There are a number of reasons this doesn't usually come up, one of which is that it's taken me awhile to realize there's any point to acknowledging that when I'm in an opposite-sex marriage. Hell, it took me awhile to acknowledge that as a fact about myself in the first place (which, in retrospect, just makes me shake my head and wonder how I could be so thick-headed), and even then (which was about 12 years ago), my follow-up thought was pretty much, "Well, it's not like it changes anything, right?" To which the answer is it both does and doesn't. More on that in the tl:dr version under the cut.
One of the other big reasons that has repeatedly held me back, though, is the periodic bouts of major biphobia in fandom. (And in other areas of life as well, but insofar as LJ/IJ/DW, that's the realm where I've seen it most often and most loudly.) I'd planned to write this post months and months ago but at the time was planning to put it under a really tightly filtered flock because of some of the backlash I'd seen bisexual fic writers receiving. I've since decided that kind of defeats the purpose of making a post like this, which is mostly just to be counted, for whatever increased visibility that creates. You can't increase visibility whole lots in a tightly filtered post, y'know? :D
For a bit longer than the past year, after getting hit over the head with a really bizarre clue-by-four, I've been doing a lot of work around figuring out how to integrate my bisexual orientation, because simply ignoring it proved to be a Bad Plan, and basically boiled down to some internalized biphobia. You see, some part of my brain still bought into the idea that bisexual=promiscuous, and since I wasn't planning to go have an affair, therefore it was obviously irrelevant and best ignored.
Go ahead and roll your eyes. I did several times just writing that sentence.
The most obvious comeback to that ridiculous notion is that if it's possible to be straight and "married but not dead," i.e. able to acknowledge attraction to others while remainng monogamous, then obviously it's possible to be bisexual and "married but not dead." The difference is that it's not only men I may find attractive.
That was also one of the things that held me back from even acknowledging my own orientation. I went to an all-girls high school, which was undoubtedly a factor, as we were all very invested in assuring one another how straight we were. I can remember a particular discussion in which someone pointed out that if, statistically speaking, 10% of the population is homosexual, then the odds were at least one person in our class (there were a whopping 12 of us) would be. Smile plastered on my face, I thought, "Well, that's probably me. Except, no, I like boys! So I can ignore the crush on So-and-so." The idea of being attracted to both wasn't even on my radar. The only time I can remember it even coming up during that time frame was a conversation with a friend who said something along the lines of, "I can understand how someone could be gay, but I can't believe God would make someone bisexual, because how can you be monogamous if you need both?" So, not only did neither of us "get" bisexuality, we also had no idea that polyamory existed, two separate issues that sometimes but not always intersect.
I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing more people discover their bisexuality later in life, a trend I read about someplace recently, though I don't recall where. If you've been brought up to expect that you're straight, and at least some of your attraction is to the opposite sex, it is possible (though unwise, ime) to simply ignore the rest of your orientation, at least for awhile. I was 30 when the lightbulb finally went off, or at least started to go off. For some, it's even later.
Unfortunately, that's one of the things people cite when they talk derisively about bisexuals. "If that were true, wouldn't they have figured it out sooner?" Which, if you think about it, is probably the opposite of logical, or at least so it seems based on my own experience.
In fandom, there has been a lot of vitriol around “allegedly bisexual” fic authors, particularly slashfic authors. There seems to be this belief that people claim insincerely to be bisexual in order to get “cool cred” of some sort. I’m not clear on how that’s supposed to work. If anything, it seems more like you get crap from both the straight community and the queer community. There may be bisexual authors who think they should get a pass for writing slash that is disrespectful of gay men, which is where I gather this notion comes from. That’s not the same thing as being dishonest about their own orientation.
For myself, I’m very clear on the fact that I am mostly granted straight privilege because, unless I announce it (kind of like this), I’m pretty much assumed to be straight. I’m married to a guy, so it’s obvious, right? (Well, I had also assumed that one of my flisters was lesbian, because she’s married to a woman, but that was an incorrect assumption too.) And I’ll acknowledge that sometimes I very deliberately make use of that privilege. Before marriage equality was achieved in CT, I wrote lots of letters to my assorted state-level government types, and I would make it a point to include that I felt my heterosexual marriage was under no threat by extending marriage benefits to same-sex couples. In retrospect, I think saying something more like, “Dude, I’m a bisexual in an opposite sex marriage, and I’m not planning to up and get a divorce so I can go find a woman to marry instead, so surely straight people aren’t going to either” might have been a better idea. At the time, though, I felt that framing the message as being from an apparently-straight ally was likely to be more effective. Now, that makes me kind of cringe.
So, yeah. Definite straight privilege. And yet, in arenas where I’m out, sometimes suspicion from both straight and queer people, which is weird.
You may have noticed that I’ve mentioned being involved in the Gay-Straight Alliance at my college. That was one of the things I decided I needed to do in order to better figure out where I actually fit. It’s been an awesome experience, though not remotely what I’d expected. The friends I’ve made and the projects I’m finding myself up to my elbows in have all helped, both directly and indirectly, with working on accepting and integrating my bisexuality.
Part of which is figuring out how to deal with coming out in areas I haven’t yet. This was one. (Or three, if you count LJ/IJ/DW separately.) *ticks box* Another is my family. Living in a different state makes being out to everyone but them weirdly possible. I still haven’t figured out if/when/how to deal with that. I’m not even out of the broom closet to them, never mind the closet, thought it’s a coin toss which would be a bigger bombshell. The only member of my family I feel close enough to that I’d even want to know is my sister. Otherwise, I’m actually kind of good with just doing the occasional birthday/holiday visits and not really getting into anything real. Which is also straight privilege, as deciding whether to be honest about who I’m in a relationship with isn’t part of that equation. Wow, this got scrambled.
You know, for a post I’ve been composing in my head for months, this is awfully scattered. Probably because I didn’t sit down and actually start writing until about an hour ago. Now it’s almost time for work, so I guess I’ll stop here, even though it doesn’t really feel done. Instead of editing this to bits and probably taking another couple of months to actually post it, I’m just going to send it out into the wilds of the internet and ask if there are any questions.
