Try Coming Out as Bisexual

[civic_oracle]

Some years back an excellent editorial on bisexuality and bisexual exclusion within the lgbt community came out in Bay Windows, a major Boston lgbt newspaper. It often surprises straight people to learn that bisexuals are treated so poorly by many lesbian and gay folks. Yet they are. Andrew Rapp, a gay man and editor in chief at the paper in

Comments

[civic_oracle]

I'm glad that it does not make sense to you. :-) It doesn't make sense to me either, though it is an issue I have grown around and learned about over time. Once upon a time I agreed in an unexamined way with the binary notion that people were either lesbian/gay or straight. When I was a first year student at American University I was an officer of the Lesbian and Gay Student Community, and I really hassled one of the other officers because she came to one of our events with her boyfriend and got very affectionate with him. It felt to me, at the time, like a violation of safe space for homosexual students. Looking back I regret it, but I was really ignorant about bisexuality at the time. It was a long way from there to a later period in my life when I served on the board of the Bisexual Resource Center. :-)

A lot of the trouble has to do with the binary identity structure that our culture has established around sexual orientation. The structure does not match the reality of the complexity of people's feelings, so you end up with "straight" people who are also attracted to people of the same gender, "lesbians" who sleep with men, and "gay" men who have relationships with women. This structure privileges the other identities above anyone who calls her or himself bisexual. Lesbian and gay-identified people are uncomfortable admitting that we have more social and institutional power than bisexuals, but the simple fact is that we do. People are always more comfortable talking about and admitting their target identities than their power identities.