Asylum Seekers and “Dishonest” Sexualities: Bisexuality at the Border

32-year-old Orashia Edwards, a bisexual man and long-term resident of Leeds, was denied asylum yesterday by the UK Home Office as Judge Clive Heaton QC declared that Edwards was being “dishonest” about his sexuality. No justification was given for this verdict, but Edwards has a 14-month-old child in the UK and has expressed frustration at the assumption that he could “fit in” with straight people in Jamaica.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVib2Hh6Oog

Edwards was scheduled to be deported this morning but his flight was cancelled at the last minute. While this has granted him temporary reprieve, his future remains uncertain; without refugee status, Edwards could still be detained and/or deported at any time. He has no family in Jamaica and is likely to face violence and discrimination on the basis of his sexual orientation and now public persona.

Edwards’ relatives and supporters in Leeds, UK
via Yorkshire Standard

The failures of the UK immigration system to protect vulnerable LGBT asylum seekers from persecution are well-documented: LGBT asylum claims have a 98-99% failure rate (compared to 73% for claims in general), some asylum seekers have been driven or coerced to go as far as submitting home sex tapes to “prove” their sexuality, and Yarl’s Wood Detention Centre in particular has come under scrutiny for abuses committed against women asylum seekers. The Home Office denies that it is biased, though Home Secretary Theresa May called for a review of officers’ handling of asylum claims made by gay and lesbian applicants earlier this year. This review has yet to materialise.

Edwards’ case, however, highlights the specific concerns bisexual asylum seekers face at the border. While the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that LGB asylum seekers cannot simply be told to go home and “be discreet,” the difficulties of “proving” one’s sexuality remain as difficult as ever — if not even more so now — in a climate of institutionalized disbelief and public scaremongering about “illegal immigrants” and “fradulent asylum claims.” The dominance of assumptions of binary monosexuality and the “born this way” narrative, assessing the legitimacy of asylum seekers’ sexual orientation based on their sexual behaviour and relationship history, and disproportionately white, male and straight judges mean that bisexual people are far less likely to pass the “gay enough” test to qualify for asylum.

In January, Colin Yeo of the Free Movement blog revealed questions posed by immigration officers to a bisexual asylum seeker in detention.

What did you do with x?
Did you do anything other than kissing x?
Where did this happen?
How often did you have intercourse together?
Is that every day?
Did you put your penis into x’s backside?
When x was penetrating you did you have an erection?
Did you ejaculate?
Did x ejaculate inside you?
Why did you use a condom?
How do you show your sexuality when you are in the UK?
How does that display you are bisexual?
Why have you got to behave as a bisexual in [country]?
That was with x only and he initiated the contact you claim. Why can’t you return and live a full life there?

Can we really expect the UK Home Office to believe the stories of bisexual asylum seekers (and others who deviate from expected gay narratives, including those who came out later in life and asexual people) when gay activism and media coverage often replicate similar dynamics of biphobia and bi invisibility? Non-monosexual asylum seekers are not only interrogated on their sexual and relationship histories but are expected to “display” their sexuality in rigid, restricted ways even while in the UK, when it is exactly scrutiny of their sexual orientation and lives that they are escaping. At the intersections of biphobia and sexism, queer women, who often experience different forms of violence and discrimination (particularly with regard to domestic and sexual violence) and are more likely to have been married to men before or to bring children with them into the country, are especially vulnerable to being dismissed by the Home Office.

Activists rallied in May in support of Aidah Asaba, a Ugandan woman whose asylum application failed because courts did not believe she was a lesbian, with her having been married to an abusive male partner
via The Guardian

Edwards is being supported by his family and immigration justice groups Leeds for Change and No Borders Leeds. There has been an online petition directed at the Home Office to keep him here, a fundraiser for his legal fees, and the hashtag #DefendOrashia to keep track of updates on his case.

The fate of LGB asylum seekers, Edwards included, cannot be contingent on fickle media attention and Twitter mentions. Without a more comprehensive overhaul of the asylum system — and an acknowledgement of and move to redress the wider queer community’s complicity in biphobia and bi invisiblity — vulnerable people will continue to be sentenced to the very real risk of violence and harm.

Gallup And Everyone Else Wants to Know: Were You Born This Gay?

In a poll released on Wednesday, Gallup found that 42% of Americans believe homosexual people are born homosexuals, rather than becoming so due to factors such as upbringing and environment. 37% voiced the opposite opinion, and another 21% didn’t answer. Nobody asked me, but if they had, I’d have responded with some questions of my own: why are those the only options? How come you’re asking random strangers of unknown sexual orientation rather than actual queer people? And don’t you think that’s kind of a loaded question?

Via Gallup. I looked for the corresponding “why are straight people straight” poll, but for some reason, I couldn’t find it.

Gallup has a long history of polling the general public about queer issues, sometimes problematically. In the case of this particular question, it fits into the larger narrative being told by a particularly vocal set of gay rights activists. That narrative goes something like this: gay rights are the civil rights struggle of our time. As we know, it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, because people are born that way. Similarly, it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, because people are born that way.

Those are far from the worst ideas I’ve ever heard; I think there are elements of truth in all of those things. But those are far from the only true things, and sometimes the repetitive drum of the “born this way” tagline drowns out those other truths.

Yes, some people are queer and know it from a very young age. Other people realize their queerness a little later on — in college, or after they’ve married a partner of a different sex. Some people experience fluid sexual attraction throughout their lives. Still others (count me in this group) feel like their queerness is something they chose for themselves — and further, that the element of choice in their behavior and identity should have nothing to do with its acceptability.

Via Campus Pride.

I think that part of the reason many of us have become invested in the idea of inherent queerness is that it’s an easy narrative to defend. People generally understand why discrimination against minority groups is wrong, thanks to the hard work put in by black civil rights activists (and women’s rights groups after them, and immigrant groups, etc). By slotting queer people into this familiar framework, our struggles become quickly comprehensible.

However, the queer-rights-as-civil-rights approach has its limitations. Getting hate crime legislation passed, for example, is no small feat; however, it still leaves the underlying hate intact. I also question whether the idea of queer people as just the same as you straight people except for this one thing is applicable — because we aren’t exactly the same, are we? The very nature of our difference means that certain foundational social structures from straight society (I’m thinking gender roles and the like) cannot operate in the same way. Queer culture has some unique features, and I think we’d be better off trying to make straight society more like us than the other way around.

Beyond that, I feel like it’s hypocritical to piggyback on the work of civil rights leaders without examining racism in queer culture. If the goal of civil rights activism is to eliminate discrimination in all forms, why aren’t more queer groups taking steps to explicitly fight racism? Why are there so many entitled white queer people oblivious to their privilege? The struggle against racism isn’t “over,” and there are many racialized people who are also queer. I feel 100% confident saying that I was born as a mixed race Filipina due to factors beyond my control. My queer status? Less so. I suppose it’s possible that I was “born” bisexual, but again, that isn’t what feels true to me. What feels true is that I’ve made a series of choices and that I continue to do so.

Wisdom from Mae Martin.

While scientists continue to explore the many ways that biology relates to/is responsible for our sexual identities, anecdotally, I can think of plenty of instances in which I’ve made conscious decisions regarding the matter. In Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation, Urvashi Vaid writes, “Homosexuality always involves choice — indeed, it involves a series of four major choices: admitting, acting, telling, and living. Even if scientists prove that sexual orientation is biologically or genetically determined, every person who feels homosexual desire encounters these four choices.” Maybe this isn’t everyone’s truth, but what Vaid describes feels true for me. Perhaps more importantly, I agree with her that the argument for innate queerness is very politically limiting.

Vaid explains, “Where we once sought to free the homosexual potential in everyone, by making it safer to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual, we now assert the conservative view that all we want is the freedom to be our biologically determined selves. History shows that the shelter of biology has never protected a people from persecution. The right does not care that we were born gay; they object to us because we are not straight.”

Although Vaid wrote all of this in the mid ’90s, the point still stands. While not all queer people have the luxury of a safe environment to come out in, what if those of us who could moved away from biological essentialism, and instead focused on stamping out homophobia? What if our larger cultural narrative was less like “People can’t help being the way they are so give them a break” and more like “Every person deserves respect, regardless of who they are or how they got that way“? Like, maybe I wouldn’t emblazon that across the back of a jean jacket (or maybe I would!), but it feels to me like a more empowering message.

Lady Gaga, did you decorate that jean jacket at Alpine Meadows? That unicorn stencil looks awfully familiar…

Even though the person who brought “born this way” into pop culture parlance is an out bisexual, some disturbingly common threads I see throughout these “born or made” discussions are monosexism and bisexual erasure. For example, I don’t think it’s accidental that Gallup only directly named gays and lesbians in their poll. By and large, bisexuals are seen as a complication, or watered down extensions of “authentic” sexualities, where authenticity is connected to biological fact.

In Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, Shiri Eisner writes, “In the case of bisexuality, we might look at society’s insistent attempts to naturalize both homosexuality and heterosexuality, appealing to bodies, genes, hormones, and brains in order to establish that ‘this’ (the sexuality in question) is inborn, natural, and immutable. Under this logic, one is either ‘born’ gay or ‘born’ straight, and thus any performance of their desires is ‘true to its nature.’ Being in a same-gender relationship presumes homosexuality, and being in a different-gender relationship presumes heterosexuality because one’s relationship choices are understood to reflect one’s inner essence. Bisexuality — and bisexual passing — short-circuits this circular logic by showing that ‘acting gay’ or ‘acting straight’ does not necessarily equate with ‘being gay’ or ‘being straight.’ It allows us to distrust visual representations and to deconstruct claims of inner essences.”

I think part of the reason why we like to think of sexual orientation as a division between two camps is that when differences are well-defined, they are easily contained. Polarized notions of gender and sexuality make it easy for people to figure out which side they’re on and draw lines between “us” and “them.” Bisexuality breaks this worldview down, showing people that the “other side” is not so different. And while prejudiced people can learn to be “okay with” homosexuality as long as they maintain distance from it, it’s a different and trickier thing to feel “okay with” ambiguity that hits so close to one’s own sense of self.

Via Obey Giant.

In the end, my feeling is this: it doesn’t matter how we got here. Whether we were born this way or we chose to be queer, we’re all entitled to be who we are, period. We don’t owe anyone an explanation or poll results playing into a narrow definition of “progress.” All we owe each other is respect.

In order to make sure that the comments section on this article is a healthy and welcoming place for our bisexual readers, please note that any comments that question the validity of bisexuality or sexual fluidity as a sexual orientation, question Autostraddle’s decision to publish pieces discussing bisexuality, or make essentialist claims about bisexual people (ex. bisexuals are cheaters, bisexuals turn out to be gay) will be swiftly deleted.

Evan Rachel Wood Bisexual Is Single Again: What Does This Mean For You?

feature image by Hilary Walsh

Professional attractive person Evan Rachel Wood and unlikely-but-determined ballet dancer husband Jamie Bell have reportedly split after two years of marriage.  The couple met in 2005 while starring in Green Day’s video for “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” and wed in 2012. Their son, whose name has not been made available to the public, was born in July of 2013. According to a rep for Mr. Bell, “Evan Rachel Wood and Jamie Bell have decided to separate. They both love and respect one another and will of course remain committed to co-parenting their son. This is a mutual decision, and the two remain close friends.”  Bell has recently deleted his Twitter account, and Wood announced yesterday that she’d also be taking a hiatus from Twitter.

via Getty Images

Noted goodlooking human Evan Rachel Wood came out as bisexual in a 2011 issue of Esquire, and since then has continued to be a bisexual person, breathing the same air as other human beings on Planet Earth and walking among them. Following her wedding in 2012, a Twitter follower inquired as to whether her marriage to a man meant that Ms. Wood no longer identified as bisexual. Evan Rachel Wood replied that she was in fact still bisexual, just no longer single. In the wake of her marriage’s dissolution, Ms. Wood now appears to be not only single, but also still bisexual.

Sources close to Autostraddle.com report that the newly single Ms. Wood was spotted dancing at a ladies’ party called the Grind in Los Angeles this past Wednesday night, sparking rumors that you, yes YOU stand even a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming Evan Rachel Wood’s new paramour. Presumably, Evan Rachel Wood will also start showing up in your OKCupid matches, Tinder and at your local happy hour. Is she looking at you?  OMG maybe she’s looking at you. You should say hi!  Maybe you could work up the nerve to dance awkwardly with Evan Rachel Wood, and then later on you guys might exchange numbers! Later this weekend, you’ll meet up to drink almond milk lattes and shyly hold hands, and the paparazzi could describe you as Evan Rachel Wood’s “mystery flame.”  She just got out of a pretty big relationship so she isn’t in a rush to get serious, but that’s OK, Evan Rachel Wood!  We just want to peruse used bookstores and eat Thai food with you.  We’ll take this at your pace.

Orphan Black’s Delphine and the Dangers of the Bisexual Femme Fatale

[WARNING: this post contains spoilers up to the current episode]

The character of Delphine on the TV show Orphan Black is one of the most high-profile depictions of bisexual women in current popular media. In fact, it’s one of very few media texts in which a bisexual woman character actually uses the word “bisexuality” in order to describe herself (a rare occasion indeed!). But while it’s incredibly exciting to see this kind of depiction, we should also be aware of the role that Delphine’s bisexuality plays in the plot.

As a general rule in popular media, bisexuality is never depicted for its own sake or for the sake of the character. More often than not, it’s there as a trope, as shorthand for something else, a hint to help us understand something entirely different about the character. In short: it’s a form of stereotyping. For example, we can often find bisexuality as a way to emphasize a character’s “wild” or “exotic” nature, to underline lack of commitment, or point to immaturity. While Orphan Black seems to be above using such blatant stereotypes, it is however not above using one particular trope: the bisexual femme fatale.

The bisexual femme fatale, first identified by film scholar Katherine Farrimond, is a seductive, but dangerous, bisexual woman. Appearing in many films and TV shows, she often becomes a source of tension and danger for the plot and its protagonist(s). One of the reasons this character is perceived as so dangerous is that we don’t know where her loyalties lie. In plots where she appears, she must make a choice between a man and a woman in a way that creates the conflicts, mysteries, and riddles that are at the base of her plot. Since whatever choice she makes determines the outcome, we find ourselves constantly wondering whether or not we can truly trust her.

Delphine is such a character. The first time we meet her, we see her flirting and trying to make friends with Cosima, the quirky, queer, science geek clone. From the very outset, we know that she can’t be trusted—we know she’s a monitor, an agent sent to spy on Cosima by hostile elements. Indeed, by the end of two episodes, we not only discover the identity of those hostile elements (the Dyad Institute, headed by Dr. Aldous Leekie), but also that Delphine is romantically/sexually involved with Leekie himself.

As the plot goes on, Delphine’s loyalties become more ambiguous. She becomes an ally to Cosima, helping her attain and decipher secret information about the clones, as well as covering for Sarah (the main protagonist of the show) when she sneaks into the Dyad Institute dressed as Cosima. However, the show also puts up many question marks about her loyalty to Cosima and the clones. For example, she convinces Cosima to take a job at the (still hostile) Dyad Institute as a scientist. Later on, she brings a blood sample of Cosima to Leekie after promising her not to do so.

For the duration of the plot so far, Delphine’s bisexuality is the premise for the moral tension that she causes, and a key to the danger that she poses to Cosima. Her choosing between Leekie and Cosima is one of the things that will determine the fate of Cosima’s engagement with the Dyad Institute, for better or worse. This choice will also mark her as either an enemy to Cosima and the clones, or as an ally to them. The reason why we don’t know whether we can trust her is that we don’t know who she will choose.

While I want to acknowledge that this is a problematic depiction, I also don’t want to be too hasty about throwing Delphine (or any bi femme fatale) away. As bi women, we mostly have to live on scraps, scavenging on leftovers from queer representation and innuendo. For this reason, explicitly bisexual characters are precious. And very often, can also give way to wonderful counter-readings, disregarding the original intention of the text and instead giving it an interpretation that’s helpful for us.

I like to think that bisexual femmes fatale represent the threat that bisexuality poses to clear cut boundaries, and to the hierarchies that these boundaries create. Significantly, their function in plots represents an anxiety from breaching the boundary between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and the hierarchy that follows with it. As dangerous women, they also represent a threat to patriarchy—they have the ability to choose, and their choice has the power to change reality for the other characters. At the very least, that makes them women with agency, a characteristic widely associated with dangerousness when it comes to fictional women. And since they can choose, the femmes fatale are as dangerous to men as they might be to women. In fact, in many plots we might find them posing danger to men (for example, as in Basic Instinct).

Though Delphine’s bisexuality exists not in its own right, but as a (problematic) function in the plot, I’d still like us to appreciate her as an agent of chaos, a woman with power, and a destabilizer of boundaries. I hope that sometime in the future we wouldn’t have to do with scraps and scavenging. For now, while we scrape and scavenge, we should be aware both of the problems with these depictions, and of what we can get from them.

In order to make sure that the comments section on this article is a healthy and welcoming place for our bisexual readers, please note that any comments that question the validity of bisexuality or sexual fluidity as a sexual orientation, question Autostraddle’s decision to publish pieces discussing bisexuality, or make essentialist claims about bisexual people (ex. bisexuals are cheaters, bisexuals turn out to be gay) will be swiftly deleted.

For All The Girls I Loved Before I Knew I Could

Amanda

I remember vividly that her name was Amanda because of the crushing wave of confusion that came with that knowledge. I was 8-years-old and at Girl Scout camp, so I don’t know why I thought she was a boy when I saw her across the mess hall. I couldn’t make the stirring in my gut go away once I knew she was a girl — a girl with short black hair and a confident walk and a smile that disrupted my child’s understanding of happiness. I channeled my butterflies into befriending her, and we spent the weekend playing sports and singing about the Princess Pat. I never saw her again.

It took 14 years more before I let myself fall for a woman. Amanda caught me off guard with her short hair wizardry, but I felt sure it was a fluke. I first had crushes on boys when I was 4. I knew my more-than-platonic feelings for women were some other thing, some deep friendship or sisterhood. As soon as I knew what an “ally” was, I considered myself one. But I did not understand that I myself could be gay. Bisexuality seemed mythical.

Ana

We met at an international program for teenagers interested in conflict resolution. She was all hair and hips and fire, and the second we shook hands I knew she would rock my world. We spent our year in the program together talking about justice work, listening to Adele, and laying on top of each other on grassy hills and fancy rugs. I wanted to be her best friend, or maybe be her. I Facebook stalked her female best friends, who were all beautiful and cooler than me.

A few weeks ago on Facebook chat, she congratulated me on my new writing gig at Autostraddle, and we found out that we came out as queer in the same month. We have been on parallel journeys embracing our sexuality, reconciling our queerness with our other identities, and figuring how to date women. And we found out we were both kind of in love with each other in high school.

My hand is the one with the very straight rainbow thumb ring on it.

We talked about how the program would have been a perfect space to start coming to terms with our sexuality — at camp we talked for hours about identity and personal stories and faith and a hundred kinds of loss. We were surrounded by sympathetic, politically progressive camp counselors with training in helping young people communicate their pain and confusion. But we didn’t have the vocabulary or social context to even begin to give voice to the butterflies that lived in our stomachs, not at 16.

In college, my long-distance boyfriend who I loved a beautiful, frightening amount for a very hard 17 months gave me a pass to kiss girls while drunk. We never talked much about why I wanted to do that. It just seemed like the thing to do. Texas, my glorious, red as blood Texas, was already a weird place to grow up as an anti-death-penalty, skeptical-of-capitalism vegetarian. What if queerness meant Texas wouldn’t feel like home? What if queerness meant my skin wouldn’t feel like home?

Kelly

We became Facebook friends in preparation for spending summer 2012 as interns at The Dallas Morning News. The first time we met in person, we spent two hours driving around Dallas with our co-intern Andrew looking for somewhere to eat ice cream in 100-degree weather. Our friendship was instantly intense, like that Texas summer heat. It felt like we couldn’t get to know each other fast enough. Over G-chat at work, we swapped Thought Catalogue articles and talked about our “mostly-straight-but-sometimes-kind-of-into-girls-but-really-of-course-straight-ness.”

On the Fourth of July, we got drunk at our friend’s lake house, and I turned away when she tried to kiss me on the roof because I understood it would be something different than all the kissing I had done with girls before. A few weeks later on her birthday, we made out on the dance floor of a gay club while a creepy mustached man danced behind me. It was different to kiss her to shitty Rihanna remixes when I was too blasted to accidentally feel something.

Hanging out at the gay club with Kelly and some strangers dressed in elaborate costumes. This was the summer of yolo.

Kelly went back to Kansas, I went back to Austin. She cut off all her hair and started dating Katie. I started chasing around after a guy who looked like Ellen DeGeneres. A month after I turned 22, I saw Andrea Gibson read two nights in a row. The first night, Lauren Zuniga opened for her, and her poem “Confessions of an Uneducated Queer” left me shaking. She read “This is for every straight girl who still has to get drunk to kiss other girls, I get it. Oppression is a loud room — sometimes we can’t hear our own pulse,” and I felt the throbbing of my heart in my tongue.

Molly

Our friend Oliver introduced us the weekend after those Andrea Gibson shows. I made a joke about our matching Justin Bieber haircuts, and we were both donezo. Soon, I started telling people about the girl I was dating. Every reaction was positive (My mom: “I’ve always thought there were a lot more bisexual people in the world than most people realize;” my best friend Josh: “Um, finally.”) Molly was the first girl I fell in love with and the first girl to wreck my stupid heart. I feel profoundly privileged that I had a safe, loving coming out experience. From the first moment I called myself queer, I have never wanted to rebury that truth. But I still resent the structures and cultural pressures that made it so hard for me to figure it out, that make it so hard for so many of us to hear our pulses.

Now, I think about how things could have gone differently. If there had been a gay kid in Hey Arnold or an openly gay teacher in my school, I might not have waited 22 years to choose queerness. I might have sent a check-yes-or-no note to Amanda while we made banana boats. Ana and I could have started an awkward, whirlwind camp romance. I would have let Kelly kiss me on the roof, to hell with the inevitable heartbreak when we both moved away at summer’s end.

For the girls I loved before I knew that’s what I was doing, I promise to blaze a trail of queer wherever I can. I will fight for a future when no kid has to quash feelings because her socialization leads her to insist they are bad or nonexistent, one where we can loudly celebrate the radical act of loving whoever we want without interrogating it scientifically or apologizing for it to our families and in our equality campaigns. I’ll do it for Amanda, for Ana and for Kelly, and for every person who fears their love is something lesser than love. I’ll do it for myself.

Hey, Jessie J Isn’t Bi Or Gay, Much To Our Dismay She’s Strai, Okay

When Jessie J came out as being a human who likes both men and women a few years back, many of her diehard fans were surprised: not to learn that their favorite human wasn’t heterosexual, but that she wasn’t homosexual. There were rumors — never confirmed — that she’d been an out lesbian prior to getting a record deal, but we were on board with this new information, too, because it didn’t negate the especially glorious rumor that her girlfriend was one of the studs/AGs dancing in her amazing music video “Do It Like a Dude.” It was a groundbreaking video — studs and AGs are a severely underrepresented portion of the LGBTQ community and many of us queer women were thrilled in our hearts and pants to finally see a reflection of that diverse population on MTV. Because of that video and the queer subtext in her other songs, we were instantly happy to have Jessie J on our team. Needless to say, these same fans were pretty surprised to hear today that Jessie J is now coming out as… straight?

“For me, it was a phase. But I’m not saying bisexuality is a phase for everybody. I feel that if I continue my career not speaking on it, I almost feel more of a liar than if I didn’t. I just want to be honest, and it’s really not a big deal. Who cares?”

Obviously we all know the answer to that question: WE DO. I’m not sure exactly why we care, or why I care, or if we even have a right to care (I’m pretty sure we don’t). Regardless: we do. But before we get into that, let’s look back on how we got here to begin with.

Video still from “Do It Like A Dude,” one of the hottest videos of all time

Here’s what Jessie J told Glamour UK in July 2011:

It’s important for me to be open and honest about [my sexuality]. My Mom and Dad have known for years and were super cool, my sisters made jokes about it because they were married with kids and I was the rebellious one. I had a girlfriend and tattoos… Because I haven’t tried to hide it, people have gone, ‘Oh, she’s so cool about it, so we’re cool about it.’

I never wanted to be called a hypocrite, but I didn’t want my sexuality to become a gimmick. There are lots of people who go, ‘Oh, I’m bisexual.’ No. You’ve kissed your friend.

Here’s what she said in another 2011 interview:

I’m very open, and it’s funny because people say I’m very mysterious. They want me to be mysterious. I don’t think I am at all. I think they want me to be mysterious because that’s what they’re used to… but I’ve never denied it, even four or five years ago when people used to talk to me about it, I always said I’ve always liked girls and I’ve always liked boys. I’ve never put my sexuality in a box and I’ve never named it, and I’ve never labeled it.

In March 2011:

I’ve never denied it. Whoopie doo guys, yes, I’ve dated girls and I’ve dated boys – get over it. It’s not a secret, but it’s the only thing they can grab onto – they’re like, “She never drinks and she comes out of the party looking like she did when she went in, damn her!”

In April 2011:

My family and friends never made me feel like I had to put a label on it. The same goes for my music. I don’t feel like I have to say I’m pop or I’m rock or I’m hip-hop. I make music – and if people like it, they like it. And I think it gets people frustrated because they need to pigeonhole me, but I won’t allow them to, because I just think it’s about being who you are.

In May 2011:

I’ve been with guys and I’ve been with girls. And I kind of think it’s about the person not the genitals. A lot of people are like, “‘Oh, she doesn’t know what she is,’” she says, sighing with impatience. ‘But I definitely think my generation is more easygoing about it.’

Those declarations were actually pretty meaningful, at the time, and when I wrote about her coming out in May 2011, I praised her for eschewing the linguistic runaround so many other pop stars favor. Which brings us to yesterday, when news broke that she’d said this:

“I did talk about it, and I was open about it, and I do support being lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender — love who you want. That’s what I’m doing. I don’t regret anything I ever said, but I never knew back then that whatever I said became a fact that I couldn’t change. I’m just so bored of it, and that’s kind of it – I want to stop talking about it completely now and find myself a husband. It’s a true struggle. All the chick flicks that didn’t make sense to me, I now understand – Sex and the City is real! I’m not anything. I’m aware of who I want to be and I want to marry a man. That’s it.”

I think we can all agree that Sex and the City isn’t real, for starters — although it bears mentioning that SATC, while worshipping at the altar of gay male sexuality, treated lesbianism alternately like a desperate and monotonous last resort, a trendy thing all the kids are doing, a way to get ahead in the workplace and a party game (literally and figuratively, re: the party game). Perhaps Jessie J marathoned all six seasons in a sound-depravation chamber and is now rocking back and forth softly in a chair clutching a purse made out of a bird and wondering when her White Knight is coming because her hair hurts?

Hello, ladies

No, but seriously, obviously many humans have reacted with emotional violence to this revelation, inspiring Jessie to take to twitter to point out that she hasn’t killed anybody.

Although I agree that directing hate towards Jessie J or anybody, ever, is counterproductive and misguided, there’s also a lot about that statement that rubs me the wrong way, including her incorrect citation of twitter’s 140-character limit. But before I get into that, I will say this: we do put pressure on stars to declare their sexual orientation at a really young age, and that’s not always fair, and it’s not fair to chastise them later for reclaiming what they’ve come to realize is their true identity. I think about this a lot when people talk about Kristen Stewart — she might be gay, she might be bi, she might be straight, we really don’t know, but I’m surprised by how infrequently people consider the possibility that Kristen herself is either still figuring it out, or, if she is gay, might still honestly believe that she is straight. She wouldn’t be the first woman to not realize her own queerness no matter how many times inquiring minds wanted to know. I was 25 by the time I finally beat my internalized homophobia into submission and felt comfortable openly identifying as gay, queer, lesbian or bisexual, and we do need to realize that anything coming from a young person is not necessarily a “final answer.” Treating it as such only serves to make young stars more hesitant to open up about feelings that might be really confusing.

That being said, in Jessie’s follow-up statements on twitter, it’s curious that she seems to be positing bisexuality as an identity which puts her “into a box,” but is eager to speak openly and bluntly about her heterosexuality, seemingly because she doesn’t feel straightness does put her in a box. She’s miffed that people assumed she was dating her female friends but failed to acknowledge her boyfriends. To be honest, her twitter speech is uncomfortably familiar, like something your now-straight ex-girlfriend would say to explain why she doesn’t want anyone to know that you used to date ’cause she’s worried being labeled “bisexual” will ruin her chances with men and therefore wants to distance herself from that word as dramatically as possible. To which I say: any man who won’t date you ’cause you’re bisexual sucks even more than all cis men inherently suck, which is a lot.

Jessie insists that she never used that word to describe herself, but she basically did by referring to girls who just kissed their friends as “not bisexual” in opposition to her own identity. Regardless, I personally believe that if we’re okay with calling women who date men “heterosexual” even if they’ve never stood up and said “I am heterosexual,” we should be okay with calling women who openly declare that they date men and women as “bisexual” or “queer,” too, unless they’ve requested we use another label, in which case we should exclusively use their chosen label when discussing them. That vigilant in-community policing of applying those words to celebrities only serves to amp up the stigma around those words (there’s no universally agreed-upon catch-all word, after all!) by treating them differently than we do every other word in the dictionary (wherein a thing that matches a certain definition can be called the word that definition defines until we are otherwise notified). 

Furthermore, she also seems to be positing some things as mutually exclusive that are not mutually exclusive: I too want a husband and kids one day, but I also expect that the “husband” I raise my kids with will be female. Being gay or bisexual and “wanting a husband and kids one day” are not mutually exclusive. The fact that she wants to date men now doesn’t have to mean that she’s not bisexual, either, as “wanting to date men” or even “wanting to marry men” and “being bisexual” also aren’t mutually exclusive. I can’t tell Jessie J what she is, but I can suggest that her narrative sounds a lot more like sexual fluidity than heterosexuality. If she’s honestly saying she’s been straight all along and that dating girls was just a misguided phase, then, honestly, I feel sorry for her ex-girlfriend. The media is always eager to feel bad for ex-boyfriends and ex-husbands of women who come out as lesbians later in life, after all.

I do, I do remember, and I’m so glad that I saw the light and stopped eating Lean Pockets every day for breakfast because I feel like that phase was really unhealthy for me and the egg/cheese situation reminded me of toxic waste in a really confusing way

Ouch.

This is also true, I am a really bad singer and you are a really good singer and we are just different in that way.

It’s not Jessie J’s responsibility to ensure that your friends and family believe that your bisexuality is real, and anybody who takes your sexuality less seriously because of Jessie J’s recent revelation is being a jackass who doesn’t deserve our collective concern. But it is her responsibility, as it is every ally’s responsibility, to not talk about bisexuality like it’s a curse or a disease she can’t wait to be rid of — a nasty thing from the past she loathes to revisit. And although she doesn’t have to lie to the media, it would’ve been awfully kind for her to refrain from referring to it as a “phase,” specifically.

EW GIRLS EW GROSS

“Jessie J’s assertion that she wants to “stop talking about it completely” is directed at a media fond of asking her questions about her sexuality, but however justified her frustration, the message to young women and men questioning their sexuality is that she’s over it, she doesn’t want it to be a part of her life anymore, it’s something that she wants to move away from,” writes Laura Kay in The Guardian. “But having already entered into a public discussion about it, to dismiss her previous brave coming out as something she did when she was young and naive, just “a part of growing up,” is a real shame.”

Ultimately there’s nothing wrong with being straight, there’s nothing wrong with being gay, there’s nothing wrong with being bisexual or queer or a lesbian or pansexual or however you identify. Wanting to do it like a dude doesn’t mean you can’t do it with a dude and Jessie J doesn’t have to be anybody but herself, that’s true, and I don’t think she deserves to be mercilessly attacked. But I don’t think she deserves your unqualified affections, either — no musical artist does. And if her unabashed queerness was what drew you to her music, you’re certainly not obligated to maintain that affection in light of her recent conversion to The Bible of Charlotte York.

To be honest, I’m personally way less interested in her whole situation now than I was yesterday when I still thought she was bisexual. As the wise and totally real Carrie Bradshaw once said:

In order to make sure that the comments section on this article is a healthy and welcoming place for our bisexual readers, please note that any comments that question the validity of bisexuality or sexual fluidity as a sexual orientation, question Autostraddle’s decision to publish pieces discussing bisexuality, or make essentialist claims about bisexual people (ex. bisexuals are cheaters, bisexuals turn out to be gay) will be swiftly deleted. 

Debbie Harry Is Bisexual, Says You Can Call Her Any, Any Time

Today in news that shattered everything we once knew about life, love and the world at large, Blondie frontwoman and professional cheekbones-haver Debbie Harry announced that she identifies as bisexual, and that she has enjoyed relationships with both men and women.

During an interview with a German magazine promoting their tenth studio album Ghosts of Download (LOL what?), Ms. Harry confirmed that longstanding rumours of her alleged romantic dalliances with women were indeed true, and although she had enjoyed more longstanding relationships with men, “let’s just say women are more sensual.”

That sound you just heard was the collective gasp of every warm-blooded woman on planet Earth.

Deborah Harry emerged in the mid-70’s as the singer of seminal new wave rock band Blondie, whose countless hits include “Sunday Girl,” “Atomic,” “One Way Or Another” and “Heart Of Glass.”  In their early years, Blondie were regulars at New York’s notorious rock incubator CBGB’s, and their 1981 single “Rapture” was the first chart-topping song to combine elements of rap with disco and rock’n’roll.  Deborah Harry became the quintessential frontwoman – a platinum-blonde ice queen with a punk rock snarl.  The band split up in 1982 following legal and financial troubles, as well as the illness of primary songwriter (and Harry’s former longterm romantic partner) Chris Stein, only to triumphantly regroup in the late 1990s with their comeback album No Exit.  The band still releases new material and performs today, and at 68 years old, Debbie Harry remains an iconic sex symbol.  Although Ms. Harry has been an ally to the gay community in the past (speaking as an advocate for gay marriage and participating in Pride celebrations), it’s wonderful to know that we can count her as an outspoken member of our own community.

In terms of her future, Ms. Harry expressed a desire to fall in love again someday, adding: “I don’t know if I have any specific requirements – just somebody nice, who has a good sense of humour and loves to have sex. What more could you ask for?”

I cannot speak about this anymore because I am still reeling, but here is Debbie to sing you a song about how she feels about you and your beautiful future together:

More Than Words: Bi Bi Bi

Identity terms have really hard jobs. Seriously, think about all the things they have to do! There’s that private shine the right one is supposed to have when you call yourself it in your head. There’s the categorical meaning they’re supposed to take on when you use them to describe yourself to other people. And then there’s the baggage each drags along — the baggage of connotation and etymology, baggage that can be useful and positive (when it reminds us of shared community and shared history, for example) or negative (say, when it’s used to stereotype). At some point, privately or publicly, every well-examined word struggles under the pressure. And there’s no group better at thorough public examination than us QUILTBAGs.

SOMETIMES I JUST DON’T FEEL CAPACIOUS ENOUGH

At the moment, the word “bisexual” is in the cooker — and its case throws those warring pressures (of community and individual identification, and of cultural and etymological history) into sharp relief. Which means it’s a great time to map those pressures out. Let’s take a look.

“Bi” as a prefix or infix comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *dwo, for “two.” This became the Old Latin *dvi and then Latin bi, which survived the transfer to English intact. You could even say it thrived — it shows up everywhere from biathalon to bivalve to labia (which come in pairs, after all).

CLAMS RULE.

No recorded use of “bisexual” exists until 1824, at which point it meant what intersex does now. The term was repurposed to mean “attracted to both sexes” in 1892, when neurologist Charles Gilbert Chaddock wrote an English translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing‘s Psychopathia Sexualis. (The Psychopathia Sexualis is a collection of 238 case studies of sexual behavior that — in the process of positioning all non-procreative sex as perverse — also managed to popularize the words “masochism” and “sadism.”)

KRAFFT-EBING PUT ALL THE KINKIEST PARTS IN LATIN SO THAT MOST LAYREADERS COULDN’T UNDERSTAND THEM

The term didn’t come into wide use until the 1950s (DSM III?). In the meantime, people (generally psychologists) proposed alternatives, including “ambisexual,” coined by S. Ferenczi in his 1916 book Sex in Psycho-Analysis, to better “connote that we understand by this predisposition, not the presence of male and female material in the organism (Fliess), nor of male and female sex hunger in the mind, but the child’s psychical capacity for bestowing his erotism, originally objectless, on either the male or the female sex, or on both.”

Early usage of this word — like most sexuality-related words — was largely clinical. Psychologists threw it around more than the people it was supposedly describing. In 1910 Freud published his infamous theory of “innate bisexuality”: that all humans are originally predisposed to be non-monosexual, but “in the course of development” become heterosexual, as long as everything goes according to plan (this theory — like most sexuality-related theories! — was based on dubious science, incorrect conflations of sex and gender, and societal influence, but was pretty popular in its day). Freud’s contemporary, Wilhelm Stekel, actually took Freud’s theory and used it to argue that bisexuality is a more “natural” state, but his theory got less traction. In 1948, Kinsey published his Scale, which, though also oudated, vanguarded a “breathtaking assault on the hetero-homo divide.” (Kinsey himself didn’t use the word bisexual in his work, because he felt it “implied a biological origin of bisexuality rather than a psychic one.”)

PIPER WILL YOU PLEASE GET WITH THE PROGRAM FOR LIKE ONE SECOND

As usual with queer identity labels, instances of bisexual self-identification reached a critical (recorded) mass around the same time as LGBT rights movements took off — and it’s easiest to trace the word’s spread via the people who led those movements. Stephen Donaldson (aka Donny the Punk) began identifying as bisexual in 1966 after spending years as a gay activist. Maggi Rubenstein, then a nurse at at a San Francisco LGT health center, came out in 1969 during a staff meeting, which inspired her workplace to become an LGBT health center.  Throughout the 1970s, bisexual advocacy groups were formed in major cities around the United States. A Quaker group called the Committee of Friends on Bisexuality published “The Ithaca Statement on Bisexuality” in 1972 in The Advocate, marking the first time a US religious institution had acknowledged bisexuality. In 1978, Fritz Klein, a psychologist AND a self-identified bisexual person, published The Bisexual Option (1978). In the book, Klein “drew the conclusion that sexuality defies rigid, well-defined categories; still, he worked throughout his life as a bisexual activist,” eventually later founding Bisexual Forums in New York and San Diego, along with the Journal of Bisexuality and the American Institute of Bisexuality.

BI ACTIVISTS CAROL QUEEN AND MAGGI RUBENSTEIN

Lately, some people have started looking around for a different term. The main concern for most people is that, because many people identify outside of the gender binary, the “bi = 2” part of the word is becoming less and less relevant, and potentially exclusionary. This conversation is loud on Tumblr, where people have proposed alternatives, and objections to those alternatives (“Go Home Biphobia” has a good rundown of both). Some people are looking for this word to describe themselves; others seek an umbrella term that can be used to refer to all people who don’t identify as monosexual. The golden egg would be a word that wasn’t defined in opposition to another group (i.e.”non-monosexual”), didn’t privilege sexual attraction over other types of attractions, and avoided current prefixes (such as bi-, pan-, and poly-) that are used already. Shiri Eisner, a longtime bisexual activist, told me that if an alternative is necessary she recommends “multi-spectrum,” which she considers “as close as it gets to an elegant and inclusive solution.” Our very own Stef uses the word bisexual to refer to the community as a whole, but prefers “sexually fluid” for herself, because “it seems hard to pick a word to describe something that has the potential to change, so describing that change instead makes more sense to me.”

UMMM STEF CAN CALL HERSELF ANYTHING IF SHE CALLS ME, AMIRIGHT

At the same time, it doesn’t make any sense to assume that bisexual people are really attached to the literal meaning of the word — as the Bisexual Resource Center puts it,  “no one would say that miserable people can’t be “gay” because they’re not happy or upbeat all the time; nor are lesbians [only] women who hail from the Greek island of Lesbos.” Literal-historical translation of a term — especially a term invented by medical professionals in order to diagnose several different things that used to be considered diseases — should not be considered that term’s primary meaning. And the push specifically against “bisexual” is surprising, especially since there are so many other words and identities out there that technically imply that a binary exists (it’s also worth pointing out that there are plenty of bi people who themselves identify outside the gender binary). Just because news outlets have had a little trouble catching on in no way negates the way actual bisexual people define their own identity. Eisner told me that although she agrees that “umbrella terms need to be as inclusive as possible, and that words that feel exclusive to people should be avoided, I still find it suspicious that so many people want to dissociate themselves from bisexuality… I find that, a lot of the time, this feeling is based in biphobic notions, such as that bisexuality is always and inherently oppressive (towards any other groups, and especially trans* people, and pansexual, polysexual and omnisexual people), and that it’s never viable as an identity word.”

In order to strike a balance, many people who identify as bisexual take care to define the word for themselves publicly. Robyn Ochs, who has been a bisexual activist for over thirty years, has a page on her website where she does just that:

“I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”

ROBYN OCHS DOESN’T SEEM TO NEED AN UMBRELLA

Eisner told me that she “hopes that “bisexuality” will become accepted some day as the umbrella term.” To her, the word is dense with implications that reach far beyond attraction:

“At the basis, bisexuality means to me attraction to people of more than one gender, or to people of genders similar to and different from mine. But that’s just the basis. Identifying as bisexual for me also means resisting biphobia and monosexism, it means rebellion in heteronormativity, patriarchy and cissexism, it means solidarity and identification with all bisexual people, and with queer and trans* people as a whole. It also connects me in solidarity with other marginalized groups… ultimately for me, bisexual identity is about resisting all hierarchies and seeking liberation for everyone. In a very personal sense, in my life, bisexuality has meant accepting myself as different from social norms, celebrating that difference and subverting the norm itself.”

Bisexual people have suffered disproportionately from invisibility, erasure, biphobia, terrible representation on The Real L Word, shockingly low emotional and physical health, and even worse New York Times headlines than most identity groups. The bisexual community struggled for decades to reclaim a word in order to describe an identity that still slips through the cracks. While communal quests for inclusivity are noble — and it would be great to find an umbrella term that all the people it covers want to stand under — we have to make sure that, in searching, we don’t negate that history. Because identities are, y’know, more than words. And words are more than the sum of their parts.

***Many thanks to Rachel for this idea!

This has been the thirty-fourth installment of More Than Words, where I take queer words of all sorts and smash them apart and see what makes them tick. Every week I dissect a different word, trying to figure out where it came from, how it has evolved, where it might be going, and what it all means. It’s like reading the dictionary through a prism. Feel free to send word suggestions to cara@autostraddle.com.

Header by Rory Midhani

Our Willow, Ourselves

I’m not really into the standard “there are two types of people in the world” dichotomies. Human beings are varied and thrilling and obviously there are millions of types of people in the world; whether you prefer, say, dogs or cats, or coffee or tea, does not define you as a person. That said, there are certain issues that do reveal aspects of your character based on where you stand on them. One of those issues – perhaps the most important of our lives – is the pressing and oft-discussed question of Willow Rosenberg, television’s most computer-literate magical lesbian.

Or is she a lesbian? Therein lies the rift. Some back story for the uninitiated: Willow dated dudes for the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; she had a longtime unrequited crush on her best friend Xander, then dated the scruffy and adorably taciturn guitar player Oz. Xander began to return her affections while she was still with Oz, resulting in a torrid PG-13 affair and a short-lived Willow/Oz breakup, but she and Oz then reunited and were really (as even the biggest Tara fan has to admit, and I know because I am the biggest Tara fan) extraordinarily sweet together until midway through season four. Then Oz, who did I mention was also a werewolf, cheated on Willow with another werewolf, and left to pursue his movie career I mean meditate on the implications of his lycanthropy in Tibet or something. I don’t know, 1999 was a weird year for everyone.

With Oz out of the picture, Willow’s burgeoning friendship with Tara developed into love – a love fraught with questionable wardrobe choices (why would anyone wear an ankle-length jean skirt?), musical numbers, and witchcraft used as a metaphor for everything from cunnilingus to drug addiction, yet still one of the most poignant and heart-wrenching loves I’ve ever seen on television. Willow’s coming out was tied to her relationship with Tara, but even after Tara’s death, Willow never seemed to consider going back to men. She continued gaying it up, and even had the first lesbian sex scene on prime time television, though my heart will always ache that it was with Kennedy instead of with Tara.

In the later seasons of Buffy, Willow never identified as anything other than one hundred percent totally super lesbo. At one point, when Xander’s ex-demon girlfriend Anya (if nothing else, I hope these character descriptions are convincing any holdouts to go watch Buffy already) expressed concern about the possibility that Willow would steal Xander away from her – since, you know, she’d done it before – Willow’s response was an indignant “Hello?! Gay now!” She also described her relationship with Tara as “best friends. Girlfriends. Lovers. Lesbian, gay-type lovers.” Willow is never described, by herself or anyone else, as bisexual, despite her history of dating and loving men.

So here’s the question: Is Willow a total failure of bi visibility – a character who could have been written as bisexual, but whose hetero past was simply ignored by the writers when they decided to “make” her gay? Is her insistence on identifying as gay, not bi, a biphobic or bi-erasing gesture? Or is she actually something separate, something more progressive and interesting than bi erasure – a strong, dynamic character whose sexual orientation is genuinely fluid? I believe that the way you answer this question reveals a great deal about you, your values and your beliefs about queerness.

People who identify as bisexual tend to find Willow extremely disappointing. That makes sense. She had the opportunity to be prime time television’s first out and proud bi chick, and she passed it by. To many people, especially in the bisexual community, a woman who identifies as “straight” when dating men and “gay” when dating women sets off some alarm bells about internalized biphobia. And insisting, as Joss Whedon did, that Willow is unequivocally gay, and “it just takes some people a while to realize it,” can’t help but seem disingenous, an attempt to justify away her obviously real feelings for men in order to make the narrative of her queerness as simple and palatable as possible.

“She likes men and women!” I remember my college roommate fuming, when Willow described herself as gay for the eleventeenth time. “She had an emotional crisis over whether she should make out with Oz or Xander! She was torn between two men! She’s bisexual! ” She had a point – and, as a bisexual girl who had experienced her fair share of “just pick a side already, God,” plenty of reason to feel infuriated. Rewriting Willow’s early loves as insignificant or produced by self-delusion is the exact same kind of revision that bisexual people are often urged to practice on their own histories to avoid making other people – gay or straight – uncomfortable, and watching a dynamic that has hurt you play out in your favorite TV show is a great way to end up feeling really shitty.

But I think there’s another way to read Willow – a Willow less taken, if you will, and not one that involves covering Oz and Xander with white-out and going about your exclusively homosexual business. If you look at her from a certain angle and kind of squint, Willow, like a Magic Eye picture, springs into startling resolution as one of the most empowering depictions of fluid sexuality that has ever graced the small screen.

The thing is, I see a lot of myself in Willow. I, too, dated nothing but dudes in my high school and early college years. Unlike Willow, I described myself as bisexual at that time, and was aware of occasional attractions to women, but I seldom acted on them. Dating women seemed complicated and intimidating, and I was just as interested in men – more so, even – so why not save myself the trouble?

Then I had some bad experiences with guys. Nothing traumatic, just a series of annoyances and minor heartaches that made me wonder whether I would ever feel completely myself, completely seen and understood, in a partnership with a man. At that point, I started to explore what I thought of as my bisexuality in earnest, and I discovered something wild: I really, really liked girls. Like really. Like a lot. Like more than I ever expected I would. And once I’d had a few great times with women, I felt the compass of my libido begin to swing. More and more, I noticed attractive girls on the street. More and more, my celebrity crushes were female instead of male. More and more, when I thought about what kind of person I might like to end up with in some far-off settled-down future, I pictured a woman. It wasn’t until I met the person to whom I am now married that I really became comfortable calling myself a lesbian, but long before then it was clear that, though I’ll never be completely monosexual, something had shifted. I wanted to be with women. Women were the San Juan Capistrano toward which the swallow of my vagina must eternally wing.

This is how I see Willow when she meets Tara. She’s aching and desperate after her breakup with Oz, and she finds this woman who understands her better than shy, nerdy Willow ever expected to be understood. Their connection, their love, comes from the very thing that makes Willow unique, the very thing that makes her strong, and suddenly Willow feels seen in an entirely new way. In Tara’s eyes, Willow is finally the person she’s always wanted to be – both powerful and cherished, both protector and protected. I don’t buy that Willow never loved anyone before Tara, but I absolutely buy that she never loved anyone the way she loved Tara. And I find it totally plausible that discovering that kind of love would make her reluctant to return to the kind she’d had before.

I know it’s popular to depict sexual orientation as something inherent and immutable – you’re born gay, or straight, or bisexual, and that’s what you’re stuck with forever – but I don’t think it’s that simple, at least not for everyone. Sometimes you meet the right person and suddenly everything is different. Sometimes you have choices, a multitude of paths you might explore, a plethora of relationships you might nurture or neglect. To say “Willow must have been bisexual all along” is to deny that love can change you, can climb inside your head and heart and rearrange all the furniture, can spin you around and around until you’re pointed in a completely different direction than you ever imagined you would go. I don’t deny that there’s something comforting in the notion that we are born with the person we will become already curled up inside us waiting to burst forth, that we have a constant internal identity that does not alter, but I think for many people it’s not always that simple, and I like the possibility of Willow being one of them.

Now, for the sake of clarity, I want to point out that I absolutely don’t think either of these readings were intentional on the part of the writers. I think the entire story arc of Willow’s relationship with Tara and her sexual orientation was written sloppily, by people who have never actually lived through what Willow has lived through. I don’t believe they thought out the implications of this storyline beyond “let’s make her gay, that’s progressive of us; let’s say she’s always been gay, that’s less complicated.” Any reading of the coming-out narrative other than “poorly handled” is entirely at the discretion of the viewer, and there is no right or wrong answer here.

But given the choice between a Willow with deeply internalize biphobia and a Willow with a fluid sexuality – a Willow who falls in love with Tara, then becomes the person she needs to be in order to live up to that love – I’m always gonna choose the latter. Does Willow contradict herself? Very well then, she contradicts herself. She is large. She contains multitudes. She’s complex and multifaceted and okay, sometimes extremely fucked up, but she follows her heart wherever it leads her. I like that in a woman. I think that’s something we could stand to see a whole lot more of, both in television and in real life.

The Journalistic Quest to Write An Accurate Story About Bisexuality

The New York Times doesn’t have a shining history when it comes to respectful and accurate reporting on bisexuality; sometimes it needs to be reminded by its readers that bisexuals exist, sometimes it writes about flawed studies that question the existence of bisexuals, or writes about “same-sex experimentation” and “lesbians until graduation”  without presenting bisexuality as feasible explanation. Since the NYT as an institution has consistently presented itself as being on the fence about the existence of bisexuals, the title of their newest article on it is perhaps not surprising: “The Scientific Quest to Prove Bisexuality Exists.”

It’s a lengthy piece, and a lot of the information it presents is accurate and helpful, especially for readers without a lot of understanding about bisexuality. Respected bisexual activist, Robyn Ochs and Lisa Diamond, who has written extensively about sexual fluidity, were involved in the article, and there’s some important knowledge dropped, like the fact that bisexuals have poorer physical and mental health outcomes, and that the modern definition of bisexuality doesn’t revolve around attraction to “men and women” or binary gender. (Robyn Ochs’ definition of bisexuality is “I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted — romantically and/or sexually — to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way and not necessarily to the same degree.”) For some readers who are operating with a limited or backwards understanding of bisexuality, these things will be big news, and important to include. Much previous writing about bisexuality has focused on straight or gay researchers’ work, and it’s important that this piece speaks to actual bisexuals doing research about bisexuality.

Robyn Ochs

However, the article isn’t consistent in terms of its approach — for instance, even though Robyn Ochs’s inclusive and non-binarist definition of bisexuality is included in the text of the article, the NYT’s excerpt for their article on the NY Times Magazine homepage still reads “How a new breed of activists is using science to show — once and for all — that someone can be truly attracted to both a man and a woman.” (Emphasis added.) And while it’s great that bisexual activists and researchers like Ochs, Diamond and more are included, very little time is spent discussing their work when compared to how much space is devoted to Michael Bailey. 

Bailey isn’t bisexual; in fact, much of his previous work (which was referred to in the previous NYT article “Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited“) was designed from a place of personally not believing in bisexuality as a real sexual orientation, especially among men. His research revolves around measuring physical sexual arousal in response to different gendered stimuli to “prove” or “disprove” bisexuality. His work has been roundly criticized by people of a number of sexual orientations, and while the article explains how American Institute of Bisexuality has worked with him to make his studies slightly less problematic and therefore seemingly measure the “proof” of bisexuality more accurately, the fact remains that the premises of his work seem at best uninteresting and at worst offensive.

Bailey… went into an explanation of his proposed study, which I was surprised to hear wouldn’t include any actual bisexuals. Instead, he planned to test the arousal patterns of 60 gay-identified men.

“We’re interested in the role that sexual inhibition can play in people’s sexuality, in ways that might be relevant to sexual identity or capacity,” he began. “There’s evidence from prior studies that if you start with a stimulus that might turn on a gay guy — say, two guys [being sexual] — and then add a woman to the scene, some gay men are going to be inhibited by that and feel less aroused, while others won’t see their arousal decrease. A subset of bisexual-identified men might be explained by that.”

Even leaving aside the fact that he’s designing a study about bisexuality without including any bisexuals, there’s plenty to take issue with here. The clear implication is that the goal of the study is to see if at least some bisexual-identified men can be “explained away;” if a reason can be found that would account for their baffling behavior and identification — you know, any explanation at all besides their being actually bisexual. It’s also telling that, almost ten years after his famous (and flawed) study, Bailey is still obsessed with trying to measure sexual arousal to define sexual orientation. While most people can figure out why this might not be the greatest yardstick to use — not every person of every sexual orientation is going to be physically aroused by every person of the gender(s) they’re attracted to! Some lesbians are more into Shane, some more into Carmen! — it’s particularly frustrating when used to talk about bisexuality.

Bisexuals have historically been imagined as sexually predatory, “greedy,” “slutty,” or as necessarily requiring simultaneous sexual activity with people of different genders — essentially, bisexuality has been defined by mainstream culture as an inherently sexual and sexualized category, sometimes little more than a genre of porn. In contrast, with identities like “straight” or “gay” we’re much more willing to recognize that there’s more to how someone lives their life than their sexual desires; we understand that being gay, for instance, also has cultural connotations, a history, social rites of passage, and emotional and psychological contours. For this reason, when sexual behavior or arousal are the only factors considered important in studying bisexuality, it comes across as worse than just a less than effective research method; it reads as though the researcher is buying into the assumption that sexual behavior is the defining inherent characteristic of a bisexual person.

We also allow people to identify as straight or gay outside of sexual experience; straight people are assumed to be straight even before they’ve become sexually active, and gay people are usually (although not always) believed by others when they come out as gay even without same-sex sexual experience. Why, then, do researchers remain skeptical of someone’s bisexuality — when that person identifies as bisexual, has dated multiple genders, has maybe faced stigma from both the straight and gay communities but continues to identify as bisexual — unless they can measure a large enough pupil dilation at the sight of a particular set of genitalia? Many of the people quoted in this piece seem willing to take straight and gay people at their word, but when it comes to bisexuals, are fixated on what they call the “the tricky matter of identity versus behavior.”

To be fair, the article’s premise is defined as exploring the “scientific quest to prove bisexuality,” and so in that light all the time that’s spent on talking about Bailey might be kind of defensible — after all, he’s one of the only researchers still working on that problem, since others have long since accepted that bisexuality exists and have moved on to other questions, like “Why are bisexuals more likely to live in poverty and be food insecure?” or “Why do bisexual women report higher rates of intimate partner violence?” But unfortunately, aside from reporting on flawed research, the article itself also seems to come in with some flawed assumptions, or at least assumptions based in a certain level of male privilege.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis, the author of the NYT piece, identifies as a gay man. (Although he’s briefly shaken in this identity when a researcher tells him that his pupil dilation is similar to that of a straight man, he ultimately decides that “no matter what my pupils suggest… It doesn’t feel true as a sexual orientation, nor does it feel right as my identity.” It’s unclear why the writer doesn’t choose to apply these same insights to others in the story.) The two people he talks to most in constructing this story are John Sylla and his partner Mike Szymanski, who are the president of the American Institute of Bisexuality and co-author of The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe respectively. Input from bisexual women was minimal; although Diamond and Ochs are quoted, it’s in small soundbites, with little if any analysis. As a result, a familiar problem of LGBT media coverage develops: male bisexuals and their experiences are the most heavily drawn from, which gives a skewed impression that a) the problems of male bisexuals are the most pressing, and b) that the problems of male bisexuals are the problems of all bisexuals. Just like gay men and lesbians face different challenges and oppression — lesbians aren’t usually thought of as accessories for straight women who love shopping, and gay men aren’t usually quizzed about how they have penetrative sex by strangers — bisexuals of different genders face very different problems.

John Sylla and Mike Szymanski, via GLAAD

If Denizet-Lewis’s article was the only text about bisexuals a reader was ever exposed to, they would likely conclude that the biggest issue facing bisexuals was the collective refusal to believe that bisexual men really exist, and problems with successfully dating people of the same gender as them — because these are the issues that the bisexual men who are the focus of this article experience in their own lives. The only paragraph devoted to the issues specific to bisexual women suggests that their biggest challenge is dating lesbians — basically, the same problem the bisexual men Denizet-Lewis talks to report with gay men.

Bisexual women also struggle to find lesbians willing to date them — or even to take them seriously. The bisexual activist and speaker Robyn Ochs told me that when she realized in college that she was bisexual, she hoped to be honest about that with the lesbians on her campus. “But it didn’t feel safe for me to do that,” she said. “They said that bisexuals couldn’t be trusted, that they would inevitably leave you for a man. Had I come out as lesbian, I could have been welcomed with open arms, taken to parties, invited to join the softball team. The lesbian red carpet, if you will. But for me to say I was a lesbian would have required that I dismiss all of my previous attractions to men as some sort of false consciousness. So I didn’t come out.”

The focus on this issue has the effect of pitting two groups of women against each other and of positioning individual lesbians as the cause of bisexual women’s struggles rather than systemic oppressors like heterosexism or monosexism. While some individual bisexual women may feel that way, plenty of solid research indicates that as a group, bisexual women have much larger and more complicated problems. Denizet-Lewis doesn’t seem to have set out to write an opus about the current challenges facing bisexual groups, which is fine, but the fact that there have been so many recent and hard-to-miss stories bringing to light oppressions unique to bisexual women — like the recent headline that almost half of bisexual women have been raped, a percentage much higher than either straight women or lesbians — makes the highlighting of dating woes as a supposed major problem seem even more egregious. The fact that the majority of the experiences focused on were those of men sets the article up for this kind of misunderstanding, and that’s even before looking at the fact that the vast majority of the people spoken to for this article appear to be white and cisgender, when many bisexuals are transgender and/or of color. Given the ways in which cultural assumptions about bisexuals — that they’re hypersexual, duplicitous, and not to be taken seriously — overlap in meaningful ways with cultural assumptions about trans people, people of color, and trans people of color, it seems especially unhelpful to focus on the experiences of cis white bisexual men.

It especially seems like a misstep to avoid looking at the growing list of ways in which bisexuals experience oppression because if the question is really one of “proof” that bisexuals exist, isn’t the already-published research about the ways in which bisexuals experience unique marginalization already pretty compelling in that regard? More than the degree to which one’s pupils widen when being shown footage of a threesome, it seems like given the fact that people who identify as bisexual all experience similarly poor levels of health, sexual assault and violence, mental illness, alcohol abuse that are more extreme than and distinct from those of other sexual orientations, there’s something pretty real going on there.

Hopefully this conversation, inaccuracies and all, can be the final word in the discussion of whether bisexuals can be proven to exist: they do. Maybe if everyone can agree about that, we can move on to the next step: letting actual bisexuals speak about their experiences and their community, and taking them seriously when they do.

In order to make sure that the comments section on this article is a healthy and welcoming place for our bisexual readers, please note that any comments that question the validity of bisexuality or sexual fluidity as a sexual orientation, question Autostraddle’s decision to publish pieces discussing bisexuality, or make essentialist claims about bisexual people (ex. bisexuals are cheaters, bisexuals turn out to be gay) will be swiftly deleted.

You Need Help: You Fell In Love With A Girl and It’s Exploding Your Whole Life

Q:

I’m 29 years old, heading to divorce final hearing in a couple of weeks from being married to the same man I met in high school in 2001. Married for 9 years, never been with a woman nor have I entertained it. Or have I? So now after an 9 year failed marriage of abuse, a 3yr old son, my family who has turned on me due to “speculations” of this new relationship (only to soon find out those speculations are true) there she is.  My mother hasn’t spoken to me now in 3 months due to the speculations. Will this affect my son if it comes to him being raised in a same sex home? Would God condemn me to hell for loving another one of his children and still following his will as a Christian? What I have been taught in church my entire life taught out of context and because it was the accepted social norm. 

Now my love, she has been open and out since high school, she has been patient and not putting a label on my sexual identity. I’m not even sure 6 months into this relationship. Am I a lesbian, bisexual, or simply a straight woman in a lesbian relationship? What is my label? Does there have to be a label? Am I pushing her back into the closet because I can’t openly be with her yet, until this is final and then until I can get enough courage to tell my family and ex? Am I creating a problem that will damage her and me in the long run? She will jokingly say “Yes, baby, I know you’re (well, were) straight but you’re straight in a lesbian relationship, but it’s ok if you don’t put a label on yourself,” Is it really?

A:

Oh sweetheart babygirl I just wanna buy you an ice cream sandwich but first let’s talk. Let’s be real, there are at least 6 questions in here, and so let’s take them one by one.

Will this affect my son?

I mean, yes. Our parents are the major figures of our early lives, and most of what they do affects us in some way. The changes your family is going through will become part of his life story. But you know what else affects your son? Your ex’s abuse, and your mom not talking to you, and a million other things will also affect your son, and they deserve at least as much accountability as you, if not more. It seems from your question that what you’re concerned about are the effects of having two coparents of the same sex somehow being negative, but the research doesn’t support that! Studies show that same-sex parents are at least as good for kids as different-sex ones!

As a child of divorce myself (hi Mom!), I feel like sometimes parents worry about negative effects of divorce without seeing that there can be positive ones, too. I’m still incredibly grateful to my mother for showing me by example that you don’t have to stay in unhealthy relationships, that you can make it on your own and even take care of others without a male partner, and that if you’re unhappy or unsafe you have the power to change it. Your son will be affected by the knowledge that his mom is brave and honest, that she was strong enough to get out of an abusive marriage even though it was scary, and that queer people can be a loving and supportive family. If your son does live with you and your girlfriend, it might be rocky at times, but you won’t be ruining his life — you’ll be providing him with a safe and loving home away from an abuser.

Will God condemn me to Hell?

I don’t know! I mean no one knows really; there are some people who would say that I’m condemned to hell because I’m wearing a wool blend sweater with jeans. It seems like what you’re maybe asking is what your relationship means for your personal relationship with God and your faith and your religious community. The good news is that if your faith is important to you, and it seems like it is, you don’t have to walk away from it or be rejected by it. You can find a religious community that affirms your identity and your relationship, and once you’re there it might be easier to talk through what this means for you and God. You could start with something like this LGBT-affirming church finder! If you can’t find a real-world community near you, you might benefit from finding queer Christian blogs or online circles, which are many and various.

I’m not sure from your question whether your girlfriend shares your faith, but it might be good to talk this through with her, too — it’s an important part of your life, and hopefully she can support you and confirm that you are still a good and worthy person!

What is my label? Does there have to be a label?

This is a great question! You are not the only one with this question, if that is affirming at all — even if it sometimes feels like everyone else has figured out exactly which Dewey Decimal classification they fall under, that’s not true, and you’re not behind the curve. Your ladyfriend is right; you don’t need a label right now, and maybe not ever. In the same way that you have probably never felt pressure to choose a single definitive label for your sandwich preferences (“I’m a Ham and Cheese and I was born this way,”) it’s ok not to choose a single definitive label for your sexual orientation or your relationships. Sometimes when our lives feel generally chaotic — say, we’re in the middle of a divorce and also in a new relationship — we fantasize that coming up with the exact right name for our situation will somehow make the situation less complicated and scary. Usually, this isn’t the case; if you think that you’re worrying about a label as a way of distilling your general worrying into a single thing, then it’s okay to take a deep breath and let it go. You would be far from the only amorphous weirdo in the world. So, to answer your question succinctly: Yes, it really is okay.

Am I a lesbian, bisexual, a straight woman in a lesbian relationship?

However! A counterpoint! Sometimes we’re not searching for a label because we’re displacing anxiety; sometimes we actually want to know. When people are all “labels are for jars!” they’re not always taking into account that there’s a reason we put labels on jars, which is that it’s USEFUL. It helps you know what’s in them and how to organize and whether you’re using flour or tapioca starch. In the same vein, sometimes labels can have a real purpose in our lives, and really do make things easier, because things are generally less scary if we can name them. It can also be really useful when coming out to others, like you’re preparing to do, both in terms of giving you more confidence in your own identity and making it easier to communicate it to others. I don’t know much about your relationship with your family members, but it may be easier for you to say “I think I’m a [thing]” than “I’m in a relationship with [person]” to your mom or son or ex-husband.

So in the event that you do want to explore what label might fit you, how does one even go about doing that? That’s a great question! There isn’t really an answer. There might be more than one label that feels right; it might be totally confusing and overwhelming to try to figure out whether you “feel” like a certain identity. It might change day to day; one day you might feel like you’ve found a great truth about yourself with your current partner and you could never date men again; other days you might feel like your girl is the only one you’ll ever feel this way about; other days you might not be able to deal with thinking about labels at all and just want some lasagna. All of those are fine.

Some concrete tools that people might use to define or express their sexual orientation might be things like the Kinsey Scale or the Klein Grid. They won’t give you a definitive “answer” — it’s not a Buzzfeed quiz — but they might be helpful in helping you figure out what you like and how you might feel comfortable identifying. Keep in mind also that even within the allegedly more rigid world of labels, there’s a lot of wiggle room and a lot of overlap and diversity in identities. For instance, even within the “bisexual” label, you have a lot of different identities associated with bisexuality to choose from, and even if “bisexual” doesn’t feel right, for instance, one of its related identities might.

Image by Shiri Eisner. Click to make bigger!

And also, please please remember that this isn’t Who Wants To Be A Queer Lady Millionaire and you don’t ever have to give a “final answer.” It’s okay for any label you choose to be subject to revision, or for you to change your mind later. This doesn’t mean that what you identified as before has to now be “wrong” or that you made a mistake. Pay attention to what you’re thinking and feeling and remember that if you do want to choose a label, it will be a valid one — you don’t need anyone else to sign off on it to be real.

Am I pushing her back into the closet and/or damaging our relationship?

Well, it seems like a good sign that your partner is saying things like “it’s okay.” It’s valid to worry that differing levels of out-ness (or sometimes, differing labels) can strain some people’s relationships, but unless you’re actively seeing that happen, you are maybe in the clear. Also, let’s be real, your reasons for not “openly being with her yet” are pretty fucking legit! You’re worried about family rejection and your son and potential custody battles, and for right now I think it’s ok to not be shouting stuff from the rooftops. The choices we make around how we present ourselves and our partners in queer relationships are tricky — I think it’s important to always keep in mind a relative sense of what it’s reasonable for people to do in their lives. Even for people without children and divorce proceedings it may not be feasible to be out all the time to everyone, due to concerns about career, family, education or physical safety. It seems like your girl understands that it’s not reasonable to expect you to be at Pride parades with her right now, and I think you can give yourself permission to agree with her! You’re really concerned overall with your responsibilities to others in your life, and it’s ok to think about your responsibilities to yourself, too, which can include privacy.

Is it really okay?

Oh my lord honey it is the MOST OKAY. Here’s the thing: I know it doesn’t necessarily feel good right now. No one can give you a promise about when this will stop feeling hard and scary and weird. But I can pretty much promise you that you’ll look back on this time as when everything started to change for the better, and be really proud of yourself. You were able to leave an unhealthy situation, be honest with yourself about what you want, and start building a better life for yourself. You are so brave and should be so proud of yourself! In five years, future-you is gonna build a time machine just so they can send past-you an Edible Arrangement. So when the chocolate-covered pineapple flowers show up on your doorstep next week, you’ll know where it came from.

Have a question? Email Rachel at rachel [at] autostraddle.com.

Please keep your questions to around, at most, 100 words. Due to the high volume of questions and feelings, not every question or feeling will be answered or published on Autostraddle. We hope you know that we love you regardless.

Bisexual Health Is The Worst Of the LGBQ Community and This Month We Need To Talk About It

In addition to being the month we celebrate Autostraddle’s fifth birthday, March is also Bisexual Health Awareness Month, brought to you by the Bisexual Resource Center.  Inspired by the White House’s roundtable focusing on bisexual issues this past September, the BRC hopes to use this month to educate the public about issues that specifically affect the bisexual community, specifically the alarmingly large percentage of bisexuals who suffer from depression, struggle with alcohol and substance abuse, are in abusive relationships or suffer from poor physical health, among other concerns.  Although some studies have estimated the bisexual population as constituting roughly 50% of the LGBTQ community, bisexual-identified individuals often describe feelings of alienation or erasure, often rendering them less likely to seek help for physical or emotional ailments — studies show that bisexual women have the lowest levels of social support of any group, which may shed some light on why bisexual men and women have the lowest emotional well-being of any sexual orientation group. Bisexual poor health can be compounded by intersection with other identities that also experience poor health and poor healthcare because of marginalization, like bisexual trans people, bisexual people of color, and especially trans bisexuals of color. The theme of this year’s Bisexual Health Awareness Month is “Bi the Way, Our Health Matters Too!” and the goal is to encourage bisexuals to be conscientious about maintaining their own wellbeing, while highlighting the amazing work that’s already being done by LGBTQ organizations around the world.

Image via the Bisexual Resource Center

Throughout the month, the BRC will roll out relevant information through their Facebook and Twitter accounts highlighting issues affecting bisexuals and ways the community can help.  This week’s theme is “Mental Health & Biphobia,” and the BRC have accumulated a wealth of resources including the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Bisexual Health Report, One Equal World’s “Biphobia: The Attitude that Plagues the LGBTQ Community,” and this great “31 Days Of Bi Wellness” calendar put together by the Los Angeles Bi Task Force.

According to a statement from the BRC’s president, Ellyn Ruthstrom,

“The Bisexual Health Awareness social media campaign will be focusing attention on important health issues that are affecting the bisexual community. With more research indicating that bi people are experiencing severe physical and mental health disparities, we think it is imperative to bring this information out of the shadows so that we can build more effective ways to address them. Our community is suffering and we can no longer afford to be the invisible majority of the LGBT community.”

Other topics the BRC plans to cover during Bisexual Health Awareness Month include “Safer Sex & Sexual Health,” “Nutrition & Physical Activity,” and “Intimate Partner Violence & Sexual Violence.”  The program officially launched Monday following a 12-hour “Tweet-a-thon,” but participants are encouraged to get involved in the conversation all month long by using the hashtag #bihealthmonth.

Hungry, Poor Queer People to Become Hungrier, Poorer after Food Stamp Cuts

A new analysis by the Williams Institute indicates that in the U.S., LGBT people experience disproportionately high levels of food insecurity and participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka SNAP or food stamps). This data complements other recent studies showing that the queer community experiences disproportionate amounts of poverty, homelessness and discrimination, and rarely do those combine without it also being difficult for people to access adequate nutrition.

The fact that LGBT people face higher levels of food insecurity is far from surprising, but this information comes at a critical moment. In early February, President Obama signed into law a new farm bill that will cut $8.7 billion from the SNAP program over the next ten years. These cuts will likely drive up food insecurity across the population, and since food insecurity especially affects queer people, impact queer people at a higher rate. This cut, combined with the cuts to unemployment insurance in January, mean that poor queer Americans risk  losing benefits that are critical for survival across the board.

via Floyd Farmers’ Market

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) classifies food insecurity by whether it satisfies several conditions, including households worrying whether their food would run out before they got money to buy more, not being able to afford to eat balanced meals, and people eating less than they feel they should. According to the analysis,

“An estimated 29% of LGBT individuals indicated that there was a time in the last year when they did not have enough money to feed themselves or their family, compared to 18% of non-LGBT individuals. This implies that more than 2.4 million LGBT adults in the US have experienced at least some aspect of food insecurity.”

Drawing from several studies, the Williams Institute traced distinctions along demographic lines within the LGBT population.

Food insecurity and SNAP participation, by survey and sexual orientation/couple type. via The Williams Insitute

Overall, LGBT adults and couples are 1.7 times as likely as non-LGBT identifying adults to experience food insecurity and receive food stamps. Along gender lines, 34% of LGBT-identified women reported not having enough money for food in the last year, compared to 24% of LGBT-identified men. Along racial lines, 37% of African-American LGBT adults, 55% of Native American LGBT adults, and 78% of Native Hawaiian LGBT adults reported experiencing food insecurity, compared to only 23% of white LGBT adults. This is consistent with other recent studies that have shown people living at the intersections of marginalized identities experience compounded barriers to survival.

The Williams Institute did not make a distinction between the prevalence of food insecurity in trans* population and the LGB population. It did, however, separate out people who self-identified as bisexual from the rest of the gay and lesbian community when looking at SNAP participation. The institute found that 25% of bisexual people reported receiving SNAP benefits, in contrast to 14% of the gay and lesbian population. It’s unclear why bi people consistently experience higher levels of food insecurity and poverty, but it may indicate the fact that a high percentage of the trans* population identifies as bi, so higher levels of poverty and discrimination faced by trans* people may be reflected in statistics about bi people. It’s also possible that increased reliance upon SNAP benefits has to do with the bisexual population’s greater incidence of mental illness and unhealth, which is correlated with and can perpetuate poverty.

Okay, Shutterstock. via Shutterstock

When we hear about legislation like the farm bill, we don’t and we won’t hear the mainstream media talking about queer people. But studies like this one show the implications of these bills and benefit cuts on specific communities, and illustrate why we need to be constantly working to make sure the magnified impact of poverty on queer people isn’t erased or silenced.

The L Word and “But Not Too Bi”: Flipping The Script Is Not Much Better

It’s been ten years since The L Word premiered, and we’ve got lots to talk about. Welcome to The L Word week!

Bisexuality, and the way it is presented in both queer and “straight” media, is always a complicated issue. The degree to which we are welcomed in the LGBTQ community, how that varies between different sections of it, how that should vary… that is a question that can be debated endlessly. What is harder to dispute is that, as far as media representation goes, bisexual “stereotypes” tend to fall into a few distinct patterns.

TV Tropes, the user-created wiki cataloguing different character, plot and other “patterns” in fiction, has a few different examples of common “bisexuality tropes.” From the violent or insane “Depraved Bisexual” to “Anything That Moves,” the character whose lack of preference with gender extends to a lack of preference in anything, it is obvious what is wrong with a lot of these “tropes.” Suggesting that a non-heterosexual orientation leads to mental instability, or that bisexual people cannot be monogamous or choosy, is playing into well-known and harmful stereotypes. Yet the problems with others are somewhat less obvious; this is the case with “But Not Too Bi.”

The site defines the “But Not Too Bi” trope as the following: “A character is nominally bisexual but is almost exclusively involved with one sex during the run of the narrative.” It goes on to list some of the common ways in which this plays out:

1. Time: Alice used to date or sleep with both sexes, but there is no indication that she does so now.
2. Actions on screen: Bob sleeps with both sexes, but the only relationships he forms are with women…
3. Tone/emotion: These two usually go together. If Alice considers her experiences with women to be wacky hijinks and her experiences with men to be love stories, they are usually treated as such by the music, the other characters and the rest of the set.

The first two, of course, are not “problematic” on their own; there are real-life people who identify as bisexual while later coming to realize that they are exclusively gay or straight, or even just bi people who end up in long-term monogamous relationships with someone of a particular gender. Likewise, there are people who are sexually interested in more than one gender, but only romantically interested in one, or vice versa: “homoromantic bisexuals” and so on. Yet, the issue of a “pattern,” once again, comes up. What does it say to the viewers when so many of the bi characters we see are like this – viewers who may not be open to the nuances of romantic vs. sexual attraction? The third example gives a clue: that one kind of attraction is more significant than another, and in turn, that bi people are kidding themselves when they pretend that they can have both. As it also writes:

“[The] key is to create some form of pecking order between the sexes, presumably in order to make the character more appealing to the audience depending on what gender and sexuality they are expected to have, while at the same time having the titillation, comedic material or diversity of ‘deviant’ sexual behavior. Of course, the prevalence of the trope brings some unfortunate implications for real life bisexuals; that in the end it’s only one gender that matters to them and that their experiences with the other one are worthless.”

A good description of how the Skins writers dealt with their bi and pan characters

The way the trope most often plays out in media is where a bisexual character’s “real” relationships or “focus” is toward the opposite sex. This is where the “deviant” part comes in, and the issue of “diversity”: it can seem like writers want to have their cake and eat it, too, gain credibility for having an LGBTQ character on their screen while not alienating certain bigoted straight viewers by showing them in an actual same-sex relationship. In this sense, the “But Not Too Bi” trope hurts both gay and bi people: it furthers stereotypes about bi people “kidding themselves” and defines non-heterosexuality in general as The Other, something that is “too much” to portray fully on-screen.

For all the credit it gets for its portrayal of lesbian couple Naomi and Emily in the third and fourth seasons, Skins engaged in this in the other two generations’ casts with its bi and pansexual characters. In the first generation, Tony and Cassie had dalliances with both boys and girls, but their “real” relationships were with opposite-sex characters. How the third generation dealt with Franky was even more egregious, as after she told everyone in the fifth season that her sexual orientation was “into people” – which sounds like she’s bisexual and/or pansexual – she was never shown to have a sexual or romantic encounter with anyone other than a boy. In the end, even though these characters had interest in multiple genders, the “double standard” causes fans of the show to debate their sexual orientations, finding reasons to explain any same-sex interest as “not counting.” Similar to the issue with queerbaiting, it draws in queer viewers while still upholding the double standard that reminds us that we’re inferior.

The L Word, of course, is a different story. While “But Not Too Bi” was firmly in effect with the main  characters who could be read that way – Alice Pieszecki, Jenny Schechter and Tina Kennard – their bias was toward the same gender, rather than the opposite one. When the “double standard” is toward a disadvantaged rather than privileged group, does the problem change? Is there even a problem?

Alice Pieszecki starts out from the very first episode, proudly identifying herself as bisexual and rebuking her friends’ biphobia. When Dana asks her, “When are you going to make up your mind between dick and pussy?” Alice responds with, “Well, for your information, Dana, I am looking for the same qualities in a man as I am in a woman.” She dates Lisa, a “lesbian-identified man,” during the first season. However, as the seasons go on, Alice later comes to identify as a lesbian, even testifying under oath as such. In the third season, she jokes by Dana’s bedside, “You’re right. Bisexuality is gross. I see it now.” The joke was in response to Tina’s question about how she’s dressed for a date with boyfriend Henry. Tina herself plays into another bisexual stereotype – the bisexual cheater, who leaves her long-term lesbian partner for a man – but it says something that Alice is now attacking other bi women with the same kind of biphobia she despised in the first season.

Whether the dramatic and troubled Jenny would count as good bisexual representation anyway is another matter, since “crazy bisexuals” are their own minefield of a media trope. Regardless, despite her starting off the show engaged to a man, and having her interest in women referred to as “bisexual” (as in the joke in the pilot about finger lengths), Jenny later in the show comes to identify as a lesbian. She is so lesbian-identified, in fact, that she comes to exclude Tina for choosing to date a man, insisting she is “enjoying all the heterosexual privileges” when she walks around with him. It makes sense that Jenny would mostly date women after coming out as bisexual (a term she does use to define herself in the first season) and leaving her fiancé Tim, since she’s likely “making up for lost time;” Jenny probably only dated men before she came to terms with her sexuality over the course of the first season. However, even with that understanding in place, the show still manages to find a way to eventually twist Jenny’s character into one that undermines bisexuality. Her interest in men is something of the past, and something she actively disavows in her current identity. It is “lesser.”

While Tina does at least get to have ongoing, significant relationships with characters of multiple genders, she, too, continues to identify as a lesbian and eventually comes to disavow her interest in men when she gets back with Bette later in the show. Bisexuality on The L Word is a transitional state and, like the Skins examples but in reverse, bi women’s interest in men is always secondary and never lasts. They always, inevitably, move toward a lesbian identity.

It’s interesting to wonder if these examples would be a problem in isolation. Certainly, it is an issue when one of the most visible and influential queer shows on TV makes a pattern of showing bisexual characters as fake or duplicitous; it raises the question of if they would have represented bi people better by leaving us out entirely, as another highly visible and influential queer show – the US version of Queer as Folk – arguably did. Yet, would these characters be a problem if there were other, contrasting examples of bisexuality on the show? As mentioned before, Jenny’s lack of male partners after, presumably, a lifetime of only dating men makes sense, if not her animosity toward other bi women later in the show. Alice could easily be a lesbian who slowly came to her true sexual identity after believing she was bisexual; this is also realistic. And Tina’s cheating on Bette – a relationship that was on the fritz anyway – isn’t necessarily a problem absent a cultural stereotype of bi people as cheaters. People of all sexual orientations cheat, after all. Certainly, none of these situations are necessarily unrealistic. So is it merely a lack of diversity in experiences, or are they problematic on their own?

I feel the same way, Tina

When one looks closer at The L Word‘s failings when it comes to bisexual representation, it isn’t just about a lack of variety. In fact, all The L Word‘s bi characters have different experiences with their attraction to people of multiple genders, but all happen to gravitate more toward women – which makes sense for a lesbian-focused show. It does have variety. The problem is that every single one is presented in a way that makes bisexuality as a whole seem like a negative thing. It undermines bisexual people and identities in general.

There are ways The L Word could have given us these storylines without making bisexuality, or bisexual women, look bad. A close friend of mine identified as bi before he later came out as gay, but still makes it clear to others that bisexuality is real, just not who he is. If Alice is truly a case of a lesbian character who was previously bi-identified – and not just a case of the writers changing their minds halfway through – they could have presented that identity crisis like my friend’s, making it clear it wasn’t her identity but still a valid identity in general. Or just not had her comment on it at all, beyond stating that it’s no longer how she identifies. That’s not great when it’s the only representation we get, but it’s fine when there are other bi women in the cast, and certainly very realistic.

Jenny could have continued to identify as bisexual or something else that suggests an interest in multiple genders, since she clearly is attracted to both men and women over the course of the show. If not, there could have been a conversation about why the “lesbian” label was more comfortable for her: feeling more in tune with the lesbian community as a whole? A reaction to biphobia? Or, at the very least, as with Alice, we did not need to see her attacking other women who are interested in people of multiple genders, actively excluding them from her queer communities.

If even one of these had happened, The L Word could be counted as having some actually good bisexual representation. The biphobic attitudes of any other characters would have come off the way Dana’s had earlier in the series: that character‘s attitude, not that of the show. But because The L Word instead made a pattern of having even its actual bi characters come to embrace biphobia, that’s not what happened. It appears that the show itself wants to undermine bi women, or at least make it clear we’re not welcome in queer communities. So in that sense, part of the problem is a flipped version of “But Not Too Bi” – which, while not as heterosexist as the usual straight-biased version, is still biphobic and monosexist. It still portrays bi people as Other and as duplicitous and confused. But it goes beyond that. The show outright states that these women aren’t queer enough unless they shed their bisexual identities.

I’ve always considered Reese Holloway, the main character in Malinda Lo’s sci-fi YA novel Adaptation, to be the ideal example of how to write bi characters well: she has a male and a female love interest and the narrative doesn’t appear to privilege one over the other. Yet, characters whose attractions are that close to the 50/50 mark aren’t necessarily “more realistic,” either. Even Kinsey 3 bi people don’t necessarily have their actual dating ratios down to that exact margin. Avoiding “But Not Too Bi” isn’t good representation in and of itself, since plenty of real-life people’s experiences can appear to uphold that trope. But at least don’t actively undermine bisexuality as a legitimate identity, and as one that belongs in the LGBTQ community (what else do you think that B stands for?)

There’s a good conversation to be had about what truly great and respectful bi representation looks like. But I think we can all agree that The L Word is not that.

In order to make sure that the comments section on this article is a healthy and welcoming place for our bisexual readers, please note that any comments that question the validity of bisexuality or sexual fluidity as a sexual orientation, question Autostraddle’s decision to publish pieces discussing bisexuality, or make essentialist claims about bisexual people (ex. bisexuals are cheaters, bisexuals turn out to be gay) will be swiftly deleted.

“Transparent” TV Pilot Features Trans Mom, Queer Women, Additional Delightful Things

*This posts contains super minimal, like really tiny, baby quarter-spoilers.*

Last week Amazon released a second wave of streaming TV pilots to compete for a spot as the next Amazon original series. Amidst the offerings was Transparent, a family comedy Amazon describes as “An LA family with serious boundary issues have their past and future unravel when a dramatic admission causes everyone’s secrets to spill out.” I think you’re going to like the secret: it’s LBT women. The show opens by introducing you to three adult siblings: Josh (Jay Duplass), a sad-eyed hippie manchild; Ali (Gaby Hoffman), a wry, failure-to-launch depressive; and Sarah (Amy Landecker), a pampered, type A housewife, clearly bored by the monotony of her marriage. The human they know as their father “Mort” — now Maura — invites them over for dinner at their childhood home in order to come out to them as transgender. Unfortunately, the children are so busy selfishly bickering over who should get the house if their parent dies of cancer that Maura’s news never makes it out.

Josh picks his teeth. Ali tries to find meaning in a Jim Croce album. Sarah and her husband primp.

If you think Maura’s children sound self-absorbed and not very likeable, you’re exactly right! The characters in Transparent aren’t aspirational archetypes — they’re quirky, naval gazing weirdos — but they’re well written! After just thirty minutes you already know intrinsically who these people are and what they’re about: in real life, they’d be the annoying acquaintances just beyond your inner circle whose antics you love to hate. Like Lena Dunham meets Wes Anderson — simultaneously off-putting and enthralling. Plus, ten minutes in, we learn that another lead character, Sarah, had a serious relationship in college with a lesbian who resurfaces in the pilot wearing very cute glasses. Against the backdrop of her family, Maura is the most down-to-earth and sympathetic character. Given the overwhelmingly negative portrayal of trans people on TV, any positive representation is a welcome addition. However, the casting choice for Maura (Jeffrey Tambor, best known for his comedic role in Arrested Development) did send up a red flag.

Jeffrey Tambor as Maura.

This pilot comes at an interesting time. Last year’s highest profile trans-inclusive film, Dallas Buyer’s Club, has been winning mainstream awards left and right while simultaneously drawing sharp criticism from queer community members. For one thing, many feel that the casting of a cis man in a trans woman role reinforces dangerous stereotypes of trans people being drag queens. For another, Jared Leto continually fails to be an advocate for trans women and is actually using the platform to be a total ass. I can’t imagine we’d be hearing such tone-deaf remarks from someone with lived experience as a trans person. That a cis man was again cast in a trans woman’s role gives me serious pause, especially when that actor is best known to me as George Bluth, walking punchline. That being said, the decision seems to have been made thoughtfully, with trans actors in supporting roles on screen and numerous trans people involved in production.

Maura’s trans support group. Aside from Tambor, all the actors in the scene were trans.

Director Rhys Ernst, a trans man, explained:

As a trans director, I ask myself, how would I cast a non-medically transitioning trans person, or someone pre-transition? I look at all options, and that may include some cisgender actors. I also see filmmaking as a holistic practice and don’t see casting as the only area to focus on regarding the politics of trans representation. Filmmaking is a team effort and when it comes to trans related subject matter, trans sensitivity needs to be integrated throughout the entire production chain.

He went on,

As a filmmaker I have gone to great lengths to cast transgender actors. It sometimes takes more work to locate trans actors but because of my commitment to trans representation, I feel it’s a step well worth taking…there are certain instances in which casting a cisgender actor in a trans role can be appropriate. I don’t think it’s nearly as often as Hollywood’s track record might suggest, and 9 out of 10 trans characters in Hollywood productions are typically a disappointment, both in their writing and in their casting.

Whatever the verdict on the casting, writer Jill Soloway‘s work shines here. Soloway has written and produced for Six Feet Under, United States of Tara and Grey’s Anatomy in the past, as well as a few episodes of Dirty Sexy Money, the first primetime show to feature a trans character played by a trans actor (Candis Cayne). Soloway described Transparent as her “dream project” post-Six Feet Under, “this idea about a family who inherited a secret about sexuality as opposed to a funeral home.” So far, it seems that Maura is also a lady-loving lady, and aforementioned daughter Sarah might be lined up for her own coming out narrative. (Or something. It’s complicated. But she’s definitely queer.)

Tammy is described as a lesbian. Sarah isn’t labeled but her relationships suggest she may be bisexual.

The pilot for Transparent is available streaming free on Amazon. To provide feedback and help this show be picked for further production, complete the survey at AmazonOriginals.com.

Two “New” Poems By Sappho Uncovered and Translated, Prove She’s Still Got It

After having been lost to the world for a couple thousand years, two poems written by Sappho have unexpectedly turned up in London following an anonymous collector’s submission to Oxford. The reconstructed ancient poems now join a scant handful of surviving works by the famed bisexual author from the island of Lesbos, the most famous woman poet in antiquity.

Bust inscribed “Sappho of Eressos,” Roman copy of a Greek original of the 5th century B.C.

As Cara has written previously, Sappho was a woman born in the 7th century B.C. During her day job she ran an academy to teach social graces to unmarried young women; on the side, she also found popular success as a poet. Unfortunately, as times and social mores changed, Sappho became the butt of salacious jokes about lesbians and prostitutes. Considered deviant, Sappho’s works were burned on the order of Archbishop Gregory Nazienzen of Constantinople in 380 A.D — and then again in 1073 on the order of Pope Gregory VII. Out of a believed nine volumes of work, we are left today with only four(ish) poems and a variety of fragments.

Yet from time to time, newly discovered pieces of Sappho’s work turn up in unexpected places. This time, an anonymous private collector in London showed a piece of papyrus fragment from a mummy wrapping to Dr. Dirk Obbink, a papyrologist at Oxford University. Recognizing the dialect (Lesbian Aeolic Greek, with distinctive long vowels), meter (Sapphic strophe, matching all of the poems in Sappho’s first book), and reference to family members (her brothers), Obbink describes the poems as “indubitably” belonging to Sappho.

Similar papyrus manuscript containing fragments of three of Sapphos poems. This was found in mummy casing in the archives of the University of Cologne, about a decade ago.

But enough background! Here’s the first fragment, “The Kypris Poem,” translated text via Thomas H. Buck and Katy Waldman at Slate:

How could anyone not gorge always
Cyprian goddess, whomever you should love
and fervidly wish to call back to you?
You have …
Having summoned me idly you cut
longing …

Or, as Obbink translates it:

How could one indeed not repeatedly feel
anguish
Queen Kypris, over whomever one really
wanted to make one’s own?

The Cyprian goddess (or “Queen Kypris”) is Aphrodite, goddess of love. Obviously there’s a lot of text missing, but the fragment appears to be a part of a love poem. (Possibly unrequited? Your guess is as good as anyone else’s, until more evidence is revealed.)

The second fragment is much more complete, and appears to be about two of Sappho’s three brothers, Charaxus, Larichos and Eriguios. Here is “The Brothers Poem,” translated text via Tim Whitmarsh, Oxford Professor of Ancient Literatures, for the Guardian:

[ the first stanza or two is missing from the text ]

But you always chatter that Charaxus is coming,
His ship laden with cargo. That much, I reckon, only Zeus
Knows, and all the gods; but you, you should not
Think these thoughts,

Just send me along, and command me
To offer many prayers to Queen Hera
That Charaxus should arrive here, with
His ship intact,

And find us safe. For the rest,
Let us turn it all over to higher powers;
For periods of calm quickly follow after
Great squalls.

They whose fortune the king of Olympus wishes
Now to turn from trouble
to [ … ] are blessed
and lucky beyond compare.

As for us, if Larichus should [ … ] his head
And at some point become a man,
Then from full many a despair
Would we be swiftly freed.

I’d probably be really anxious about my brother traveling by sea, too, if none of us had cell phones. According to Obbink, Sappho’s verse expressed the feeling so well that its proverbial wisdom was adapted in Horace’s “Soracte Ode.”

One question that has been raised about this discovery is that of the artifacts’ provenance, or origin. Without further information from the anonymous collector, many have speculated whether it was acquired via the black market. No clarification on the origins was given in the preliminary draft of Obbink’s paper, though it is clearly still under revision. The final paper with Obbink’s translation and interpretation is expected to be published in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik (ZPE) 189 later this year.

Black Canary is a Totally Bisexual Superhero on “Arrow,” Kissed A Hot Lady On TV Last Night

In the latest episode of the CW’s show Arrow, “Heir to the Demon,” one of the main characters, Sara Lance, also known as the superhero Black Canary, came out as queer. She’s the first superhero from one of the two major companies (DC and Marvel) to be visibly and explicitly queer on either television or film. If you’ve never seen the show Arrow, it’s about the DC Comics super hero Green Arrow and his friends, one of whom is Sara Lance, played by Caity Lotz. While it’s popular for fans to interpret the character Black Canary as queer in the comics, it’s never been stated in canon that she has ever had a relationship with or interest in women, so this is pretty big news for the character and for the superhero genre in general.

Nyssa and Sara, AKA Black Canary

The way her queerness was revealed is a little convoluted, but let me try to explain it. Sara Lance was on a boat that sank and was “rescued” by a group known as the League of Assassins. They trained her to be an assassin, but she eventually escaped, something that is not really allowed and is currently back in her hometown of Starling City. This episode featured a character named Nyssa al Ghul (played by Katrina Law), the titular Heir to the Demon, daughter of Ras al Ghul, the leader of the League of Assassins.  The episode starts with Nyssa entering the country and fighting off some security guards to let us know that she’s trouble. Later, Sara is in a bar with her dad telling him that the League won’t rest until it’s captured her and brought her back. By putting two and two together, we’re able to figure out that that’s what Nyssa is here to do. The two then bump into each other in a dark alley after a very dramatic entrance by Nyssa and proceed to immediately make out. Green Arrow is creepily watching them until Nyssa calls him out of the shadows.

The two then go for a moonlight stroll by the side of the river where Nyssa implores Sarah to come back home with her. Obviously, a large part of it is because of League of Assassins business, but as Sara points out, Nyssa went there because of her feelings for her. Sara even tells Nyssa that she loved her and the two look very devastated that they can’t be together because Nyssa’s father is a mass murdering assassin king. They clearly have a complicated relationship. Based on their dialogue, it seems like when Sara escaped, the two were still in a relationship and Nyssa feels very betrayed that Sara left her without saying goodbye. It’s also definitely not a good idea to date the daughter of the man who’s holding you captive and forcing you to become a trained killer, but, hey, love is strange.

Nyssa then goes to extreme measures to get Sara back, kidnapping her mom from the hospital. Sara tries to stop her, but she’s unsuccessful and she realizes that she’ll have to tell her dad what’s going on. When she tells her dad that Nyssa has kidnapped her mom, she also tells him that Nyssa did it not to get her to come back to the League of Assassins, but to get Sara to come back to her. At first Sara’s dad seems a little surprised, but they don’t really have time to talk about it right then. Sara and her dad later have a heart to heart where she asks if he’s upset that she was in a relationship with a woman, and he says “honestly I’m just happy that you had someone who cared for you.” It’s a nice sentiment, but also, the woman she was in a relationship with is pretty much second in command of an army of assassins, so, she’s not exactly dating material.

Sara comes to rescue her mother, but instead of going back to the League with Nyssa, she takes some poison and is about to die in Nyssa’s arms right before Green Arrow comes in and saves the day. Nyssa is again devastated that she can’t be with Sara, but she knows when to let go and says, “In the name of Ras al Ghul, I release you” before disappearing. At the end of the episode Sara starts making out with Green Arrow. On one hand, boo, another queer woman on TV seemingly ending up with a man! On the other hand, yay, bisexual representation! Still, I’m holding out hope for the sake of representation that Sara can someday soon meet a nice queer super heroine to settle down with so that we can continue to discuss her queerness without fans and writers ignoring it (obviously, ending up with a male partner wouldn’t make her less queer).

DC does have some precedent showing queer characters on its TV shows. The DC Animated Universe gave us characters like Renee Montoya, Maggie Sawyer and Richie Foley, who are all canonically queer but either never or barely got to show it, and of course featured Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy who definitely seemed to be more than just friends. However, Black Canary is arguably a higher profile character in the comics than any of them and a more major character on her show. Black Canary is often a member of the Justice League, she’s one of the core members of the Birds of Prey, and later this year she’ll be starring in a comic alongside fellow fishnet wearing super heroine Zatanna. On the Marvel side of things, Mystique from the X-Men comics has been in several movies and cartoons and her sometimes lover Destiny was also a character in the TV show X-Men: Evolution. Also, the show Agents of Shield recently introduced the character Victoria Hand (played by out actress Saffron Burroughs), who in the comics is queer, but that part of her hasn’t come up on the show yet.

Black Canary having a totally heterosexual moment with Barbara Gordon in the comics

As I said before, Black Canary has never been stated as being queer in the comics, but former Birds of Prey writer Gail Simone once wrote on her tumblr that in an issue where Black Canary was interestingly enough, fighting Talia al Ghul, another daughter of Ras al Ghul, there was supposed to be a scene where Black Canary says Talia’s wiles won’t work on her because she’s “70% hetero.” Problematic wording aside, this would have confirmed that a pretty high profile female superhero was queer, but unfortunately a printing error was made and a non-corrected version of the comic with different dialogue was sent out instead. Some things from the show have already made the jump to the comics, such as John Diggle, a character invented for TV who is now a character in the comics, so hopefully this development will make a similar leap and we can celebrate having another queer lady in comics to read about.

What Do You Do With A Problem Like Romi Klinger: On Bisexuality, Biphobia and Media Representation

Recently, GO Magazine published an interview with Romi Klinger of The Real L Word regarding the current state of her relationships, her career, and the controversy surrounding her sexuality. In the interview, Romi reveals that she and and her husband Dusty Ray (of dubious Tumblr fame) have separated and are moving forward with divorce proceedings. The interviewer then pushed Romi to declare her sexuality as an absolute percentage, and Klinger actually went as far as to partially blame her marriage’s collapse on her bisexuality. “I would say that half of the divorce is because it wasn’t working out and we weren’t happy. And the other half is because I want to go back to women,” she explains.

Look, I haven’t eaten an animal product in nearly a decade, but when I see PETA campaigns that make all vegetarians look petty and insane, it embarrasses me on a personal level.  As I read Romi’s explanation of her current situation and her incredulity at the public’s reaction to her prior relationship drama, I couldn’t help feeling personally betrayed in some (possibly unrealistic) way.  I’m an actively queer woman who does not identify as a lesbian, and I date people of all genders without worrying too much about giving myself a label.  It would be easy to gloss over all the difficulties I had in reaching this level of acceptance with my sexuality, but the truth is that from time to time, non-monosexuality can be a pretty lonely place to be.  Ever since I found my predilections  shifting towards this current state of affairs, I’ve been very keen to find others who understand my point of view, and it can be enormously upsetting to see someone who has a major international platform making us all look crazy.

Obviously nobody is denying anybody the right to love who they want – that’s sort of the whole point of this community, right? It’s what we’re here for! However, Romi’s comments about the role her sexual fluidity has played in both her on-screen vilification and her ever-changing relationship status left a bad taste in my mouth.  According to the Advocate, who named “bisexuals” (all of them, apparently) as one of their 10 choices for 2013’s Person of the Year, there’s never been a better time to be open about one’s “in-between sexuality” in the media… So why does it still feel so distinctly uncomfortable?  Romi’s often branded herself as a representative of the bisexual community, but her statements about what it means to be a sexually fluid person do nothing to paint her as any sort of role model – in fact, she drives home a number of unfortunate stereotypes.

In the beginning of Season 3 of The Real L Word (a real television show that actually exists), Romi is shown “coming out” to her friends as dating a man. She is frightened of the reception she may receive from her lesbian friends, and this is a valid fear that many non-monosexual women know all too well. The risk of being judged or excommunicated for “going straight” or somehow betraying one’s community is a very real issue among bisexual women involved with male-identified partners, as though these relationships somehow invalidate one’s queer identity. However, Romi laughs to her friends that she started dating a guy because she “got tired of [her] strap-on not working,” and it’s here that she began to lose me. I watched the rest of the season with my jaw on the floor, aghast at one of the worst and most disappointing representations of bisexuality I have ever seen on television – which is really quite a distinction.

In terms of media visibility, our options have been pretty limited for quite some time. Remember all the way back in season 1 of The L Word, when Alice was portrayed as the only bisexual in The Planet, not to mention the whole wide world? By the end of season three, her awkward journey along the Kinsey scale was unceremoniously concluded with her admission that “bisexuality is gross. I see it now.” As Maria San Filippo explains in her book The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television, Ilene Chaiken’s decision to abandon this aspect of Alice’s storyline squandered the opportunity to tell stories that a significant chunk of her audience could relate to, leaving behind a world where the most outspokenly bisexual woman left on television was Megan Mullally’s character Karen Walker on Will & Grace. Bisexual visibility in media has long been a touchy subject, with many characters hesitant to openly refer to themselves as bi (see: Chasing Amy, Piper from Orange is the New Black). Our other options tend to be poorly-developed, problematic representations like A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila. These murky examples don’t do very much to demystify or enhance public perception of those of us who fall somewhere in-between. It would have been lovely to see a sympathetic portrayal of a complex bisexual woman on television, but instead Ilene Chaiken did it again – we got Romi, who threw temper tantrums about not receiving the treatment she felt entitled to as a “celesbian” and lied to her girlfriend about her obvious attraction to her ex-boyfriend before unceremoniously ditching her to marry him.

Any criticism of her behavior, even when valid, was written off by Romi as biphobia, and while I don’t doubt that much of it was rooted in biphobia, the problem of biphobia in the lesbian community is too pervasive and important to be dubiously employed on national television. Like other forms of oppression, biphobia and monosexism are systemic and institutional, propped up and perpetuated by larger systems that have a vested interest in maintaining rigid narratives about sexual orientation. Biphobia and monosexism aren’t just feeling dismissed by lesbian friends; they’re why bisexual women have disproportionately high rates of mental illness, substance abuse, sexual violence, intimate partner violence, and poverty when compared to both straight and lesbian women, just for starters. What Romi experiences is interpersonal; the feeling of someone being mean to her. While it’s undoubtedly hurtful for her, and would be hurtful for anyone who had to experience it, it’s only the tip of the iceberg when talking about biphobia. A refusal to look beyond Romi’s experiences — whether that refusal is Romi’s or the media’s  — helps us avoid looking at the institutional ways in which bisexual women are disadvantaged, and encourages us instead to continue bickering about whether bisexual women are “slutty” or “greedy.” Focusing the discussion in this way means that all that gets discussed is Romi as an individual. Even if Romi is a bisexual or sexually fluid individual, there’s an invitation to imagine Romi’s personal life as representative of what bisexuality is, and even worse, the negative experiences Romi complains about as representative of what biphobia is. And that’s just objectively incorrect.

via the Williams Institute

Of course, all we can go by is what we’ve been shown of this person’s public life; we cannot know what happened when the cameras were off. The GO Magazine interviewer does push Romi to quantify her sexuality in a very specific way, and she expresses some frustration with the way viewers of the show received her shifting sexuality. After three persistent questions on the topic, Romi seems to submit to the pressure to identify as “90/10,” more attracted to women than to men. She qualifies with “I don’t care what you want to call me or where I am on the scale, if I’m gay or bi or a fucking idiot.”

She is disheartened by the reactions she’s received from the lesbian community, and rightfully offended by the notion that by opening herself up to dating women, she’s suddenly “back.”  Sexual fluidity is real and it can vary with time, especially with women – I’ve chronicled this within myself over the course of the last several years, and it’s certainly ebbed and flowed over time. For some reason, people do often tend to ask me to define my sexuality with percentages, as though it were a pie chart I could draw up in PowerPoint for them to use as a handy guide to my relationships. What feels right for a person today may not be the same thing that feels right a year or even a month from now, but this doesn’t decrease one’s ability to love or commit to another human being.  It’s frustrating that Romi’s reported experiences with a  fluid identity are being parlayed into a common misconception about non-monosexual people: that they can’t “make up their minds” about what gender they’d like to be with, and that any committed relationship represents a clear choice between hetero- or homosexuality. Undoubtedly, she should be able to pursue the kind of person who makes her happy, but the myth that bisexuals are unable to make a longterm commitment to a single person of any gender is both unfair and unnecessary.

The language that implies Romi has “returned” to an attraction to women (or that she “gave it up” when she married Dusty) is indicative of a larger problem with how bisexual women are perceived in relationships. Regardless of however one personally identifies, we do tend to be defined to an extent by our current relationships.  A pair of female-presenting individuals holding hands will almost always be perceived as a homosexual couple, and both members of a heterosexual-appearing couple are generally assumed to be 100% straight. It’s upsetting to have to explain time and time again that an individual’s sexuality is not always defined by the gender of one’s present partner, and the nagging perception that long-term monogamous relationships can somehow erase one’s sexual preference. To use a pair of famous examples, compare the media’s reactions to Cynthia Nixon’s marriage to Christine Marinoni with the reaction to Evan Rachel Wood’s marriage to Jamie Bell. Whereas Cynthia Nixon found herself forced to explain her sexuality in great depth to a public convinced that she had suddenly become a lesbian, Evan Rachel Wood was criticized for marrying a man, as though her previously much-discussed bisexuality was no longer accurate or valid. “Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night,” Woody Allen once quipped, but he’s not necessarily correct. The misconception that sexually fluid people are able to move effortlessly between the queer and heterosexual worlds seems awfully rosy, but it’s rarely accurate. Bisexuals often report feeling alienated by both sides of the coin. In straight society, bisexual women are often seen as promiscuous, sexually indiscriminate, up for anything; sexual relationships with women are portrayed as being almost entirely performed with the male gaze in mind (see: Katy Perry’s debut single, most mainstream girl-on-girl porn). On the other hand, there’s also a widespread misconception that bisexuals are all insatiable, inevitable cheaters who use so-called “bisexual passing privilege” to allow themselves access to heterosexual privilege without having to commit to life as fully-fledged lesbians.

This idea of the bisexual as part-time queers or somehow not fully committed also lends itself to the perception that non-monosexuals are less qualified to be active in LGBTQ organizations, that they are traitors, merely allies, or have less of a right to feel strongly about causes directly affecting their own lives. It’s unfair, and it’s terribly discouraging. Rubyfruit Jungle author Rita Mae Brown spoke for a lot of people who reject bisexual women when she said, “You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t be tied to male privileges with the right hand while clutching to your sister with your left.” In Sex and Sensibility: Stories of a Lesbian Generation, Arlene Stein explains that early bisexual feminists were seen as “undermin(ing) the struggle against compulsory heterosexuality” and as “an inherently sexual category, while lesbians, feminists suggested, transcended sexuality.” This dismissive attitude creates a hostile environment for bisexuals seeking to form a queer political identity, or even to establish an inclusive community outside of the heterosexual world.

This is not to suggest that Romi or anyone is doing bisexuality incorrectly; obviously as long as nobody’s getting hurt, there’s certainly no right or wrong way to pursue sexuality. Even if Romi does in real life fulfill every stereotype of bisexual women, that doesn’t make her any less of a “real” bisexual, or a person whose sexuality isn’t valid and deserving of respect. That said, when we see sexually fluid individuals in film or television, they’re often unfortunately edited to fit the mold of the clichéd “bad bisexual,” a promiscuous, greedy person who is inconsistent and selfish with partners. Newsflash, guys – there are bisexual people who behave this way, but there are also people of every sexual orientation who behave this way, and if we had more nuanced, fleshed out characters representing non-monosexuals, these characteristics could be seen simply as individual personality traits and not representative of an entire community.  To pretend otherwise is wearisome at best, and biphobic at worst.

This may be the time to wonder why Romi is a primary person we are paying attention to when we talk about bisexuality in the first place.  Why are these kinds of stories that are so often amplified to reach us, instead of more nuanced, empathetic accounts of bisexual life?  As a queer woman who does not exclusively date women, it would be enormously validating to see something even vaguely resembling my story told in film or television. Instead, bisexuality has mostly been shown as a cry for attention, a phase, or an excuse to dodge commitments and treat partners badly – which is bad for business no matter how you identify.   The character of Romi who exists in front of reality TV cameras is indecisive, flighty and impulsive.  When she enters into a new relationship, she makes broad statements about how her new partner’s gender is the gender that’s been truly right for her along, and then often backtracks when said relationship doesn’t work out. Here we have a person whose public persona seemingly defines all the misconceptions that the non-monosexual community are tired of, and yet it’s a story we’re told all too often.

Bisexual women have been doing and saying wonderful things for a long time, and certainly there are far better examples to be found out there. Recently, Maria Bello’s beautiful coming out piece in the New York Times’ Modern Love column discussed her past and current loves in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner, being clear about relationships with people of different genders without invalidating any of them or making essentialist claims about gender in the process.  She certainly isn’t the first sane, secure person on Earth who’s ever been capable of loving more than one gender, and yet her article’s wonderful reception was a pleasant surprise – finally, someone was getting it right (sort of — the number of headlines that claimed she was “coming out as gay” were disheartening, but not surprising).  These are the kinds of stories we need to be telling. I hope that Romi Klinger finds someone who makes her happy (Instagram suggests that this person is currently Kelsey again, so mazel tov, you two!), but we also need to start presenting more three-dimensional and simply MORE examples of sexually fluid humans — so that one complex, flawed, vulnerable woman doesn’t have be our most visible public understanding of that community. I am hopeful that perhaps in 2014, we can begin to make positive changes necessary to start seeing  a more balanced representation of the bisexual community in mainstream media.

In order to make sure that the comments section on this article is a healthy and welcoming place for our bisexual readers, please note that any comments that question the validity of bisexuality or sexual fluidity as a sexual orientation, question Autostraddle’s decision to publish pieces discussing bisexuality, or make essentialist claims about bisexual people (ex. bisexuals are cheaters, bisexuals turn out to be gay) will be swiftly deleted. 

Evan Rachel Wood Bisexual and Nikki Reed were Two Girls in Love During ‘Thirteen’

January marks the tenth anniversary of Thirteen, the Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood film based loosely on Reed’s life. IMDb has the film’s synopsis as “A thirteen-year-old girl’s relationship with her mother is put to the test as she discovers drugs, sex, and petty crime in the company of her cool but troubled best friend.” My little gay fourteen-year old brain had the film’s synopsis as “two girls make out.” At the time, Thirteen was being buzzed about because of the self-harm, drug use, and sexualization of underage girls present in the film. Since I was just a gay babe that didn’t realize I was such, I was CERTAIN that if I ever tried to rent this movie at Blockbuster, everyone would think I was gay. Because straight people are super paranoid about that kind of thing, right? So I didn’t.

This is all to say that Nikki Reed and Evan Rachel Wood Bisexual live streamed a Q&A session in honor of the movie’s 10th anniversary. Even if you’ve never seen it, this is worth checking out solely because of Wood’s backwards hat and suspenders situation. When someone asked the question that’s apparently been tumbling around their head since Evan Rachel Wood Bisexual came out as bisexual, if she had a crush on Reed during the movie, the feed cut out. And just when they started wrapping up the session and you thought all hope was lost, someone off camera reminds them that the viewers never actually heard the full answer to that question. Blessed be that person. There are three parts to the session but the part we’ll be discussing happens around the 11 minute mark of this one.

Video streaming by Ustream

Now I’m no stranger to filling in someone years after the fact that I had a crush on them back in the day, even if I couldn’t identify it as such at the time. I know how awkward that moment can be and so I feel for Wood because she had to do it TWICE. Wood, the champ that she is, gets back into the topic with a joke. “When it cut out we were making out the whole time. I’m so sorry that you missed it.”

Apparently they’d never discussed whether Wood had a crush on Reed during filming before. They’ve only rekindled their friendship over the past year (thanks to Twitter) so I’m not too surprised that two married women haven’t discussed a childhood crush. Once Wood gets going, Reed temporarily curls into a little ball which made me have a crush on her for a hot second. She seems bashful and flattered even though they’re speaking about events that transpired over ten years ago. It’s pretty cute. Wood fesses up to her crush:

I did have a crush on Nikki. I don’t think I realized at the time that it was like a full blown crush but I definitely remember having feelings and thinking she was so beautiful. I thought you were so gorgeous and fun and there was something about you. The relationships you have with girls when you’re a teenager–there’s a part of you that wants to be them, there’s a part of you that kind of hates them, and there’s a part of you that’s kind of in love with them.

Reed chimes in and notes that she doesn’t meant to devalue Evan Rachel Wood Bisexual’s very bisexual feelings but that she thinks feelings of curiosity and confusion are very common with teenage girls.

Your first girl friend kind of represents your first time exploring love and what it means to love someone like that outside of your family and it’s not necessarily sexual although your body’s going through all these crazy things. The most making out I’d done up to that point in my life was with Evan in this movie and that was my first time experiencing what that was like and so you have all these crazy feelings and things that are happening–it is all mixed into one.

Wood goes on to state that she thinks a lot of girls get crushes on their best friends. They then talk about how they practiced for the kissing scene and are only now realizing that in some ways, their real lives began mirroring the movie. Both of them agree that this revelation changes how they interpret that experience and makes them reflect back on their own motivations. The video ends with Reed jokingly, but poignantly asserting that while making Thirteen they were “just two girls in love.” If a time machine is ever invented, do not go back in time and tell little Brittani this information. Her brain WILL explode.

“Saving Mr. Banks” Erases P.L. Travers’ Queer Identity, Misses Amazing Opportunity for Representation

I love Emma Thompson. She’s beautiful, an ardent feminist, a longtime ally of the LGBT community, and even, some would say, something of a gay icon. Practically perfect in every way. She’s been popping up in the news a lot lately for starring in movies, winning awards, making amazing speeches and perpetuating an enthralling bromance with Meryl Streep. So I was a bit taken aback to hear what she had to say on the subject of queer erasure in her latest film, Saving Mr. Banks.

Here’s the movie trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16MdSZH6I4o

Widely released at the end of December, Saving Mr. Banks is based on the true story of author P.L. Travers‘ experiences while working with the Disney team on the adaptation of her novel, Mary Poppins.

P.L. Travers as a young working actress, 1924. Here she was dressed for the role of Titania in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

In real life — and in the film — Pamela Travers was an unconventional woman. But unlike the onscreen depiction of an uptight English homebody who seemingly turned her nose up at America, the real Travers was actually an adventurous, widely traveled woman who had previously lived in New York and in New Mexico. She did not despise children, and in fact she had an adopted son and would invite child fans into her house for lemonade. Most importantly, she did not live as a solitary, sexless spinster; over her lifetime she had romantic relationships with both men and women. Sometimes, she even wrote saucy erotica inviting readers to imagine taking off her undergarments.

Travers was a member of The Rope, a group of mostly lesbian writers who studied under a guru. She wrote in her diary about her off and on tempestuous relationship with Jessie Orage, known for wearing trousers and smoking in public. And Travers actually wrote Mary Poppins while she was living together with Madge Burnand, in a decade long relationship that Travers’ hyper-discreet biographer begrudgingly described as “intense.”

Aside from the quick flash of an obscure book in Travers’ library, there’s no hint of any of this in the film.

Movie Travers had some silver feather charms on her bracelet links and a vaguely southwestern ring featuring a black sunburst — a subtle but nice touch. Real life Travers reportedly was fond of wearing Native American turquoise and silver bracelets “stacked up each forearm like gauntlets.”

Instead, Saving Mr. Banks ruminates over Travers’ troubled childhood in Australia and her battle to maintain her (rigid) sense of dignity and artistic vision during a two week trip to Walt Disney Studios. The movie is charming and Emma Thompson, per usual, makes for an utterly endearing misanthrope. However, I have to question the decision to gloss over Travers’ queer identity.

In an interview published in The Advocate on Thursday, Thompson reasoned,

You can’t fit everything about a person’s life into two hours. Like when we made Carrington, which did address homosexuality, we didn’t include stuff about Dora Carrington’s relationships with women because it would’ve looked like she’d literally gone bed-hopping her entire life. Besides, Saving Mr. Banks is about a woman’s creative, artistic life. It’s a relief, quite frankly, because when is a movie about a woman not about her love life?

In the film, Travers fights to keep Bert from being portrayed as a romantic interest. In the books, Bert is a groupie and Mary Poppins is characterized as strident and plain looking, which some read as butch.

Thompson makes an interesting point. And to some extent, I agree — it is refreshing to see a woman on screen who isn’t an object of desire… if they’re straight. The thing is, we live in a heteronormative world where everyone is assumed to be straight until proven otherwise. Choosing not to represent queer women (and especially their love lives) isn’t new, and it isn’t a relief.

As GLAAD explained in its 2013 Studio Responsibility Index report,

When minority characters are marginalized or made invisible within these films, it not only reminds those being underrepresented that their social position is less than, but also makes it more difficult for the majority to see them as part of that film’s reality as well as a valid part of our own. … Movies reflect the world we live in, while also showing us where we came from and the endless possibilities for where we could end up. It’s important that Hollywood acknowledges that LGBT people are an important part of our society’s past, present, and future through the stories that they tell.

In Thompson’s remarks, she alluded to the fact that the film is not about Travers-the-person, but about Travers-the-artist, and the very specific period of time in which she was working with Walt Disney Studios on the film adaptation. Which is fine. But surely they could have found a way to tell this story without erasing Travers’ queerness.

In 2012, Walt Disney Pictures released 14 films. Only one had any detectable queer representation (out MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts playing himself while reporting on an alien invasion in The Avengers). Via GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index.

Just off the top of my head, I can think of multiple ways Travers’ queer identity could have been represented without derailing the existing plot. They wouldn’t even need to hire another actor. For example:

• When the lawyer is trying to convince Travers to take action to bring in some money, have him mention that she should think of her partner’s needs.
• When she fires the maid, have her reply that she’s going to appeal to Travers’ partner.
• When she sets up the trinkets that she brought from home, include a photo of Madge Burnand or Jessie Orage.
• During one of the scenes where Travers stares longingly at the hotel bar, have a woman catch her eye and send her a drink (which I imagine Travers would refuse, but still — that would read totally queer).
• When Disney visits Travers’ home in the end, show evidence that she lives with another woman.

I could probably think of five more without breaking a sweat, and I bet you could too. (Ooh, could we gender flip Screenwriter Don to Screenwriter Dawn? So much tension there!) I mean, maybe they aren’t all great ideas, but I’m sure those genius screenwriters at Disney could have come up with something if queer representation — or at least, avoidance of queer erasure — had been a priority. But it wasn’t.

In my mind, to fail at LGBT inclusion in fiction is to have a failure of imagination, a lazy lack of understanding concerning the world outside of one’s self. To intentionally choose to tell a story about a real LGBT person and then exclude their queer identity is a failure on an entirely different level. It’s perverse. It doesn’t matter whether the intent was malicious or not; the damage is still done.

While I don’t think that Emma Thompson meant any ill will to LGBT people by her remarks or participation in the film, the end result is yet another piece of work upholding heteronormativity and contributing to queer erasure. It may be too late to fix this one (as Disney told Travers at the Mary Poppins premiere: “the ship has sailed”), but it’s never too late to get the message out for next time.