The Bisexual Bob: A Bold Haircut for a Beautiful Future

Our recent Queer Stereotypes Survey, which garnered nearly 13k responses, invited readers to share their feelings about their haircuts, and while scrolling through thousands of responses on this intimate topic, I noticed a recurring phrase: “bisexual bob.” I immediately took to twitter to investigate, which brought me a great deal of helpful information as well as a lot of generally hot photos of bisexual people. An educational time was had by all.

AHEM there ~25 mentions of a "bisexual bob" / "bi bob" in the comments of the haircuts section of our queer stereotype survey. i need to know more about this haircut immediately, plz reply to this thread with pics for my important research!!

— riese (@autowin) November 11, 2018

So, where did this all begin?

The Bisexual Bob: Origins

The concept began, as so many things have, on one girl’s tumblr three years ago. Leah, tumblr patient zero, who identifies as a lesbian, told me that she “noticed how three of my favourite characters at the time whom I either viewed as bisexual or who were canonically bi all had a similar haircut and thought it was a funny coincidence.” The characters in question: Marceline from Adventure Time, Korra from Avatar: The Legend of Korra and Max Caulfield from Life is Strange. As of this writing, that specific tumblr post now has 211,118 notes.

The graphic was re-posted on a bisexual reddit thread, where many users chimed in to say they had the same haircut, and one who asked for clarification on the similarities between these three fictional ‘dos was told “same length hair with bangs on one side.” Eventually, in the grand tradition of the queer community I know and deeply love, the thread devolved into a heated debate on whether or not Marceline is actually bisexual.

“After I posted it,” Leah remembers, “people started adding more bi characters with that haircut to the post and a lot of bi women would message me to tell me they had that haircut too.”

Word spread quickly, and the Urban Dictionary’s most popular definition of “bisexual bob” was entered in 2017.

The Bisexual Bob Evolves

The LGBTQ community is both uniquely adept at developing and crowning specific cultural signifiers and also at subsequently deconstructing those signifiers, in the spirit of inclusion, until they are entirely unspecific and encompass a vast range of expression. (See also: when we opened the “Lesbian Ken” gallery to Lesbian Barbies, thus sacrificing the integrity of the bit in order to make room for more people to have fun and look hot on our website, e.g., Reneice & Kaylah.) (Absolutely no regrets there.) This expansion of definition is often good thing, I should say, as the “same length hair with bangs on one side” look was not accessible for humans of all hair types, and proved especially challenging for people with curly hair.

When I asked on twitter for examples of the bisexual bob, I got a wide variety of cuts in return, many outside of the bob looks initially posted on tumblr. I saw blunt bangs. I saw layered cuts, with lengths that often fell above the chin or significantly below it. I’d argue that including “lobs” (long bobs) in the definition of “bisexual bobs” is perhaps a step too far, edging dangerously close to a territory in which any haircut that is not super-short or traditionally long could be named a bisexual bob. And then how will you ever find each other if you get lost in the mall!

However, I think undercut-inclusive bobs — aka “the Kate Leth” — definitely fit the definition. Especially if they are dyed a color present on the bisexual flag, a situation for which I once again must draw your attention to Kate Leth. Raven-Symone is another strong example of this look, but she refers to herself as gay, not bisexual.

Carmen: Riese, for your bisexual bob post, Krysten Sinema is a superb example of the bisexual bob, no?
Riese: i feel like it’s two kinds, yeah?
like some people seem to be pushing like a bob that has slightly longish-bangs pushed off to one side
and then there’s also the krysten sinema version
aka the two haircuts i’ve had my entire life
Rachel: my imagination of it is like, a blunt cut bob in between chin and shoulder
but I have no textual references for that
Carmen: Petra Solano

Riese: it apparently started with this:

Sarah: Lol oh I’ve seen that
Carmen: Eleanor Shellstrop

Sarah: Omg Carmen
Carmen: Oooh fascinating! I can’t wait to learn this very important history lesson
Rachel: interesting
thank you for documenting the history of my/our people riese
Riese: for the record did you say you’d heard of it before rachel?
Rachel: I definitely have yes
I want to say around 2016?
Riese: interesting
honestly part of why i always had this haircut was because it felt in between things, which is how i have often felt
in between genders, formerly in between sexualities, etc.
it’s like you can still feel like a tomboy but without upsetting your grandparents
Much like long hair in a ponytail, it reveals nothing of its wearer
Rachel: I think that’s why the blunt cut nature of it felt important to me
because it was different than like, a gently layered face-framing thing, which feels straight
something about the blunt cut being kind of like, severe
Riese: yeah it’s lower-maintenance i think. also easier to cut yourself

[…two hours later….]

Riese: wow it’s been a minute since i’ve been on tumblr and i definitely did not miss it

What About Bob?

This seems like a good moment to, perhaps, look into the definition of “bob,” itself. According to Wikipedia:

A bob cut or bob is a short haircut for women (and occasionally men) in which the hair is typically cut straight around the head at about jaw-level, often with a fringe (or “bangs”) at the front. The bob is cut at the level of ears, below the ears, or above shoulders.

The history of the bob isn’t to be ignored, either, due to its apparent longtime association with sexual independence. Women in the West had been expected to wear their hair long throughout most of human history, but in the 1920s; the bob hairstyle entered the scene. Although a few noted British socialites and French actresses wore their hair short, it didn’t take off in the U.S. until dancer Irene Castle introduced the “Castle bob” in the mid-1910s. But the bob became an Official Thing in the 1920s, seen on flappers (including noted bisexual actress Louise Brooks), who expressed their sexual independence with notoriously short dresses and lots of attitude. The trend faded in the ’30s, returned in the ’50s and became popular amongst Black women in the 1960s, as seen in groups like Diana Ross & The Supremes. Famous bob-wearers of more recent years include Anna Wintour, Jodie Foster, Victoria Beckham, Charlize Theron, Keira Knightley, Rihanna, Dianna Agron and Rooney Mara.

However, @melreeve on twitter pointed out that the originator of the bisexual bob was my childhood hero, Joan of Arc. She really got out ahead of this trend by several centuries.

The Bisexual Bob Today

Now, Joan of Arc’s tradition lives on, serving as a valuable point of identification for bisexual women. A bisexual woman from rural Idaho wrote of her haircut on our survey: “I came out as bisexual to my husband right before I did it because it felt disingenuous to have (what I considered) a ‘bisexual’ haircut without first admitting to him who I was.”

“The Bisexual Bob is real,” wrote a bisexual woman from the Bay Area. “I had that haircut before I came out and reveled in the phrase.”

Some found that their forward-thinking sexual orientation inspired straight women to get bobs of their own. “I’m proudly rocking the bisexual bob but I’m pretty mad that a couple of straight coworkers have copied my haircut,” wrote a bisexual from Madison, Wisconsin.

I’ve been lightly chided for essentially my entire life about my continued dedication to the same f*cking bob I’ve had since 4th grade, with only a few minor deviations. I sometimes chop it off or start to grow it out, only to return to the safety of the bob. Honestly, it’s a great haircut! It’s flattering to every face shape. Anything shorter can be very high-maintenance, anything longer can just feel like a lot in general. Also — and this is something I very consciously thought to myself when I still identified as bisexual — it really doesn’t give a lot away sexual-orientation-wise. Because the patriarchy is nonsense, long hair is consistently read as heterosexual, and very short hair is read as gay. This remains a popular conception despite the fact that lots of straight women have short hair, and billions of queer women have long hair. A bob is somewhere in between. Like we all are, sometimes.

“I like that it’s still feminine, but is less traditional than having longer hair,” wrote one bi woman on the survey.

The Bisexual Bob: Where Do We Go From Here?

Despite the fictional inspiration for this haircut and the noted bobs on favorite imaginary humans like Annalise Keating, Petra Solano and Season One Tina Kennard, I found fictional bisexual characters with bisexual bobs on television to be sadly lacking. (Although to be fair, 95% of LGBTQ women on television have extremely long hair, and stereotypically “lesbian” haircuts are very difficult to find.)

Still, I’d like to call upon television stylists to do better: stop this rampant bisexual erasure and give bobs to your bisexual characters! Valencia, take off a few inches! Thank you, and goodnight.

Hulu’s “The Bisexual” Is Here to Make Every Queer a Little Uncomfortable

During the first two episodes of The Bisexual, I kept thinking, “There’s not a single queer person on the internet who isn’t going to be offended by this in some way” — and by the end of the season, I understood that was the point. Miseducation of Cameron Post director Desiree Akhavan‘s new series, a partnership between the UK’s Channel 4 and Hulu, tells a story you think you’ve heard before, but you haven’t. Akhavan, who’s bisexual in real life, plays Leila, a self-identified lesbian in her mid-30s who breaks up with Sadie (Maxine Peak), her partner of ten years, because Sadie wants to get married and have children and it makes Leila panic. Not long after their break, Leila decides to explore her attraction to men for the first time in her life. What follows is the fallout, for her, for Sadie, for their lesbian friends, for their co-workers, for their parents, for everyone whose lives touch hers in some way.

Akhavan has done something truly brilliant here. She’s created a show for an audience that understands the joke “Bette is a Shane trying to be a Dana” and then centers it on a character who’s meant to make everyone who gets that joke a little uncomfortable. Leila, for example, doesn’t decide to have sex with a man one night and wake up the next morning as a fully formed bisexual role model, confident in her identity as a person who’s attracted to more than one gender, ready to lead the charge to banish erasure and champion inclusion. She doesn’t even want to use the word “bisexual.” And anyway, the fact of her bisexuality isn’t what she’s interested in thinking about or dealing with. She wants to be sexually satisfied, and she misses the comfort and companionship of a relationship that just didn’t turn her on anymore, and she doesn’t know how to exist as her full self in the disparate physical spaces she now inhabits, and she’s grappling with the sudden realization that she’s well into the second act of her life, and yeah she still wants to have sex with women.

It’s everyone else who doesn’t know how to relate to Leila’s bisexuality, especially her lesbian friends. They shun it, or don’t accept it as real, or don’t understand what it really means in terms of the way she moves through the world, or what it means about who she was before she expressed it, or if it changes their relationship with her. Everyone’s clear on what it means to be a lesbian (but don’t you worry, there’s plenty of clowning to be done on it), and everyone has a completely different idea about what it means to be bisexual. Not gay. Well, not fully gay. She gets it from all sides.

We live in a time when The Discourse is at a fever pitch, where every pop culture portrayal of a queer identity is shaken down to the lowest common denominator of “good” or “bad,”; where every character on every show who is either queer or interacting with a queer must say or do The Right Thing; where any show that makes a misstep in portraying a minority is written off as this or that -phobic (and should be boycotted by queer viewers and writers); where the default angle queer critics are supposed to take is Here’s How This Thing Aggrieves Me. Most pitches I get from college students these days are about Why X Is Problematic, not only because that’s the thinking many young queer writers are surrounded by, but also because that’s what sells right now.

And, look, I have dedicated my life to holding storytellers accountable for their portrayals of queer people. Good pop culture representation is crucial for minorities — for reasons as micro as self-identification and as macro as accessing the civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution. It’s a big deal how we see ourselves and how other people see us on-screen. But there’s a kind of furious dogma that’s choking the nuance out of the conversation we’re having about our stories. In fact, it’s discouraging us from having a conversation entirely, and trading in that give-and-take of ideas for a checklist that authorizes our outrage.

What impresses me most about The Bisexual isn’t that it skewers The Discourse, but that it ignores it completely in favor of having an actual dialogue. Sadie, Leila’s ex-girlfriend, is ten years older her, and she understands Leila’s bisexuality to be an extra level of betrayal. Through gritted teeth and tears she explains growing up as a “dyke in the ’80s,” and the shame and humiliation she put herself through to try to be attracted to men, and the pain she caused herself and her mother when she just couldn’t do it. She thought Leila had that fundamental experience in common with her, and she was wrong, and it’s devastating.

A conversation with an undergrad who’s sleeping with Leila’s straight dude roommate is the opposite thing. She doesn’t understand what the big deal is, identifying as bisexual. She says she’s queer. Leila says everyone under 25 is queer. Then, “I think it’s different. I think when you have to fight for it, being gay can become the biggest part of you. And being gay or straight, it comes with an entirely different lifestyle, like different clothes and different friends and you can’t do both. I don’t mean to be condescending to you. I just don’t know what it’s like to grow up with the internet, but I sense that it’s changing your relationship to gender and sexuality in a really good way, but in a way that I can’t relate to.”

Everything you need to know about the show is really in the title: The Bisexual. The Bisexual. It’s mocking itself and the idea that any one person, any one TV character, can be The anything; as if people grouped by sexuality or gender identity or racial identity are a monolith, and the fullness of their humanity can be expressed and explored through the actions of a single individual. Akhavan seems completely uninterested in answering the FAQ on what it means to be A Bisexual. In fact, she doesn’t really seem intent on answering anything at all. Instead, she asks myriad questions that pierce the armor of our assuredness, questions about how one human being, and the people she loves, might experience this specific revelation at this specific moment in time. Akhavan’s characters absolutely do not always do or say The Right Thing, but her writing is overflowing with compassion.

Language is not precise, and it’s constantly evolving; the meaning of a label to one person might mean a completely different thing to someone else; we are, most of us, doing the best we can in our whisper of time on this earth, in these cursed bodies, plagued by the pain and insecurities of our past experiences, driven by our known and unexplored desires, buoyed by the hope of promises we’ve yet to hear spoken.

“What do you want?” the first man Leila sleeps with asks during their morning-after sex.

Her voice is gentle; not for him, but for herself. She almost laughs. She says, “I don’t know.”

Korean-American Bestselling Author R.O. Kwon Is Bisexual, Has Flawless Signature Eyeshadow

feature image headshot by Smeeta Mahanti

Bestselling author of The Incendiaries, R.O. Kwon, came out as bisexual on Twitter today, setting off a chain-reaction of heart-emoji-filled retweets and replies from two highly underrepresented groups: queer Asian-Americans and bisexual women.

http://twitter.com/rokwon/status/1060917059242979328

Like me, Kwon was born in South Korea and has lived primarily in the United States. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, Vice, BuzzFeed, Noon, Time, Playboy, and other publications. Probably my very favorite piece of writing that Kwon has published on the internet is the essay she wrote for The Cut on why she wears her “signature eyeshadow” look, a centimeter-thick strip of black shadow lining her lower lid.

Kwon is best known for her debut novel, which came out in July 2018 and shot up the national bestseller lists: The Incendiaries, a piece of literary fiction about two college students who are drawn into a religious cult that leads them to commit an act of terrorism. The New York Times Book Review called it “a dark, absorbing story of how first love can be as intoxicating and dangerous as religious fundamentalism.” The inspiration comes from Kwon’s personal history of being a self-described “Jesus freak” who lost her connection to the fanatic Christianity of her childhood and had to grapple with the pain of losing faith.

As Kwon reflects on her own life in her writing, it’s powerful to reflect on what it means for a prominent Korean-American figure to come out publicly. Korea is still a deeply homophobic country, where laws and social mores prohibit many queer Koreans from coming out. The current President of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, is a progressive Democrat who opposes gay marriage and openly admits he is “opposed to homosexuality.” Needless to say, there are very few queer Korean role models to look up to. Even in America, you can count the number of famous, out Koreans on one hand.

Kwon coming out publicly as bisexual is both brave and deeply resonant. It appears Kwon is individually replying to each person who replies to her coming out tweet. The responses from bisexual women in relationships that make their sexual orientation invisible are moving. The responses from fellow Asian and Korean bisexual people feel like a revolutionary unveiling. As Kwon wrote in her tweet, “…hi, we’re here.”

Congratulations, R.O. Kwon! Thank you for your brilliant writing, your earnest voice, and for choosing to be visible as a bisexual Asian-American icon. I’ll leave you with some words from that essay about her eyeshadow look (which you should read, it’s amazing) and which really sum up this badass bisexual babe.

Kwon is currently on her book tour, maybe coming to a city near you!

I Went Looking for Bisexual History, and Found Online Connection and Community

The first time I googled “bisexual history,” one of the top hits was an article called “Are you worried your partner might have a bisexual history?” I was just starting to actively look for a sense of heritage, to prove to myself that people like me had existed for a long time. I didn’t fully understand why I needed to, but I knew it felt important. Instead I found a reminder of the biphobia and uncertainty that already defined much of my experience as a bisexual person.

I had started to look for bisexual history because I’d lost a feeling of community in my own life. I felt like there wasn’t a place for me in my local LGBTQ places until I understood my own identity solidly enough that no one could question it. My bisexuality is as real and permanent as my right hand, but far less tangible, and I was desperate to explore questions like what it means to be a bisexual person in a different gender-relationship, and what it would mean to be bisexual and non-binary. I didn’t have any frame of reference for these feelings; I didn’t know if I was the first person who’d ever felt like this and I didn’t think there was any way to know if anyone else had felt like this too.

It began for me with Brenda Howard, the bisexual activist responsible for organizing the original March to commemorate the anniversary of Stonewall and for holding events around Pride Day, which became what we now know as Pride. I saw her name for the first time in a Wikipedia article about the history of Pride — I was surprised to see her called “the mother of Pride” and as a bisexual person in a different-gender relationship. I’d thought bisexual people had only ever been a passive part of the LGBTQ movement, following behind the lesbian and gay activists. Discovering otherwise gave me the confidence to believe that there must have been other bisexual people present in LGBTQ community history — perhaps leading the way, or even just existing. I started to ask what it meant that a bisexual person was part of such a key moment in LGBTQ history: where else had bisexual people been in activist movements? Was my nagging feeling that maybe there was no such thing as bisexual history because we didn’t exist — or because I hadn’t seen anyone acknowledge that we did?

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So, I set up the Instagram account @bihistory to celebrate and explore the people throughout history who contributed to the bisexual community, who experienced attraction to and had relationships with people of the same gender as well as people of different genders. Social media already offers LGBTQ people a dynamic and accessible way to interact with our history; there’s a reason there are already many instagram accounts that share archival images and records of LGBTQ people. Of course, many of the archive images of protests and Pride Marches are of white, American people; these are largely the histories that are most documented. The most marginalised are usually the people whose records are destroyed by colonial forces or oppressive governments, or are otherwise ignored in favour of (what are considered) more traditional record formats. This is a key issue considering that statistically, people of color are more likely than white people to identify as bisexual.

I’m wary of applying the terms we use today to the people from the past, because the modern Western terms we use to discuss sexuality and gender often don’t account for how other cultures and societies define and defined these terms for themselves. But acknowledging this complexity shouldn’t stop us highlighting and sharing the stories of people who experienced the world in a way that modern LGBTQ people understand. Bisexual history in particular is complicated to write about because many lesbian, gay, and gender non-conforming people had relationships that passed as “straight” for a variety of reasons. Some people attracted exclusively to the same gender entered different-sex relationships to protect themselves, others did it because of compulsory heterosexuality, and others because they were genuinely attracted to multiple genders. History doesn’t necessarily give us the necessary context to distinguish between these experiences.

Nonetheless, there are affirming bisexual icons and bisexual experiences to be found throughout history, in almost every era. An eternal favorite is Julie D’Aubigny, who lived in the 1600s; she was French, an excellent swordsman and a successful opera singer. She had relationships with men and women, burned down a nunnery and became a fugitive after beating several noblemen in a duel — because she kissed a woman at a society ball. The drama of her life is underpinned by her partners, men and women, and her refusal to be any less than who she was. Her rebelliousness and daring make her seem like a fictional character from an adventure story, but she was real, and her life is one part of the great tapestry that makes up our community’s history. I was also surprised to discover in my research that lesbian icon Sappho wrote love poetry for men as well as women. Obviously I’m no Greek scholar so my perception of that is informed by the translations I’ve read, and that doesn’t diminish her importance as part of lesbian history, but it resonated with me in a way I didn’t expect to see a woman with experiences similar to my own, writing words about how she felt, that I can read for myself over 2,000 years later.

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A lot of the questions I ask myself as a bisexual living in Scotland in 2018 aren’t that different from those of bisexual women in different countries and different times — although pre-1950s they probably didn’t spend as much time worrying about how to cuff their jeans, and admittedly I’ve never set fire to a nunnery like Julie D’Aubigny (no comment on my swordfighting history). I did however, did find a real sense of connection reading about Anise, a Japanese magazine for lesbian and bisexual women published between 1996 and 1997. Although I could only read articles about the content rather than the magazine itself as it’s not available in translation online anywhere, the questions these lesbian and bisexual women were asking themselves felt familiar to me and my experiences within the community. The letters page included letters from married women who were involved with other women looking for advice, lesbian and bisexual women who had feelings for straight friends, questions about the butch/femme (tachi/neko) identities, and other key issues.

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Similar (and different) topics arise when reading through online transcripts of articles from Anything That Moves, the magazine for and by bisexual people, published by the San Francisco Bay Area Bisexual Network from 1990-2002 and the original source of The 1990 Bisexual Manifesto. The title “Anything That Moves: Beyond the Myths of Bisexuality” was intended as a conscious reaction against this stereotype of bisexual people. Most of the issues were theme-based and tried to represent the diverse range of voices and experiences within the bisexual community, and contributors didn’t have to declare their identity or label to be involved. The idea that even almost 30 years ago, there were spaces that allowed queer people to discuss their identity and experiences without having to definitively label their identities encouraged me to have higher expectations of the LGBT spaces and media in my own life. An article from a 90s edition of the magazine (available to read online) on the intersection of the bisexual community and the transgender community includes a particular quote that felt deeply relevant to my own understanding of my identity:

“I see the radical aspects of bisexuality as including a rejection of the traditional extremes of masculinity and femininity: the domineering, aggressive, macho man focused on power and material success and emotionally dependent on women, and the passive, appearance-obsessed woman. I don’t want relationships with such stereotyped identities, or in such a framework, no matter what their professed sexuality is. I would hope that the bi community could provide a space for alternatives for mainstream gender models and a diversity of attraction to be supported.” (Kevin Lano, Anything That Moves)

I’m starting to recognise faces in the digitised film photographs I see on my screen like they’re friends of friends appearing on my newsfeed. Veneita Porter was an executive director of BiNet USA; Porter had previously worked with the Prostitute’s Union of Massachusetts and COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) to advocate for women, transgender people, and injection drug users with AIDS. Porter went on to become the director of the New York State Office of AIDS Discrimination where she helped design the first educational projects and trainings for state workers, hearing judges and legal staff. The portrait of Porter I used in my post on @bihistory was taken by photographer Robert Giard. I found when I came to cite the source that Yale University tags her only as a lesbian activist.

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I’ve read many definitions of bisexuality, from Robyn Ochs’ to Rita Mae Brown’s, but in all my reading it’s bisexual author June Jordan’s words that feel closest to my own definition:

“Bisexuality means that I am free and as likely to want and to love a woman as I am likely to want and to love a man, and what about that isn’t what freedom implies? If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable. To my mind that is the keenly positive politicising significance of bisexual affirmation…to insist upon the equal validity of all the components of social/sexual complexity.”

Reading my predecessors explain that bisexuality could mean freedom changed how I had been perceiving myself — I started to see the joy in my identity. It became something I celebrated, and I was seeing more and more examples of this joy in my research. This wasn’t a new or modern idea either — I saw that along with the hardships and marginalisation, bisexual people have been living full lives and falling in love as long as anyone else.

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Bisexual history is more than just looking to the past; there are bisexual people making history right now. Bi activists like Tiffany Kagure Mugo, the writer, speaker, activist who co-founded of HOLA Africa, an online Pan African queer womanist community; Julia Serano, writer, biologist, and activist for bisexual and transgender people; and Dr Meg John Barker, author and activist-academic are just a few examples of bisexual people working right now to uplift other bisexual people and the wider LGBTQ community.

Despite the range of differences between these people past and present, they all fall under bisexual+ umbrella; they form part of the history and heritage of our community. Some just lived their lives, which itself was a radical act; others were and are activists advocating for the bisexual community. Each of their histories has helped me realize I have a right to a feeling of heritage and community, and celebrate the lives and achievements of brave, world-changing, ordinary people. When we celebrate bisexual history we’re honoring people and events that helped shape our lives now, yet are often ignored or erased.

In creating the @bihistory account, I was scared that other members of the LGBTQ community would think I was trying to take something away from them and their heritage, and I did sometimes feel like an interloper and a thief. But I was adrift and desperately needed something to hold onto. Now, it’s been nine months since my first post, and in that time the response has been so affirming; I’ve not had a single comment or tweet saying that what I’m doing is anything less than great. Instead, I’ve had messages from people who feel connected to the LGBTQ community for the first time because of the images and research I share, and questions from people wanting to know more — as if I must be some kind of expert, instead of just the most enthusiastic amateur. I’ve learned that not only does a thriving, wonderful, global bisexual community exist, but that this is nothing new. It’s not divisive or reductive to any other part of the LGBTQ community to celebrate bisexual history, it only enriches our understanding of our community’s interwoven histories. This process has helped me to feel confident in my own identity, it’s given me a richer understanding of myself and a sense of pride to be my own small part of this legacy. I can’t wait to see what new thing I find out tomorrow.

“you may forget but let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us” – Sappho (translation by Anne Carson)

This Woman Asking for Advice About Her Gay Affair Should Leave Her Husband, Be Gay, Do Crimes

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This week, the Sun published a fascinating letter in their Dear Deidre advice column, in which a (presumably straight?) (presumably real???) married woman describes falling in love with another young mother at her child’s school and wonders if their tawdry extramarital affair is built to last.

Her husband, she explains, spends lots of his time away at “cycling weekends” and seems appreciative that his wife doesn’t mind his frequent absences. The letter is creatively peppered with stock photos of thin, femme-presenting predominantly white women gallivanting provocatively in black lacy lingerie and describes a “hilarious” evening that began with too much wine and ended with forbidden romance. Now the pair “get loved up, romantic and close when we can,” a sentence literally nobody has ever said. While the girlfriend seems content to keep things quiet and not disrupt either of their apparently very boring marriages, the writer dreams of leaving her husband and starting fresh.

Deidre tells this woman that her affair sounds rather one-sided, in that the writer wishes to take their relationship to the next level and the girlfriend does not. She suggests that the writer end the affair before it gets out of hand and attempt to reignite the passion between herself and her husband.

This advice, of course, is incorrect. On behalf of bisexuals everywhere, I’d like to take this opportunity to speak candidly to the writer and offer my own advice.

While this letter reads like a PG-13 letter to Penthouse in a lot of ways, I’m for now going to work under the assumption this situation is real. Listen, sister – like it or not, your girlfriend is not interested in leaving her husband for you. Deidre’s right on that count. What you are describing as love is likely heavily influenced by the thrill of keeping a secret, and I suspect if things were out in the open you might not be quite so passionate about this relationship. You haven’t indicated whether or not you’ve had experiences with women previously; if you haven’t, in my experience most people fall hard and fast for their first girlfriend and usually end up crying. You are going to become the living embodiment of a t.A.T.u. song and girl, it’s not going to be pretty. (If there’s one thing t.A.T.u. taught us, it’s that things don’t have to be “real” to be “emotionally devastating.”)

I have no idea what your husband is getting up to on his “cycling weekends” but I’m putting it in quotes because if we were speaking about it in person, I’d be using air quotes every time I mentioned it. You’ve already mentioned wanting to leave him, but perhaps you should consider whether that stems from dissatisfaction within the relationship and/or this affair specifically. Personally, I think you sound like you’d be happier starting over regardless of your relationship status with this woman, and the world could potentially be your queer oyster. Leave your cycling husband. Kiss girls. Come to A-Camp. Get weird.

Deidre also recommends checking out her e-leaflet called “Bisexual Worries.” She does not link to it, and a cursory googling leads to several other articles in which she recommends the same e-leaflet. We as a community have enough to worry about, but this fruitless search stressed me the fuck out.

In short, my advice is to leave your husband, be gay and do crimes. Your husband wants to go cycling, your girlfriend wants to have clandestine relations with other ladies from the PTA and you deserve to live your best life.

You Need Help: Three Classic Bisexual Questions, Now with Bisexual Answers

Welcome to You Need Help! Where you’ve got a problem and yo, we solve it. Or we at least try.

Today we look at a panoply of questions, which, while the situations of their querents are specific and concrete, encompass three of the most common questions we hear in relation to bisexuality: Am I actually bisexual or not? Am I pansexual or something else within the bi+ spectrum? How the fuck do I let people know I’m not straight?

Q:

So I’m bisexual but I’m TERRIBLE at bringing it into conversation because I don’t know how to bring it up casually. I’m not currently dating anyone, I rarely if ever find celebrities attractive, and bringing up my exes rarely applies to the conversation at hand. (Those are the three suggestions I tend to get and none have worked for me.) I tend to present as straight or I like to think occasionally gay in the right circumstances. (ie. I have longer hair and I guess I’m a casual/comfy femme look?) I don’t like feeling like I’m in the closet (especially if there’s a cute girl around). I also don’t like feeling like I’m lying to newer friends who I wish they knew, but they probably assume I’m straight? Any help on how to bring up being bi into general conversation without making a big deal of it? I just want to be me.

Or if there was a general clothing option or something we could all agree on? Pins don’t tend to fit my style. But it would be great if there were a way to signal that I was bisexual in my appearance without having to say anything at all.

A:

This is a great question! The good and bad news is that it’s not just you and not even just bisexuals; this is a widely shared gay experience! So the cute girl you’re trying to be out in front of in this scenario is likely in a similar situation. More than that, we all really want to be around more gay people; gay people you meet are probably actively on the lookout for people around them to ping as not-straight, and ready to meet you halfway on this. I hear you about not necessarily being able to work in exes or celebrity crushes (although those are good suggestions in general)! In lieu of that, here are some things gay and bisexual women talk about and do a lot, and which to another gay person will feel like an oasis in the desert.

– Have you seen [show]? I started watching it recently because of [gay character/ship/representation]!
– Did you see [celebrity] came out? It’s great, I’m so excited for her.
– Oh I love [lgbt author/musician/artist]! I really relate to a lot of their work.

These are very pop-culture focused, I realize, but more than that the theme I want you to notice is that in these examples you’re… reacting to and engaging with the world around you as a queer person, which is instantly recognizable to other queer people. Nothing makes it more obvious to me that someone is straight when they say something like “I just think it was so brave of Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara to do Carol. So courageous.” Similarly, nothing makes me more certain that someone else is gay than when I can see them make the exact same look of exasperation and disgust that I’m making when someone says something homophobic in a meeting. It’s true that in like, the line at Starbucks on a random Tuesday morning, people probably won’t be able to tell you’re bisexual; that’s part of the inherent disconnect of the human condition unfortch! We just aren’t able to really know or see each other in those scenarios, not in any kind of real way. But, with people that you’re building an actual relationship of some kind with, engaging authentically and fully and sharing your experiences and worldview without self-censoring will inevitably reveal that you’re bisexual, because being bisexual is part of who you are!

Also! Have you seen these shirts we have, they’re great and feel relevant.

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Q:

I’ve identified as bi for nearly four years and at first it really felt like the right label for me. But lately I find myself wondering if I’m actually a lesbian. I have journal entries about it from 2015 and 2016, text conversations with a friend from last year, and I’m going through one now. I see pictures of women and in my head are fireworks that spell out “I’m a lesbian.” Or I talk to a woman and I feel all tingly. I have no interest in dating or sleeping with men again. When I was dating a guy I cheated on him by kissing girls and preferred kissing those girls to having sex with him. My issue is that I’ve never dated or slept with a woman so I don’t have equal experiences to compare how i feel. I think I might be a lesbian but without that experience how can I know? Can I really call myself a lesbian if I’ve never done more than kissed a woman?

A:

Friend, I have news for you: I think you are a lesbian. Normally I would use less directive language, but you said “in my head are fireworks that spell out ‘I’m a lesbian'” and I think you’ve answered your own question. To be clear, it would be perfectly possible and valid for someone to be in this situation and be bisexual — wanting to date or sleep with men is not a prerequisite for being bisexual; being a bisexual woman or nonbinary person isn’t defined by an attraction to men! Bisexuality is being attracted to your own and other genders, and there are more genders than “woman” and “man,” etc. Many bisexuals also get all tingly when they talk to women! However, you seem pretty sure that you are only attracted to women; in fact, I think your actual question here is less “am I only attracted to women” and more “am I allowed to think that, given my experience.” Yes! Yes, you are. As to your question of “can I really call myself a lesbian if I’ve never done more than kissed a woman” — what, I wonder, would you think was enough experience? What would be enough that you would feel confident in it? Would you hold another person to the same standard, or refuse to think of them as a lesbian until they had done X thing? Why or why not? Sexual orientation is about attraction, not experience — being a lesbian isn’t about what you’ve done with women, but what you want to do, and it sounds like you know what you want! Which is women. Congratulations, I’m so happy for you, friend! Being a lesbian is wonderful and so are you.

To recap: things which would indicate that you are not a lesbian, and are in fact bisexual, are feeling noticeable attraction and wanting to date/sleep with to people of more than one gender, which given that you are are a woman would include women, but does not have to include men. (I don’t mean to oversimplify or make this sound easy when it’s not; it’s so hard for women especially to know what we want or desire, which is why it’s so important to allow ourselves to compassionately notice and honor it!) Things which would indicate that you are a lesbian are noticing that you only feel these feelings of attraction and butterflies with women, and also, again, having the specific thought “I am a lesbian” is very telling! You aren’t harming bi women or doing anything inappropriate by coming out as a lesbian, regardless of how you’ve previously identified; you’re living authentically and that’s great!

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Q:

I’ve identified as pansexual for a long time. I have never found a gender that I’m unattracted to. For a long time it was as simple as that, but recently I’ve been hearing the same definition of “pansexual” over and over both online and from people I’ve met in person.

Everyone keeps insisting that pansexuals take no notice of gender and just enjoy the personalities or even the “auras” of other people. This bothers me. I’m very much aware of other people’s genders and there are many reasons for me to have a strong preference for trans feminine people (I am non-binary). I am also aware that straight, cis men are more likely to be shitty to me and/or not understand my experiences. I have countless examples of this. I can still be sexually and romantically attracted to someone of any gender, but to say I take no notice and just float around from aura to aura sounds both unbearably passive and impossibly detached from society. I’ve been pansexual for years, but does having agency mean I’ll have to change my identity?

A:

The short answer is no! There is no sexual orientation, as far as I’m aware, that is defined by being attracted to EVERYONE of a specific gender and EQUALLY. We don’t generally expect straight women to be attracted to all men and to be attracted to the men they’re attracted to in the same way; etc etc. Neither yourself nor anyone else should have that expectation of you either!

A longer answer involves a few things. I haven’t heard this particular take on pansexuality phrased in this exact way before, that it involves a sort of gender blindness, but the idea that pansexuality is open-minded about gender whereas other sexual orientations are limited or close-minded about gender is not necessarily a new one, and you are correct in thinking that that is not the case. There’s a lot to unpack there, but it’s important to remember first that sexual orientation is about who you’re attracted to, not why or how you’re attracted to them. That may sound like a silly hair-splitting distinction, but it’s an important one that gets at the difference between communities of solidarity organized around marginalized identity as opposed to political affiliations organized around ideology — there are plenty of straight women who also hate men or feel reservations about them, but that does not make them lesbians! Anyone can have a personal philosophy of gender as it relates to yourself or who you want to date, but that isn’t the same thing as a sexual orientation, pansexual or otherwise — it’s something that you can embody in addition to or in relationship with a sexual orientation.

Also, as I think your question suggests you’re already aware of, it isn’t necessarily a particularly progressive or affirming stance to say “I take no notice of gender” — many people’s gender is very important to them and hard-won, something they want to have seen, acknowledged and affirmed; and as you’ve noted, flattening the ways in which gender affects relationship and power dynamics seems counterproductive. It’s one thing to say “gender isn’t the most important factor to me when it comes to partners;” it’s another to say “I don’t see gender.” Again, the latter is an ideology, not a sexual orientation, and no sexual orientation requires you to feel that way!

It sounds like identifying as pansexual has been good for you and you don’t want to change it; I don’t think you have to! It’s worth noting for other readers that it’s also definitely possible to identify as bisexual while feeling the same range of attraction that you do; bisexual is being attracted to your own and other genders, which can certainly be inclusive of being attracted to your own and also all other genders; it’s possible to identify both as pansexual and bisexual, and many people do! Both identifiers come with the unfortunate reality that some people will probably make incorrect assumptions at one point or another, whether erring on the side of assuming that you’re rigidly binarist or that your sexual orientation is a sort of gender-nihilist political project. Unfortunately, there isn’t an identifier you can go with that will keep flawed assumptions from happening, full stop. But you can honor your experiences and the genders and experiences of your partners, and the right people who are willing to listen and take you seriously will understand that!

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Do you have thoughts for these fine people? Share them in the comments!

10 Favorite Books by Bisexual Women to Read For Bisexual Awareness Week

In celebration of Bisexual Awareness Week, I bring you a list of some of my favorite works by bisexual women — spanning genre from fiction to essays to memoir, these books are vibrant, boundary-breaking, and as intriguing as they are affirming. I strongly recommend curling up with one of these in your favorite café to celebrate Bisexual Visiblility Day today and all this week — settle in for some miso soup (what Ruby, the heroine of Eating Chinese Food Naked, drinks as comfort food) with maybe some biryani and chai for the second course (from Corona, by Bushra Rehman) and read some of these literary works. Let yourself entertain duality and multiplicity, remembering: we’re both.

Eating Chinese Food Naked, by Mei Ng

Similar in initial plot as another wonderful Asian American novel (Free Food for Millionaires, by the acclaimed novelist Min Jin Lee), the young female protagonist of Ng’s novel comes home to Queens from a fancy Ivy League college and is immediately faced with a moment of brutality, shame and lack of understanding from an otherwise-loving, less educated immigrant father. The description of the type of food Ruby fantasizes about cooking for her female crush (while still deciding whether to reconcile with her college boyfriend) is erotic, funny, and tender.

Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

I personally can’t look at Woolf as adoringly as I once did now that I’ve seen the racist fragments of her personal letters, but the fact remains that the novel Orlando is a work that can’t be left off any “bi women’s novels” list, a romp, a historical and speculation on gender (previsaging Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex) and reportedly an amusement for the married Woolf’s own female lover.

Like Water, by Rebecca Podos

Like Water received a 2017 “Lammy” (Lambda Literary Award) for best bisexual young adult fiction. Savannah Espinoza’s life has become smaller and narrower since her fathers’ Huntington’s diagnosis, and she isn’t looking to make it any more complicated; but then she meets Leigh. Featuring a Latina heroine who works part-time as a mermaid in a water park, and a love interest who is fearlessly non-binary, this book has the sparkle and heft to transcend “YA” as a genre and simply be a luscious read.

Adaptation, by Malinda Lo

You likely already love Malinda Lo’s other books featuring queer girl protagonists, like Huntress and Ash. We also love her work with serialized fiction project Tremontaine and her creepy, delicious newest title A Line in the Dark. So of course Adaptation is great; it’s part of a bestselling science fiction series that places a bisexual female character (and resulting love triangle) at the center. Who can resist? Seductive Amber makes it even harder for Reese, during a hard time from an apocalyptic standpoint, to sort out good from evil and understand how to save the world.

Some of Us Did Not Die, by June Jordan

June Jordan, one of the first Black women poets of a movement dating to the 1960s who identified courageously as “bisexual,” published this collection of personal essays in 2003 and it’s just as fantastic to read now. This volume includes thoughts and works that span her career as a poet, activist, teacher, speaker and thinker, and discuss topics of identity and bisexuality as well as pressing cultural and political events like post-9/11 America and the O.J. Simpson trial, all in Jordan’s urgent and lyric voice.

Rip Off Red, by Kathy Acker

There had to be some work included here by Acker, who in this novella doesn’t perform the same acts of appropriation and “re writing” that she’s famous for in several other works. Of all three novellas that Grove Atlantic published posthumously, five years after Acker’s death from breast cancer, I enjoyed this one most for its fresh take on the “detective novel” subgenre as explored from the POV of a queer, radical feminist, playful woman.

I’m the One That I Want, by Margaret Cho

What a joy to discover that the film I found indelible: “Hi, I’m Marge. I’m here to WARSH your —”, etc. became a book, and a book I quote all the time (hashtag #IamtheonethatIwant). Cho’s humor about her Asian-American queer woman identity — bisexual and examining, at the same time, the consequences of being under a male gaze, alert to potential male partners as well — is a sly, gut-busting, completely convincing humor that (I believe) should have made her a lot more of an empire by now, if life were just.

My Education, by Susan Choi

It’s Regina, the biracial and newly-bisexual narrator of this novel, whose vibrant lust for the lovely, elusive, postpartum, vaguely narcissistic wife of a “hip” male academic, who animates this wonderful novel. I could not put it down. There is a real suspense Choi creates on the page, as Regina tears ruthlessly through one ‘experience’ after another, pushing aside even a newborn baby to seize the one she thinks she wants. Autostraddle included it as one of the Top Queer Feminist Books of 2013, and Casey has called it “deliciously wordy and juicy, kind of like a Victorian novel but about a biracial, bisexual American woman in the 90s and 2000s… a lovely book that really captures that head-over-heels feeling of being in love for the first time.”

Corona, by Bushra Rehman

It’s all about possibility, thrill-seeking, honesty, rebellion, rather than midlife or more realized bi women’s relationships in this novel of a Pakistani-American young woman coming of age one town over from the famed South Asian-American “ghetto,” Jackson Heights. Both towns are in Queens, but Rehman’s heroine, Farzia, goes on more far-flung adventures, including to Florida and the pages of forbidden porn. While Farzia’s parents tell her to “come home and get married or never come home again,” Farzia instead chooses to explore relationships, love and independence in a fraught mid-2000s America.

Abandon Me, by Melissa Febos

Febos’ essay collection is just so thoroughly brilliant, well-written, and awash with the ambivalence of two, two, always two. Mother and father eliding each other. Men and women; a female lover who’s perfidious, thrilling. I’ll end with these few sentences that, like this entire list, would leave any reader wanting more. Or make any reader more bi-, wanting both land and sea. … And what chance did I stand against the ocean? How many times had the sea taken my father, and left her eating the shore with her hands?

Brown, Queer, Sad, Strange, and a Skilled Practitioner of Each

The first time I built an identity into myself, I was 18. After eight years in my Indian immigrant community, I had moved to Austin for college. I remember Austin as all sky and dust and the smell of beef, a bubble mostly of white people planning kayaking trips. I had arrived a week earlier with new hair, new clothes, and the whole “College Dorm Room Essentials” collection at Target. My white, artsy new roommate and some of her white, artsy high school friends had invited me to dinner, and I was stunned with joy to be included. As we returned to the university, winding through farm roads, I watched the streetlights hover stubborn in the darkness before rushing past my roommate’s fuel-efficient car. I was ecstatic to be a new version of myself and also pining for home, describing a best friend from high school who happened to captain the Bhangra Team.

“The what team?” one of them asked.

“Oh, bhangra! It’s a type of Punjabi folk dance—“

“Of what folk dance?”

I don’t know if my friends were ashamed at their lack of multicultural prowess, but I was at once ashamed at my marginality. That was the first moment in which I realized my world was a tide pool: vibrant, hidden, painfully self- contained. I reeled, aware of a chasm between myself and these new people. I tried to explain for a moment, found no English words. In that moment, the first of many, I tried to explain myself to a white person, and I couldn’t. I was hollow inside.

That first time I learned an identity, discovered piece by piece that I was Indian, South Asian, Punjabi and Rajasthani, Hindu and Jain, a kaleidoscope of countries, histories, regions, languages, and holy books—it took years. I found classes on South Asia in the corners of my curriculums, applied to live in India for a month, and then three. I wrote pages of earnest, if terrible, diaspora poetry, began wearing my mother’s exuberantly gold jewelry as an insistence that it belonged to me as well. I remember, then, how deeply I would feel it when a spate of death in Pakistan or a hate crime against a Sikh man in Central Valley went uncovered in mainstream news. I would retreat to bed for days, simmering in a pain made absurd by others’ continued functioning.

I found a different self slowly, learned to exist as if with many different goggles on at once. Always speaking from my mother’s kitchen in the Silicon Valley and, at the same time, my grandmother’s crowded living room in Punjab. In these years, I would feel the sharpness of many kinds of difference, marginalization. But when I looked down at myself for signs of why I felt so other, all I would find was the color of my hands.

The second time, I was 21, at an activist training camp for South Asian youth called Bay Area Solidarity Summer, stealing a moment away from my new community with a person I had met three days beforehand.I had known the first time I saw them, their peacock-feather hair sparking against their deep brown skin, that they had something new for me. Everything about them was exuberant: a shimmer of blue-purple light untethered by gender. They led me around a corner to a corridor papered with a timeline of Radical South Asian History, and then their face was framed by the stern visages of turbaned revolutionaries, a century’s worth of grotesque political cartoons, and shots of brown bodies marching, animated by rage and hope, holding up fists and rainbow flags. My new and beautiful friend asked to kiss me, and the spark that ran through my body changed me. Took my fingers from me and taught them new ways to want. My body became aware, precise, an instrument suddenly in tune—

That second time was harder. Faster, but knife sharp. I knew that I had lived 21 years jangling with sharp notes, and that I had been made fragile and ashamed by people who loved me. It was too much. I cried every day for a month. I searched my middle school Gchat history for “queer,” and then “bisexual,” and then “gay,” finding some artifacts of myself but mostly just casual homophobia. I read through every article on Autostraddle until one, “To All the Girls I Loved Before I Knew I Could,” jerked tears from me and showed me what I was mourning.

I cut my hair. In the fall, into a bubbling mess of shoulder length curls I later learned was called the Bisexual Bob. In the spring, to a chaotic “short” that sat in a spiraling nest on my forehead. A full year later, I had moved to New York and still found myself staring at my reflection in shop windows, testing how my tongue curled when I said the word “queer.” By then, my hair was shorn down to Tinker Bell bangs that I wore with winged eyeliner and flamboyant Indian earrings. On good days, I felt my skin sparkling with otherworldly energy, and I wondered whether people passing me on the street found me, too, a genderless shimmer of light, a thing of flighty and unspeakable beauty.

The third time was yesterday. In a counseling center in midtown Manhattan, looking into the open face of the only queer South Asian therapist I’d ever heard of, let alone met. She had huge eyes and bangs swept to the side. It was the third, maybe the fourth time I’d left work early, scurried two blocks downtown dodging whistling men and uniformed tour guides, and traveled 10 floors up to a windowless room with two armchairs facing each other from opposite corners.

My therapists eyes were wide with concern and gravity. “From how you describe your depression, it sounds a lot like Bipolar II.”

I began to leak tears and sentiment, thinking out loud through six years of “lows.” Days and weeks that passed by as if a complex play, me acting out my character with dead eyes. Or shifting from miserable to ecstatic to fascinated to bitter in the span of hours. A decades’ collection of comically sad music, a history of uncontrollable rage, and, of course, moments of overwhelming hope and optimism, achievement, nice little cycles of what they call “high functioning.” But threaded through all of it, pulsing like a heartbeat, was the sense that perhaps I did not have to live at all. When a friend cancelled plans, when the train was late, when I got back four good grades and one bad one. “Perhaps I do not have to live at all.” I spent years of my life refusing to believe that I was unwell, singlehandledly battling back a sadness I shouldn’t have borne alone.

I spent my commute to Brooklyn fidgeting and on the verge of tears, Googling bipolar, mania, rapid cycling. I walked home, had three beers, and cried in earnest at all the time and joy I had let drain from me over the years. Salt still dried on my face, I stood very still and considered my body: old cut scars, new stretch marks, muscled from occasional yoga, the tattoo still raised on my shoulder that read, “Loves herself. Regardless” in my own handwriting. I called a friend, family really, who I trusted to confirm my gut level affinity to these words. “Bipolar Depression.”

And then I slept, newly committed to the task of Living With Bipolar. With the feeling, now familiar, that I was about to learn care for a new part of myself.

All this to say. Somewhere along the line, on the rocky and winding path of becoming as a young person consumed by silent violence, I learned that identities are things that are practiced. They are pins you affix to your lapel as a reminder that you are skilled and versatile, that your pain is always becoming power: a reminder that you have remade yourself.

And — life being unpredictable, healing being endless and non-linear — you continue to do so. “Identities” are not passive or static, identities re-align in every place I am in, identities are crucial but insufficient for the enormity of a human self. Living with my identities hovering over me like angels and demons challenges and sharpens me. To wear them loudly is a badge of shared pain, an invitation to commiserate — a reminder that, voluntarily or not, you remake yourself all the time.

I have bad mental health days, bad queer days, and bad brown girl days. I keep track, on and endless loop, of my requirements for queer space and trips to spice stores. I feel myself to be brown, queer, sad, and strange, and a skilled practitioner of each, moving carefully through the world to protect my energy.

And then, on some days, I feel myself to be nothing at all. When I am alone, mostly, maybe sprinkling chili powder into bubbling yellow lentils and watching it thicken on the surface. Painting my wall deep red and watching the thickness of acrylic paint settle, alight, become fire. Or finding just the word to adorn a poem as its title. In a therapists’ office, I might call it hypomania. After an organizing meeting, I might cite Audre Lorde, call it a “Use of the Erotic.” But alone, with no pins on my lapel, the feeling just is. Powerful and immersive. The whistle of morning air and the dimming crackling of fire. Like the granite of a mountain glowing purple in the sunset; untouched snow scattered on its peak.

Celebrate Bisexuality Day 2018: Why We Love Being Bisexual and So Can You

What a great day (week, month, year, life) to be bisexual! For many of us, we spend a lot of time working to feel that it’s okay to be bisexual — that it makes sense, that it’s valid, that it’s ideologically consistent, that it doesn’t preclude our being good partners or good people. It’s a lot to wade through! One thing that makes it easier to not just accept but celebrate bisexuality is watching other bi people in our lives are vocal about what bisexuality means and what it’s brought us. This has been such a great year for bisexual figures in the public eye doing the same — like when Stephanie Beatriz worked with Brooklyn Nine Nine writers to create an affirming and authentic coming out episode that specifically centered on the bisexual experience, or when Sara Ramirez came out and also talked about how her intersecting identities — including bisexuality! — inspire her investment in helping youth.

In this spirit, here are several of Autostraddle’s bisexual staff members and/or friends of the show with our thoughts on what being bisexual (or a related multi-gender-attracted identity) has taught us or brought into our lives, making us grateful for and celebratory of our bisexuality today and every day.

Gaby Dunn, Noted Bisexual

I am so grateful to be bisexual because every day, I see evidence that it opened my mind to a more colorful world of possibilities for my life. I never feel narrowed into a corner of what my life should look like, because I haven’t had that many examples to model myself after. In some ways, that’s been sad because as a kid, a lack of role models made me believe people like me just didn’t grow up — or at the very least, didn’t grow up to be happy and open. But now I see that being bisexual actually allowed me to form my own version of what happiness and the future look like. Not to dog on straight people, but I see many of my straight friends adhering to “rules” of normativity that I’ve never had the, let’s say, privilege of subscribing to and in my experience, they seem pretty freaking unsatisfied. Whereas being bisexual has saved me over and over from a boring life, not just in romance but in seeing the possibilities of the entire world and accepting them and breaking free from what’s “expected” or “normal.” I love love love love it.

Rachel, Managing Editor

A lot of what we talk about when we talk about being bisexual is the experience of constant coming out, of constant explication, the vast array of analogies and extended metaphors so many of us have learned to trot out to make our experiences make sense to other people — the frustration of not feeling just invisible, but illegible. As frustrating as that can be, the feeling at the other end of the spectrum, of having someone (usually another bisexual person!) completely and fully understand an experience or a feeling that I’m articulating is so indescribably great, so connecting and gratifying, it helps me understand what “community” means. Being bisexual in a culture where fundamental parts of that experience aren’t intuitive has put me in the position of having to think intentionally about who I am and what I want, and it’s been such a gift; similarly, finding and noticing the people in my life who are willing to do the same thing for me (and themselves) has been so great, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Natalie, Staff Writer

In a world that likes to reduce people to the simplest possible narrative — black or white, straight or gay, etc. — being bisexual complicates things. I hope living at those intersections has made me more empathetic and more willing to make room for people (and ideas) that complicate the narrative. Knowing that being bisexual gets me into spaces where I both belong and don’t, simultaneously, makes me constantly vigilant about integrating spaces.

Raquel, Staff Writer

I recently saw a phrase that struck me, and has stayed with me since: “I would like to be my best and most complex self.” It doesn’t seem like much at first glance, but that phrase — most complex self — is groundbreaking. I love that freedom to contain multitudes, to have layers, to be a multidimensional being. That’s how I feel about being bisexual — it’s a freedom to be multidimensional.

Humans love to categorize. Our brains have evolved to stitch together meaning from the chaos of inputs we live with, the swirling environment of stuff around us. It’s pretty cool — I can show you two dots over a squiggle and you’ll know I’m feeling happy, sad, or weird about something, depending on the shape of the squiggle. Isn’t that wild as hell! But then we start to fit ourselves into these boxes of meaning, and sometimes those boxes suit us, help us have borders; sometimes those boxes constrain us and keep us from growth. I love being queer as all hell. I love getting to be water, to flow from one shape to another but retain my internal self. Lest I get too fucking philosophical and weird, I love that I could fuck anyone I think is sexy. I love falling in love with people, not despite their multifaceted genders but because of them as well. I do what I want!

The reason I wax so poetic is that I grew up in some pretty rigid boxes. I was asked to be one particular type of person, and I did my damndest to be that person. But that person wasn’t me. My bisexuality wrenched itself out of me and broke the assumptions around me. It let me realize that a lot of what I thought was expected of me, was expected at all, was ~ totally made up ~. Queerness, by its nature, is a challenge, a question, and an answer; as a bisexual, so am I.

Audrey, Staff Writer

Being bisexual and having bisexual community opened me up to my own life. For me, there is a distinct before and after. Before, I had no idea what to do with my feelings, my attractions or my body. After, I at least knew what questions to ask. I feel rooted in bisexual history and astonished by the possibilities of our futures. Being bisexual and the ensuing questions and wonders also dropped a trail of breadcrumbs toward the revelation of my nonbinary identity and experience, and for me the two exist in perfect harmony. I love being bi, and I choose it forever.

Stef Schwartz, Vapid Fluff Editor

I don’t want to feed you a line about how being bisexual is like being part of a secret society, but like, it kind of is? I spent a large part of my queer adolescence (my early 20s) freaking out about my sexuality and what it meant, and what pressures I needed to put on myself to define myself. After a long battle, I ultimately decided that I didn’t really need to define anything, and I’m much happier for it. I treasure being part of the queer community, and love having a part of my identity be so fluid and open to my specific interpretation. It’s also been very cool watching bisexual celebrities and activists speaking openly about the specific challenges that face us, and watching bisexuality/pansexuality become part of a larger public discussion. It’s possible I never connected with bi visibility as a kid because I didn’t know I was looking for it, but I can certainly appreciate what it means for kids to look around and see themselves represented. I never felt it when I was young, and maybe this is why.

Also, I definitely feel a little smug that I can straight-up choose to avoid the heteronormative bullshit my straight friends take for granted as just an inevitable part of dating. When I first started dating girls, I learned a lot about the levels of communication it’s possible to have in a relationship – and now I will accept nothing less from anyone. Bisexuality has allowed me to ask for more from my relationships, and to make my own decisions about how I move through the world. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

Something Wild

The first time I told my girlfriend Ally I loved her, we were lying in the bed I shared with my boyfriend, Dan. He was at a metal show. It was a Monday after a weekend I’d spent with family. My family came to visit from Oregon for four days, but they didn’t meet Ally. They stayed with Dan and I in our apartment, admiring the pool in the center of the building that lit up gold at night. After five years of dating, Dan was part of our family. He led us around town, eating and drinking. We played cards into the night. I felt a million miles away.

Or perhaps approximately 12 miles away – the distance on the 10 freeway between my West LA apartment and Ally’s near downtown. Since we’d started dating in August, I traveled it a couple of times a week, often after midnight with my car’s one working window wide open. Each time, especially when coming home, glee pumped from my heart out through my limbs. I’d touch the skin of my face, put my fingers in my mouth, tug at my hair, trying to make the feeling of being with her last. When I wasn’t able to travel it, this 12 miles ached, heavy and full of static.

Curled around each other on the bed that Monday night, Ally and I admitted how painful the weekend had felt. To spend time with my family and boyfriend on one side of L.A., while she was alone on the other, tore us both up. It made us think of the future.

“You’re the first person I’ve imagined having a future with,” she said, looking at the space around my head instead my eyes. “I know that’s not an option. It feels a little tragic, but I’m OK with that.”

I assured her that it was an option. Next time my family came, we’d push harder to bridge the gaps. I knew my mom would love her. We’d get dinner together. I promised Ally that I wasn’t going to let her go. Holding her face close to mine, I let out words that had been knocking around in my chest for weeks.

Dan came home later that night and the three of us drank whiskey together at our kitchen table. He played Ally her favorite Kate Bush record. He insisted on sleeping on the couch, so Ally slept with me in our bed. He woke up first and made coffee. The fact of us all sitting half-awake together in the morning, over-analyzing a date Dan went on the night before, made this life feel possible.

When I made an online dating profile in August of that year, I hadn’t expected to fall so hard. On our first date, Ally and I talked about the death of loved ones, religion, our rural hometowns, my relationship with Dan, and our queerness. We didn’t kiss that night, but her deep voice and intricate thoughts stuck in my head. Soon we were hanging out every weekend. She cuddled harder than anyone I’d ever met, hooking her feet and hands between me and the bed. I could easily fall asleep in her embrace. She’d hold me like that all night. We didn’t do much. We would lie around looking at each other until the space between us collapsed. We’d talk and talk in a deep, winding way that felt teenage in its expansive electricity.

Dan wasn’t threatened by our built dream space. He liked hearing about Ally and was a patient editor of the texts I agonized over in those first months. We hadn’t entered nonmonogamy blindly. We embraced how it made us stare the death of our relationship in the face and consciously decide to continue being together.

Openness had been part of our relationship from the beginning. Before we were ever alone together, Dan and I were wild in a three-person crush with our friend Hanna. One summer afternoon, the three of us danced around an empty Michael’s Crafts, draping ourselves in tulle and performing art weirdo wedding ceremonies. Over tacos later that afternoon, Hanna and I squeezed Dan’s cheeks and speckled his head with kisses. Our held hands made a triangle over the tabletop. We were high on the creative potential of norm-breaking love. We had a PG-13 threesome that night – lots of caresses and kisses and hands running through hair. We all felt sexy and impressed with what we’d made happen.

It didn’t happen again. Instead, I fell in love with Hanna and she promptly broke my heart. Two months later, I was dating Dan. You could ask many questions of this situation, but no, Dan wasn’t a backup. Ours was real love that had my heart swelling every morning. We’d talk at diners for hours, and dance at warehouse parties where our love swallowed me whole under spinning lights. We shared an intrinsic playfulness and imagination that’s central to who I am.

Three monogamous years later, we were tipsy on a plane when we dually admitted our wish to open things up. It felt exciting, natural, and rooted this sense of play. With trust and history, we felt well prepared for the experiment. I felt Dan deeply understood my queerness and the needs that polyamory could fill for me. I didn’t tell him how I hoped it would silence the gnawing sexuality crisis that had bubbled up insides of me every couple years since I was young.

On OKCupid we were a bisexual woman, not interested in men, looking for single women 25 to 40 for sex and play. Justine messaged us before we even matched. She was upfront about what she was looking for: a sweet couple for regular hookups and in-between flirting, nothing serious.

Dan and I were stiff with nervous giggles on the late spring walk to our first date. Justine wasn’t there yet, but texted: “Sorry I’m late. Just getting pretty for you two.” She turned out to be perfect. For almost four months, we were part of her weekly routine, which also involved trips to a dungeon by the airport, ‘normal’ romantic dates, evenings spent suspended in ropes, and marathon training. She usually came over to our place, often with a purse full of toys. She was the first person to fuck me with a strap-on, my legs hanging over the edge of the wooden bed that Dan had bought us, a symbol of adulthood. She was a textbook example of a good communicator; her “I” statement check-ins glittered with honesty and sex appeal. She gifted us with selfies of her lounging around in lacy lingerie, her bronze skin shimmering. Dan and I enveloped her in the breezy comfort of our home and the soft, easy post-sex lay-arounds of a long-term relationship. We even got skilled at taking sexy couples pics for her (not an easy task).

I enjoyed talking to friends about our arrangement, but quickly found that most everyone knew someone who had left their male partner for a woman after a messy bout with polyamory.

“Be careful,” they’d say. “What if you fall in love?”

As if it is easy for someone with so many complicated feelings about love’s intersection with identity to “be careful.” As if it was possible for me to entirely “know what I was doing.”

I ensured my friends that, given my queerness, our open relationship gave me hope for the future. With it, I could imagine Dan and I growing old together and still communicating well, still having good sex, still seeking what we needed. I left out my desires to text Justine outside of our group text, something she’d said she wasn’t into.

Then, I became the first woman to make Justine come. When her body shook I was filled with a fullness that almost made me cry. For me, in that moment, Dan wasn’t even in the room.

I said that I wanted to end things because I didn’t have enough headspace to handle everything – the communication, the planning, the concerns about satisfying everyone. This was partially true. It was a lot. But really, it wasn’t enough.

Dan and I laid low for some months. We felt connected and in love. We got our kicks talking about crushes and flipping through dating apps, but never making plans. I went to Chicago to rekindle a romantic relationship with a close friend. Our intimate time together and regular texting fed some of my desires. Then I got a debilitating crush on a very straight girl. I regressed to an emotional register I recognized only from high school, crying at night and rehearsing words to tell her how I felt. Instead of doing it, I decided I had to go back on dating apps, alone.

Ally was the first date I went on. Maybe when I talked about the beginning of our relationship earlier, it seemed slow and sweet, well balanced. I would love for you to think that, but wouldn’t trade the manic love-craze it really was for anything. With her, my world slowed. I was fully present in a way I rarely am. But when we were apart, my sticky heart lodged itself in my throat. I lost weight, lived in my daydreams, and overwhelmed Dan with them. My adrenals went so haywire that for a couple of weeks, I thought I was pregnant. I ran past the emotions about this, desperate to prove to Ally and Dan that I could make them feel safe, that I could love them both enough to never have to choose. I was racing to build something strong that consistently felt fragile. My life depended on it.

Needless to say, I didn’t have much time or energy to question things. But fierce doubt, a tightly-packed time bomb, eventually chased me down. Two weeks before Christmas, Dan and I walked to dinner by our house. As we sipped our beers, I started talking about the future. Maybe to fill space, maybe to toy with danger, I talked about us moving for me to attend grad school. I said that I felt ready to leave L.A. These were things I’d said before. Then I said that if I didn’t get into school, I wanted to have a baby. Maybe I could move to the desert. I didn’t say “We.”

After dinner, he dropped me off at the train. My body pulsed with the self-contained energy and ease of being alone with headphones in, barreling across the city. At Ally’s, we took shots and left for a dance night at a Koreatown dive that had dusty stuffed animals shoved into every corner. We had a game, then, of carting around our imaginary daughter. Roxy was a bitchy little fashionista, a seven-year-old power goth who perched on bar stools sucking down apple juice, her eyes constantly rolling back in her head at the trivial things adults did. We downed a couple more tequila shots, denying them of Roxy who sat between us.

We joked that Roxy kept us honest. Really, she made us mushy inside, in a way that felt both naughty and vapidly predictable.

“I know you wanted me to be pregnant,” I said, in one slow breath, almost like flirting.

“Maybe,” she murmured, her eyes locking with mine like a dare. Something wild squirmed around in my chest, a band strung tight from my heart out along my collarbone. I’d felt it before, when we looked into each other and said ‘I love you.’ Something threatening to break me.

I ran outside. Because we were drunk, the conversation evaporated into the night air. We talked with friends and Ally smoked a cigarette. Later, she leaned against a streetlight and I played with her hair. Our faces got close and the air between us sparked with a tugging lust.

“Ours is the best sex I’ve ever had,” I breathed.

“Better than with Dan?” she said.

“Bad!” I said, slapping her cheek lightly. Though we never denoted off-limits conversation topics, we knew comparisons of Ally and Dan were definitely forbidden.

I couldn’t say another word. It was like she’d gestured to this giant pile of unmentioned feelings that I’d been running around with. Our relationship relied on that heap retaining its shadows. In memory, I picture myself sobbing on the sidewalk there, but I think it was a couple of hours before I broke. On her couch, I cried and cried, but couldn’t yet say why.

The next day, I was quiet and still on the train home. Dan and I made dinner together, not talking much. When we got into bed, I choked into my pillow and told him for the first time ever that I think I may be gay; not bi, but gay. He said, “I thought you were so comfortable being queer like you always have been.”

I climbed into a hole that week. I called every friend whose opinion I valued. I wrote in my journal for hours. I barely spoke to Dan or Ally. I worried that the pressure I felt to break from dating men was essentialist or biphobic. Was it convention that was pushing me to choose? Didn’t I believe so deeply in fluid queerness? I obsessed over the question of certainty: why cause grief and pain unless I was undeniably sure? In this darkness, though, coming out felt light. By the end of the week, I knew what I had to do, but I waited until after Christmas to tell Dan.

After I moved out of our apartment on January 1st, Dan and I didn’t see each other for seven months. Daily, I felt alternating elation, relief and dense sadness, mostly for a sense of time lost and prior lack of self-awareness. Grief for Dan never came in the storm I thought it would. When we met for brunch in July, I expected it to hit me. Sitting across from him at a diner by my (third) new apartment, I felt blurry and soft, far from the bold conductor of affairs I’d been before. We caught up, our smiles honest. He admitted things had been pretty bad for him, but had gotten easier. I offered to answer any questions he had.

“Were there reasons besides your sexuality?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “But if it weren’t for my sexuality, we probably could have worked things out.”

He agreed and then asked if it was hard to be with Ally, in another long-term relationship so soon.

“Sometimes,” I mumbled. “I take space when I need it.”

I felt numb, then, trying to connect the joy and wholeness of my current relationship with his loss. I couldn’t tell him that Ally and I existed on a completely plane from he and I, that I had never been in love like this before. I couldn’t tell him that no, it wasn’t jarring, because it felt like the first relationship of my life.

He nodded at my vague response and said his friends had urged him to meet our situation with the anger awarded to other “unjust” breakup narratives: me cheating and then continuing to date the Other Woman; Dan cursing polyamory for driving us apart; me moving on too quickly and too publicly. This frustrated him. He couldn’t feel angry with me. He did not regret our polyamory. He simply carried the pain of a breakup: the deep missing, the lonely recalibration.

Walking home, I didn’t feel the broke-open grief I thought I might. Maybe it would never come. I thought instead about Dan’s friends’ words. I thought about a queer friend of mine saying she didn’t think her boyfriend would be open to trying non-monogamy, now, even though her sexuality is so different from mine. I thought about the sorrowful letter my grandma wrote me after I came out, about her heart breaking for Dan. She didn’t even know about Ally, at that point, but she felt that I’d done him wrong. Throughout the spring, I’d internalized this shame and zeroed in on guilty moments: When Dan gave me money for grad school applications and I barely said thanks before sequestering myself in our bathroom to film myself reading Ally her horoscope (yes, we are that gay). When I made him sit on the couch and listen to me sing a song Ally loved on his mini-amp mic, to determine if my voice sounded good enough to sing for her. Worse than that was when I went home with him for Thanksgiving and picked apart his family, wondering aloud if we’d have to spend holidays with them after we had kids. I felt invisible in the face of heteronormativity, and acted out. Dan had been patient with me.

Getting back to my apartment, a breezy space I felt immensely comfortable in, anger began to surface over this shame. Not anger at Dan in any way, but at having to answer for my winding path, to anyone. I don’t want to apologize for the timing of things. They happened at exactly the right time, if not too late. While I love Dan and am so grateful for the times we shared, I choose anger at the powerful norms that slowed my coming out, over shame and guilt. Anger is uncomfortable to me, but it is mine. Eventually, the daily miracle of my queerness and the ways I’ll continue to grow into it might eclipse that anger. Or I’ll be an angry dyke, unapologetically obsessed with her girlfriend, forever, and that’s great too.

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edited by Rachel Kincaid.

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You Need Help: Am I Bisexual If It Really Is Just This One Guy?

Welcome to You Need Help! Where you’ve got a problem and yo, we solve it. Or we at least try.

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Q:

I’ve identified as a lesbian for three years now, and this identity makes me happy. Centering my life and interest and energy and focus around women and some NB folks makes me happy. But… I made out with one of my closest male friends whilst drunk, and then again whilst sober, and we’ve talked about it and decided to pursue a friends with benefits situation. So now I feel guilty and like I am betraying lesbiankind by continuing to let people call me a lesbian… but I feel silly calling myself or thinking about “coming out again” as bi because it really is just this one guy; I’m not into “men,” I’m into women (and some NB people) and him, and that’s it. Am I betraying everyone? Am I being biphobic or lesbophobic or something else?

A:

Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether you’re being “biphobic or lesbophobic or something else” or whether you’re “betraying everyone” — I understand your concerns about being accountable and respectful in relation to the larger community, but also it can be very difficult to navigate the internal authentic experience of a situation while looking at it through the lens of what you imagine it will mean for other people. So we’ll return to that in a bit! But until then try to let go of wondering what you “owe” anyone and let’s look at the facts.

What I’m hearing you say is that you want to keep identifying as a lesbian despite hooking up with this dude, and you’re wondering whether that’s something you have permission to do. No one can really give or revoke permission to do that, although I will say (and you are aware of this, which is why you’re asking) that choosing not to sleep with men is generally understood as being pretty fundamental to being a lesbian. At the same time, certainly there are women who have gone on to have relationships with men, including extremely serious ones and/or marriages, and continued to identify as lesbians. EJ Levy wrote this about it in 2014; her central tenet sounds similar to yours:

I know plenty of people who identify as bisexual; I am not. The term simply doesn’t apply. I am not, as a rule, attracted to men. I simply fell in love with this person and didn’t hold his gender against him. That won’t change because of our vows, any more than my eye color will. My fundamental coordinates are unaltered.

Wear Your Voice also ran this piece from a previously-identified dyke who I think afterwards began identifying as queer. She writes:

“I’m still queer. Nothing about me has really changed. Most of my friends are queer, I still move in queer spaces and go to queer events. But the main reasons I frequented queer spaces in the past were to cruise for dates or to feel safe showing affection for my partner.”

I know women who have had relationships with people of varying genders including men and who feel strongly about identifying as bisexual regardless of their relationship status or gender of their current partner because their identity doesn’t change as a function of their relationships; I know women who have had serious relationships with men who are adamant about being lesbians, and for whom not being able to be out (to themselves or the world) previously of course doesn’t invalidate their identity. I know plenty of people in a position like Chirlane McCray, who previously identified as lesbians and are now in a more label-free space and in relationships with men. I know a bunch of women who are clear about the fact that they’re attracted to men in addition to women but have elected to only date women and identify as lesbians for this reason; I know women in a similar space who identify as bisexual even though they’ll never date another man. Personally, I identified as bisexual for a long time and briefly identified as a lesbian because I was convinced that the reason I couldn’t make a relationship work with a man was because I was gay and then later identified as bisexual again and accepted that I couldn’t make those particular relationships work because of men, both as a category and in specific, and because of life and stuff. I bring this range of experiences up to acknowledge the context that yes, definitely, as a community we have a diverse variety of relationships to men individually and as a class, and sometimes that matches up neatly with our identities and sometimes it doesn’t! And I would absolutely encourage you to read and ask around and discuss with other women who have and are navigating this and see if there’s any insight to be gained. However, at the same time, I honestly don’t think that’s where you’re going to find your answer to this question about “what” you “are.”

Speaking super bluntly, a general working definition of bisexual is that you’re attracted to more than one gender, usually understood as your own and other gender/s. Clearly you’re attracted to your own gender, and the fact that you want an ongoing sexual relationship with this guy would indicate that you have some level of attraction to his gender (I hear you that you aren’t attracted to “men” as a “group;” at the same time, this is a man and you are attracted to him! So there’s that. If you say you don’t like tiramisu but also order it every time you’re at this one restaurant, the evidence would suggest you may be someone who does like tiramisu and is picky about it.). If you don’t identify with the label of bisexual, despite the fact that that definition fits the facts of the situation, it suggests to me that it’s because you have a different definition of bisexual that you’re functioning with right now, one that you don’t recognize yourself in.

I want to look more closely at two things you say here — that in your life and identity as a lesbian you’ve been “centering my life and interest and energy and focus around women and some NB folks,” and also that it feels “silly” to call yourself bi because you’re “…not into “men,” I’m into women (and some NB people) and him, and that’s it.” Gently and genuinely without judgement, I’d love to ask you to consider whether you think you could still center your life around women and nonbinary people if you were bisexual, and if you think that’s something that bisexual women in general can do. Why or why not? Do you think it looks fundamentally different than when lesbians do so? How so? What do you think you’re drawing on or from when you form your conclusions about these ideas? In what ways do you imagine that bisexual women are generally attracted to men as a class? Probably you don’t think of them as being uniformly attracted to every man ever, equally, but it seems like you think a bisexual woman’s attraction to men would have to be broader than just one guy. How many men would a woman have to be attracted to, in addition to women and/or nonbinary people, before it would make sense for her to be bisexual? How do you imagine bisexual women’s attraction to men as compared to straight women’s attraction to men? Do you think of them as the same, or different, and if so how? How do you imagine bisexual women’s attraction to men being different from what you’re experiencing now?

There aren’t specific answers I think you’re supposed to arrive at here; I’ve been bisexual my whole life, give or take, and I’m not sure I have firm answers to these questions. I’ll be wrestling with my complicated relationship to men individually and as a group my whole life. The thing is, though, all women will! Regardless of sexual orientation. We all have fathers, brothers, bosses, abusers, landlords, you name it. We don’t have a choice about dealing with men; none of us are unique in taking part in that very broad experience because we all have to live under the heteropatriarchy. What is unique, I think, is that many people — both bisexual and not — believe that navigating a dynamic with men is defining and fundamental to the experience and identity of bisexual women when they do not believe this in the same way about other groups. This manifests in really just countless ways, more than I think is realistic to get into here, but I think it would be helpful to stop for a second and think through it for your sake. I don’t want to put words in your mouth! But the phrasing of where you’re coming from brings to mind a lot of this sort of tacit but fairly common idea that while being a lesbian is defined by your relationship to women and womanhood, bisexuality for women is inevitably defined by your relationship to men. And I very much hear you that you don’t want to intentionally opt into a relationship with Men as a group (me neither, friend!), and so I can see why bisexuality would feel outlandish as a possibility! I’m not gonna tell you my psychic reading of what I think your “true identity” is; that isn’t a real thing and no one can do that for you, and you may find that even for and by yourself it isn’t a productive exercise. What I am gonna invite you to do is to try to experiment with the thinking that you can center and prioritize women regardless of how you identify, and nudge you to start noticing the ways in which women in your life do so regardless of who they’re sleeping with — and also to think about what other touchpoints you have for female bisexuality as an identity and experience outside of Being Into Men.

Coming back, finally, to your questions about whether you’re “betraying” anyone — figuring out what’s going on with you and what you want is a personal process, not a burden on the group. Our community has been through so much for so long — your trying to process what’s happening with a fling isn’t going to be what brings us down, I promise. I would think about, maybe, if there’s anything else at the root of those questions and the guilt you say you feel — what are you afraid of losing? Do you feel like you would deserve to? Looking at the reality of your situation and what you know about your community, are those fears realistic? Are there any possibilities that you might also gain something or grow in some way by considering your identity intentionally right now, regardless of where you end up with it, rather than just risking or losing something?

Most of all, I’m so sad about how guilty you feel! It’s so difficult and maybe actually impossible to have an honest conversation with yourself about anything with the crushing pressure of guilt and shame drowning everything else out. You talk about your lesbian identity as something that makes you happy, and you deserve to be happy! Maybe the way forward is to focus first on that, on what will make you happy, and let the rest fall into place in its time. I wish you the best of luck!

Into The A+ Advice Box #3: Summer Hookups, Bisexual Sadness and Gender Feelings

Welcome to the third edition of Into the A+ Advice Box, in which we answer advice questions from A+ members who submitted their questions into our A+ ask box because they wanted their questions answered in a space that is not accessible by Google, their mom, their ex, etc. (No guarantees regarding your ex, however). Previously, we have included such questions in our epic Some Answers to Some Questions You Have Been Asking Us, and in most cases that is still the plan. But some questions were a lot longer or more in-depth and deserved their own place in the sun.

We solicited answers from the whole team, so let’s dive in!

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Q:

Okay so, pressing question time: how do i gently let someone know that i am not interested in seeing them to date again, even though i previously said i was? the context for this is that i met someone a bit over a month and a half ago, maybe more?? and we had a good date. she was more interested than i was, but i wasn’t not-interested, so we were going to see each other again. then i had a flare, and then i got the flu, so we postponed our date but i assured her i was still interested. but the thing is, i’m not, anymore? i have a crush on someone else? i feel awful, because i know i’m leading her on, but i just don’t know what to say. she’s really great, she’s just not someone i want to date! please help ;-;

A:

Rachel: I think this is going to be ok and, with love, this is maybe a bigger deal to you than it is for her! Even if she is more interested than you she will be fine. Honestly I’m impressed you’re still talking a month and a half later after one date. I think you can say something casual over text about how something has happened with someone else unexpectedly and you’d be into grabbing a drink together as friends if she’s down? Or if you aren’t actually interested in being friends with her, which is valid, you can like let things slowly peter out or just tell her straight up you’re sorry but you don’t see things moving forward. Again, I promise she will be fine!

Vanessa: She will definitely be fine, as Rachel said, but also, as someone who has been in this situation from the girl’s side (i.e., talking to someone who I thought wanted to date me and we had discussed it that way and had long intimate text convos as is The Lesbian Way Of Flirting etc and then the other person decided they actually didn’t want to date) I would implore you to be extremely direct ASAP. This might be specific to me, as a Capricorn who enjoys order and schedules and plans and Understanding Where I Fit In To The Universe In No Uncertain Terms, but the thing that makes me feel insane and undesirable and sad and totally overly emotional in a situation like this is when the other person isn’t communicative/leads me on. You say “I know I’m leading her on,” so I would say the easiest answer to this issue is: stop leading her on! Just send a text that’s like “listen, I need to be upfront, I know we started out as flirtatious and date-y but I’d actually rather just be friends. I wanted to let you know ASAP!” And then if you do wanna be friends make plans and act accordingly, and if you don’t you can kind of gently be unavailable for forever. BUT PLEASE TELL HER, SHE WILL BE FINE, BUT ONLY IF YOU LET HER KNOW SO SHE DOESN’T FEEL CRAZY TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT HAS CHANGED. (Sorry I’m kind of projecting with the all-caps in that last bit, but I promise, everyone just wants to know where they stand!) You’re doing a great job, send that text and get yourself a milkshake!

Alyssa: As a person who has the hardest time saying no, or letting down, I feel this dilemma so hard. But in echoing what Rachel and Vanessa have both said, everyone in this situation is gonna be a-ok. Working to be as direct and compassionate within that directness is the thing! to! do! Try to think about how you’d want her to let you down in this situation if roles were reversed and remember that saying no is not unkind. You can want different things on any given day, and it’s completely your right to step away from a budding thing that just isn’t for you. I will say though, that if you want to continue on as pals, be an actual pal and honor the friendship. Be careful not to use a friendship offering simply to escape the discomfort in saying something you don’t think she’ll want to hear.

Carolyn: The best way to think of this type of conversation is as a positive one and not a negative one. It’s not that you’re rejecting someone because something is wrong; it’s that you’re freeing up her bandwidth to explore something that feels right (as well as your own).

I would also think twice before you propose friendship with someone you went on only one date with, as other writers suggest. It’s okay to not have everyone you meet in your life. And since you already went from “interested” to “time passes” to “definitely still interested” to “actually no,” I would consider whether proposing friendship would be coming from a genuine place where your lives will be less bright without each other, or whether it’d be coming from a place of not wanting to be firm in having what feels — or at least I assume feels, since you wrote in to us — like a hard conversation.

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Q:

how do i get a casual, consistent hookup for the summer without tinder? I’m in nyc over the summer (til august) with a rlly cool internship, inconsistently private space, and a NEED FOR LOW-PRESSURE HUMAN INTIMACY. i was recently heart-smashed. Tinder scares me, and is often a lot of work for little reward. thx! bye!

A:

Vanessa: Okay, if you hate Tinder I would try PERSONALS, and I would also try telling your friends and loved ones that this is what you’re looking for! That may sound scary, but honestly, letting everyone know where you’re at means everyone is gonna be looking out for you. I’m currently in a space where I’m looking for a lot of dance floor makeouts and a lot of casual sex. I have told literally all my friends that truth (and also a lot of strangers, and also all of you I guess! Now y’all know what I’m looking for!). So when we go out dancing, or when they see me flirting with someone at a bar, or when their hot housemate says “I’m really wanting to get laid, is Vanessa down” they know that I’m looking for casual hookups and they can act accordingly! Whether this means giving me and a cute babe a little space on the dance floor so a makeout may happen, or plopping down next to me and a person I’m flirting with and telling them what a babe I am, or letting their hot housemate know that I would be TOTALLY down if they made a move on me…it’s a teamwork scenario! I also think Tinder often seems scarier than it is, so I would give it a chance if you haven’t before. I like to think of Tinder as a huuuuuuge room where a bunch of babes have gathered, and when I match with a babe we have the option of leaving the room and seeing if we connect. You’re not gonna instantly know via Tinder if you match well with a person, that’s true, but you could certainly decide if you would hypothetically wanna kiss that person’s face via a Tinder profile and then if you match you can ask them on a date and see how you do in person. It’s just like meeting someone at a bar and giving them your number, except the bar is a huge endless digital cloud and you can swipe in your pajamas. Unfortunately there is no fool proof trick to getting a “casual, consistent hookup for the summer” (ugh isn’t that the fucking dream though) but I think being really clear on what you want, putting yourself out there in as many situations as possible, telling your friends and community what you’re looking for, and being slutty is probably the best you can do. That’s what I’ve been doing, anyway! GOOD LUCK, YOU’VE GOT THIS! (I also want to remind you that even if you do not get a casual, consistent hookup for the summer you are still amazing and worthy and valuable and hot. Just so you know.)

Alyssa: Lean into your friends, pal! And I don’t mean bang your friends (unless that’s your thing and you want to!) — I mean go out! Live your life! Spend time with people that matter to you in social places, join in on queer interest clubs, be open to new things and new people. Lean into the fact that intimacy and love is all around you. When you’re out and about and feeling good, people are so! fucking! into! it! If you want the hook up, go out n’ grab it — but don’t worry so much about your summer hookups as an end goal. There’s no fool-proof how-to and it’s a ton of pressure to put on yourself for a casual fun thing! Embrace community and get yourself out there and feeling good. It draws people to you, I swear.

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Q:

Okay, I could use some advice… My friends are incredible and they pooled together to send me to A-Camp next year (still crying about it) and they said that if there was any money left over, that I should put it towards going to Clexacon next year too. So I started slowly saving money, because times are tight, and if I am able to keep this pace, I should be able to go to Camp and the con in 2019. My best friend said she’d go with me to Vegas for the convention and I have a room booked and I couldn’t be more excited to finally start making more queer friends! Now the wrench… I have a friend who is getting married next spring (YAY), and it turns out that she will be having a destination wedding in Mexico the weekend before Clexacon… I don’t have an actual invitation in hand yet, so for all I know, this won’t even be an issue (but I was part of a “y’all better be ready to celebrate!” group text, so who knows). The wedding will be in Mexico during prime Spring Break time, when airfare and hotel rates will be high and this friend’s family is well off, so I’m sure everything will be beautiful… and also expensive. My question is this: what is the appropriate thing to do? This wedding has potential to be very expensive, with showers and bachelorette stuff and then the international event itself, and I have these plans to go to Clexacon (with my bff who is ALSO invited to this wedding, ADDITIONAL WRENCH) and I am so excited about it already. I don’t know that I would be able to afford going to this wedding. I certainly can’t go to Clexacon AND the wedding. Do I skip the con and try to make it to Mexico? Do I skip the wedding, go to the con, and just participate in any local activities related to the wedding? Am I being wildly selfish? (Yes, I am definitely being selfish, I know that. But I have trouble doing things for myself, so I am trying to avoid compromising when I don’t have to). What is the best thing to do here? (Thank you in advance for your help, I really appreciate everything you do!!)

A:

Alexis: You’re not being selfish, or at least the bad kind of selfish. As someone who definitely does not have money to be doing several big things at once, I don’t think it’s bad not to go to your friend’s wedding. Participating in local events is a great idea and just being as present as you are capable is really good. I think it’s okay to do things for yourself and since you had stuff planned way in advance, it’s extra okay to not break plans with yourself.

Laura M: People who hold destination weddings cannot possibly expect everyone they invite to come. Part of the reason for holding a destination wedding, in fact, is usually that the host wants a smaller number of people! I think you should talk it out with your bff… and then you should probably both go to Clexacon?? It seems pretty clear from the question you asked that this is where your priorities are. Live your truth! It’s fine.

Alyssa: Go to Clexacon. Destination weddings are rude, haha.

Natalie: Go to ClexaCon and send them a bomb ass gift off the registry. Everybody wins!

Siobhan: Talk to your BFF and if you’re close with the friends getting married talk it over with them too. Only you can decide if you’re going in there to tell them gently that you’re going to Clexacon or if its to help you work out what you’re doing, but whichever it is be firm and don’t let anyone make you feel bad about your choices. You matter and being some degree of “selfish” is good and important.

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Q:

I dated a co-worker who is older than me and who had just started acting on her queer identity. With her permission (!! and I waited until AFTER we agreed we were gfs, not like when i first started seeing her) I told a few colleague-friends but otherwise kept it quiet. She came out to her family while dating me but is really not ready to be out more generally. We broke up for other reasons but I think this may be the underlying thing. I think she’s mad at me for inadvertently outing her to some of our colleagues and I don’t know what to do?

A:

Laura M: I mean, you’re broken up… so I feel like you don’t need to be guessing at why she may or may not be mad at you! It sounds like she needs to do some work on herself, and you need to find your next date outside your workplace.

Carolyn: You write that you told colleagues you were dating with her permission, so if that was genuinely the case and she’s mad at you for telling them, that’s her problem and not yours. I wouldn’t totally write off dating in the workplace, but I would think twice next time.

Natalie: If you value that relationship — professional and/or personal — you should talk to her and try to clear the air but, don’t let her reframe the conversation about what happened as you outing her because if you had her permission, that’s not at all what happened.

Siobhan: This sounds like a her problem and not a you problem, unless she’s making trouble for you at work. If she is then I would talk first to her (unless she’s being really hostile) and if that fails go to whoever you’re supposed to bring these kind of problems with. If you end up having to do that it would be a good idea to bring any text or chat proof you may have of either your side of this or her actions. If she’s not making trouble for you but you want to be friends/stop her being mad at you then maybe talk to her about it but seconding what Natalie said about it. (I wouldn’t though, you did nothnig wrong and she’s being an ass).

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Q:

I need advice! I was just recently voted president of my college campus queer organization for the coming school year (yay!), but also it’s kinda a lot of pressure because the club last year was kinda a let-down for a lot of folx. I want to improve the club this year, starting with the one thing people have asked for the most; more events! The only thing is… I don’t have a ton of great event ideas. I know that I want to start a queer feminist book group within the club (which I would also love recommendations for!), but other than that I don’t have much. Like I said, a lot of people felt disappointed by the club offerings last year, so I want to make the most of my time as president and make this year special! (Especially since it’s my last year!) I just want to give back to this club all I received from it over these past three years; support and community when I most needed it. I wanna leave this campus community better than I found it! Thanks! Any and all advice is welcome and appreciated!

A:

Laura M: Ooh, what if you wrote letters to LGBTQ prisoners through Black and Pink? A speed dating / speed friending event for community members? Also, have you considered hosting a drag show.

Alyssa: Partner with organizations doing rad community work! Beyond the ideas you already seem to have brewing (queer book clubs! GREAT! maybe study groups? meet-ups? etc.) I highly recommend getting involved in diverse intergenerational and trans-inclusive spaces and events throughout your greater community! The best way to leave your campus community better than you found it is to help establish relationships that can extend beyond your years of being there! Cultivating a real presence within the larger community while fostering a safe space for folx on campus to get involved, and be seen and supported is SUCH a rad endeavor. The fact that you are even asking these questions is incredibly promising that you are going to do amazing things in your time there. Partner up with larger community efforts, it’ll inspire you in the events you want to create on your own, and help you to create that inclusive reputation that will keep the community growing for years to come.

Natalie: Yay! I love campus involvement! From my experience, the key to good campus programming is to stick to three categories: social, support and activism. Try hosting a combination of small events — like a book club, queer movie nights, HIV testing or voter registration drives — to keep members engaged and one big event at the end of the semester (Laura’s idea of a drag show sounds awesome!).

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Q:

Hi Autostraddle, I am In Love with someone and they don’t know (I don’t think) but I’m also pretty sure they don’t feel the same way. Should I tell them?! How?! Can I have permission to do something crazy, like drive several hours to leave flowers and a love note on their doorstep and then drive away and wait for them to find it? DO I NEED TO CHILL?! Ahhhh!

A:

Laura M: Wait, why would you drive away? Are you also leaving a camera, so you can see their reaction? I don’t think you should do that, it’s probably illegal.

Alyssa: Oh, you tender soul! I love that you’re in love and adore your spirit, but yes maybe chill (a little, anyway). What’s romantic in movies can sometimes feel intense in real life and it’s important to be a little more direct with who we’re showing our love to and how we’re showing it. Especially if it’s hard to know if they want that kind of attention! That being said… that doesn’t mean you have to hold it all in. If you have feelings, and a relationship with this person (platonic relationships are relationships), you should have the conversation. It’s important to put your feelings out there! It’s just also important to keep in mind that your feelings are yours and not place them on this person! Love is amazing, but it’s not in short supply. You deserve to be loved in all the ways that you are willing to give and receive it, so if this person doesn’t love you back — remember that no one person is everything and it’s no reflection on you. Knowing is better than wondering, and harboring secret romantic hopes for a friend who thinks your relationship is platonic can get messy. Be brave and just talk about it (and most importantly be prepared to really hear this person in whatever their response may be)! If it works out, great! What a relief! And if it doesn’t, it gives you the peace of mind in knowing and the time to work through those feels however you have to! You’ve got this, hunk.

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Q:

My husband and I are divorcing because I’ve realized I’m a lesbian. It’s an amicable divorce and we’re going to stay friends, but we’ve been together ten years and it’s still hard. I’ve been accepted to grad school and I’m debating whether I should defer to give myself a year to process fully, maybe start dating, and not feel stressed about moving and doing all the stuff that comes with separating your life from someone else’s. I’m not sure whether it’d be helpful to move (it’s about an hour away) and just start fresh right away or I should take time to de-stress before starting the stress of grad school. Having done neither a divorce nor grad school, I’m curious what more experienced minds have to say.

Alyssa: Firstly, congratulations on getting into grad school, and on working so hard with your ex to foster an amicable split from your life together. Neither is an easy feat. Secondly… I say take the leap and go to grad school! This is a huge time for you, and it’s totally terrifying — I know. But literally no time is ever the right time for processing big life changes, and you don’t need to put yourself or your life on hold for anything right now. It will be tedious and challenging at times, grad school and life are often hard to juggle. But it will also be a time to really get to know yourself and your wants apart from your former relationship and comfort zones. The change can give you a bit of a fresh start, the space to create new goals for yourself, to meet new people, to experience new communities and interests. Take the leap. Choose yourself. You’ve worked hard to pave these opportunities and you deserve to chase them. But remember to go easy on yourself. Change is tough, and a lot at once can totally feel like an overload, but it is more often than not exactly what we need.

Carolyn: Here’s a thing about divorce: it’s probably going to take more than a year to finish all of the shit — financial and legal and logistical and emotional — that goes along with it. Deferring grad school a year doesn’t mean you’ll be totally done by the time you start, but it does mean grad school is a lot further away. Yes, divorce is a huge time suck and grad school is a huge time suck and balancing those two things will be challenging. But you put your life on hold for this person long enough already.

Laneia: Hello it’s me, another divorcée. Carolyn is super correct about all the divorce shit taking more than a year and Alyssa is totally right about choosing yourself and I just couldn’t agree more with both of these advices! Grad school!!! YOU DID THAT. You got into motherfucking grad school AND you uncovered something deep and vital about yourself AND you’ve embarked upon one of the shittiest, most overly complicated and thankless endeavors that a person in a 10-year relationship could embark upon. This has been a big year for you and you deserve to get to do the thing you’ve worked so hard for, right now! What a perfect opportunity to start a totally new chapter in a totally new city in a totally new house. I’m genuinely excited for you and all the dates you’ll eventually go on!

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Q:

I’ve been feeling really frustrated lately. Frustratedly single to be more specific. I’ve been consuming more queer content in the last 6 months or so and it’s really been normalizing just being a gay human for me and it’s been great. Until the past couple years I had never really even met many gay people. A couple months ago I got highly inebriated while hanging out with a really good friend (who I am out to). We’ve drank together before, but in this particular instance, I was hammered and she was completely sober. There was some cuddling/hand holding going on and I am the least cuddly/touchy person on the planet, but I definitely initiated it. But it wasn’t any sort of “I’m in love with my straight best friend” kind of thing. I think my body was just craving physical intimacy with a female. Between that night and all the great female queer content I’ve been consuming and seeing mushy gushy pride stuff all over the internet everywhere I go, I’ve just been feeling extra frustrated that I’m single and I feel like the only single gay person in my whole tiny little town. All 3 gay couples I know here met their significant other out of town. I joined the HER app recently and nothing productive has come of it and I’m just in a phase where I’m convinced I’ll be single forever. How do any of you deal with bouts of frustration like this?

A:

Valerie Anne: Being single can be lonely and exhausting sometimes! But I’ve been single for…ever and I am here to tell you that for every hard/frustrating spell, there’s a stretch of joy – sometimes it’s nice to be able to make decisions without having to consider anyone else, for example! So I know sometimes it can be frustrating but some of the best advice I ever got shifted my perspective and hopefully I can do the same for you: Don’t think your life as missing something because you’re not dating anyone. Think of it as building a life that’s full and satisfying and yours that someday maybe you can share with someone. It’s the difference between waiting for someone else to come and help you finish building a foundation (which comes with risks! What if they leave! Your building will crumble!) vs. building the whole damn house yourself and then finding someone to help you decorate it. So go join the clubs you want to join or take the classes you want to take or make the art you want to make and maybe that will lead you to your person. And even if it doesn’t, at least you will be doing something that makes you happy.

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Q:

hiiii two related questions: 1) if i don’t want to do anything ever again except have sex with my girlfriend, does that mean i’m depressed? how do i regain the desire to do other stuff too sometimes? 2) i want to open the relationship so as not to feel 100% dependent on girlfriend’s love for my self worth. i’m worried that the longer i date only her, the more emotionally dependent on her i will become, and that scares me. like i think i’ll be a better, healthier girlfriend to her in the long run if i’m seeing other people. she is willing to let me see other people but she herself doesn’t feel up for dating other people. she is so beautiful and amazing but i think she’s like, in awe that I like her and doesn’t believe that more girls would also like her if she tried. i’m seriously not hotter than her, just a lil more confident. but she is fat and i get that internalized fatphobia can fuck with you. anyway, how do i know if this is a recipe for cultivating jealous and resentful feelings? and if so, can we work through them? in our conversations she keeps saying that she just wants me to be present and communicative but i can’t decide whether to believe her or not, because i know it makes her anxious, and she hasn’t really said “yes i want this for you” thanks, i have been reading autostraddle since about 2008 and just now signed up for A+ after years of wishing I could… so thanks for all you’ve done for me over the years.

A:

Siobhan: Ooooh kay, yes you sound depressed. Or if not depressed then like there is some other related mental or maybe even physical health issue going on. Please see a doctor/other professional, because trust me — you cannot replace medical care with sex (or work, or fandom or any of the other stupid shit we’ve all tried over the years).

Similarly, please do not open your relationship in this state of mind. The way you’re talking about it sounds like its driven by how you’re not feeling OK and that’s not a good reason to make these kind of choices. Therapy is better at helping you sort yourself out than even six girlfriends. You might well be a person who is better and healthier in an open relationship but experimenting with it in response to feeling like this isn’t a great idea. Also I suspect your girlfriend really doesn’t want to based on what you’ve said, and that you know that really.

Riese: Firstly, THANK YOU FOR BEING AN A+ MEMBER AND LONGTIME FRIEND. Secondly, you probably are depressed! I’d suggest finding a therapist or other mental health professional to talk to.

Thirdly, I don’t think any relationship should be depended on for your own self-worth, so the idea of venturing into additional ones to achieve that goal doesn’t sound great. I think it can also be difficult, unless you’re in a really healthy place with great open communication, to open up a relationship where only one partner is actually going to date other people (unless it’s open because like, one partner is ace or isn’t into the kind of sex you want to have or whatever). The only way to know if jealousy will take you down is to try it, with the expectation that if your partner at any point doesn’t feel good about what’s happening, that she can call it off.

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Q:

got dumped yesterday and it was only six months and quite casual but i am actually devastated like sadder than i was after my ltr break up how i can i make this better cry

A:

Alyssa: I’m going to sound condescending here, because let’s be real — all advice given in the midst of a heartbreak feels condescending as shit — but I’m going to give it anyway, because a: you asked for it, and b: it’s still 100,000% true. Dealing with a break up is forever and always a matter of time. You are going to feel this until you don’t — whether you like it or not. There’s no formula for getting over shit. That’s the bad news. The good news is that you’re not alone even when you feel like you are. Remember to breathe, and work to treat yourself kindly. Reach out to pals and community, and let yourself feel whatever it is that you feel. Feelings aren’t logical, they’re neither rational nor factual. They just are. It’s okay to feel them, even the bad ones. Take this time to focus on you, and the things you want in your connections with people. You’re gonna keep waking up, and keep working through all the feels until you wake up one morning and feel pretty okay about everything. It’s gonna get better, it really just takes time.

Riese: I would like to direct you to The Best Break-Up Advice You’ll Ever Get. Breakups are terrible. I’m sorry that you’re going through this and I am excited for the time in the future when it does seem so much farther away than you could imagine it being now.

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Q:

Hey AS Team! I’ve been really struggling with some internalized biphobia lately –questioning whether I’m really bi or just gay dealing with compulsory heterosexuality and whether calling myself bi is politically correct (even though my understanding of bi is an attraction to same and different gender[s]). In addition to that, I’ve realized that I most likely am demisexual so thinking about my attractions is even more complicated, because I tend to form sexual attractions after developing an emotional bond to people [but so far this has only happened with women I am friends with, who are usually already in a relationship OR straight]. I guess my real question is how can I figure out what my actual orientation while dealing with these conflicting internalized messages?

A:

Rachel: I wish there were an easy answer for you, friend! As you likely already know, there is no litmus test to being “sure” or knowing 100% what your “actual” orientation is. You’re right that compulsory heterosexuality is super real, for both lesbians and bi women, and even those of us who experience nice moments of “wow I’m SO gay” or “I’m SO bi” often don’t get to stay in that place of satisfied self-assuredness, and have those balanced out with moments of terrifying insecurity when a family member says something about the crush we used to have on Jonathan Taylor Thomas as a kid, or someone tells us yet again that we’re too pretty/femme/straight-seeming/whatever to be gay. Based on how you’ve described yourself, I can’t see any reason why calling yourself bi would be wrong or incorrect, and even if you do decide to change how you identify later on it wouldn’t mean that you were appropriating or somehow taking up undeserved space in a bi identity; it would just mean exactly that, that you changed how you identify, nothing more and nothing less. That said, I’d also like to gently encourage you to interrogate this whole harrowing and sometimes punishing process you’re putting yourself through of “figuring out my actual orientation” — what itch is this scratching for you? What peace do you feel like it will grant you to know? What kind of permission would you feel like you had if you were “sure” that you don’t have now? Is there any way you can access that even without necessarily having, you know, a certification one way or the other in hand? It feels like it might be kindest and most compassionate to yourself if you give yourself permission for a while to just want what you want without needing to assign it to a strict narrative, and let yourself experience attraction and self without an agenda (not because labels don’t matter, they do to a lot of us including me! but sometimes labels come as a result of living, rather than us learning how to live based on our labels).

Siobhan: Hello darling probably bisexual friend! The wonderful thing about the bisexual community is we don’t mind if you later discover you aren’t bi just so long as you don’t then go around saying we’re all secretly gay or straight. But you’re not going to do that so it’s fine. Being both bi and demisexual is confusing as fuck, I know, and it takes a while to figure it out and that’s OK. You can take your time and call yourself bi as long as you want. Also remember that it’s OK to be bi and have a very strong preference; for the most part I do not date men for They Are Crap but the capacity to find them unfortunately appealing is still there. Bisexuality also includes attraction to non binary people of every or no gender identity, so it’s worth considering whether you experience attraction to them as well, regardless of how you feel about men. Mostly though, stop focusing on it. Go out and live your queer life and observe what happens with a sort of mindfulness while remembering you can change how you identify later if you realise you’re wrong. (Also, as a tangent, it might be worth trying to date other demi people or being up front that you are demi and need to be friends first with potential partners as that makes the whole experience a lot easier).

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Q:

Do you have any tips for locating a queer friendly marriage counselor/couples therapist? Have any of you gone to couples therapy? Do you recommend it, or no, or?? I’m happily married and/also wondering if a therapist might be a good resource for my wife and I to work through some recurrent issues that come up in our otherwise really peaceable, collaborative, and supportive relationship. (Namely, I am a pennypincher worrywart & she’s more lax about spending money. Usually we balance each other out and can find compromise, but I’m getting stressed with how often it feels like I have to run interference on her ideas about fun trips to take, shit to buy, etc. I also acknowledge that maybe I worry too much about money, and need to get more comfortable with our finances so that it isn’t such a huge scary unknown.) Anyways, any tips for finding a couples therapist? Or like, good relationship books or workbooks you know of that are queer friendly? Neither my wife nor I have health insurance right now, so we’re trying to do therapy on the cheap if possible.

A:

Riese: I have gone to couples therapy, but it didn’t really do much to be honest besides make me feel worse because she believed all my ex’s lies, making it harder for me to have a leg to stand on! That being said, if your ex is not a pathological liar, probably therapy will work for you. It’s really hard for a professional to provide relevant advice to somebody who isn’t actually bringing themselves fully to the couch, yannow? Most people I know have had really great results from couples therapy though, so I hope they chime in!

Heather: I love couples therapy and I cannot advocate for it strongly enough! It has helped Stacy and I make some small changes in our lives over the years that have radically altered our relationship for the better! We’ve talked to a therapist about money, sex, emotional labor, household labor, the ways we argue, the collision of our childhood trauma, and work-life balance. And every time we’ve gotten such great advice and come away understanding each other a little bit better.

The most important thing about couples therapy, I think, is that both people are going into it with the attitude of: “We’re on the same team and we’re looking for some strategies to understand each other’s perspective better and be better partners to each other.” A lot of people use couples therapists as like a mediator or a judge, like both people are going to go in and build their case for why they’re right and why the other person is wrong, and the therapist is going to render an impartial verdict after both sides have had their say, and that’s the new relationship law. It’s already human nature to tell ourselves a story and run with it, to build our own narratives about how we’ve been wronged in this and that way, and when you’re mentally preparing to make another person believe your story as much as you do, you’re not in the best partnership mindframe. Another couples therapy thing that doesn’t work is when people take their partner to couples therapy because their partner needs to be in personal therapy — for a mental illness or personality disorder or unresolved trauma or whatever — but won’t go. The ol’ therapy switcheroo neeeeeeever works. But neither of those things seem like what you’re doing, so you and your partner are probably great candidates!

As far as finding a therapist, when you search therapists through your insurance database or just a regular therapy database through like Psychology Today, most LGBTQ-friendly therapists will have that listed. And also most LGBTQ-friendly therapists have that info on their website. If they don’t, you can always ask when you call to request an appointment. Definitely make sure that’s sorted before you go in for your first consultation. And once you meet the therapist, make sure it’s someone you’re both comfortable with, and make sure you both know you have the space and permission you need to say if you don’t get a good vibe off of the person you choose. This is team building, too!

I hope you have the best luck with this. Money is one of the top three things all couples argue about and experience stress around, so you’re not alone at all. And I really admire that you’re trying to get ahead of the issue to make your relationship even stronger!

Yvonne: I’m currently going to couples therapy and it’s been surprisingly great so far. My partner and I decided to go because we’re getting married soon and we wanted to be more intentional about our relationship as we move through a new season in our life. We didn’t go to therapy with a problem in mind so that’s why I was terrified that couple’s therapy was gonna like rock the boat and bring up all this shit that I didn’t know existed. But it’s been fine!

We found our therapist the exact same way that Heather described. We searched our insurance database and then we went through the list of therapists specializing in marriage/couple’s counseling and checked to see if they’re queer-friendly. It took some elbow grease and googling lots of names and reading their website if they had one and calling them up and kinda interviewing them and asking if they had experience working with gay couples. It was important for us to also have a woman of color therapist in addition to being LGBTQ-friendly and we found a therapist that has been working for us. I mean, she’s not fully aware of LGBTQ things which can be frustrating to explain sometimes but she’s been helpful overall. I think going to see a couple’s therapist to talk about money is an excellent idea and will probably help y’all in the long run.

Laneia: Just chiming in with another thumbs up for couple’s therapy! I’ve never had a problem solved faster than the ones we took to our therapist. Well ok not like, totally solved forever, but put into a different light than either of us could’ve seen it in on our own, and she gave us the words and practices to work through these specific issues together when they come up again. It’s so important for reoccurring issues to be dragged out into the great wide open and genuinely investigated and processed. Hiring a professional to do that investigation and help with the processing just makes good sense.

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Q:

What do you do when you’ve failed as an ally? my partner recently started id’ing as nonbinary and i had a really emotional reaction to it. i was sad bc i’ve spent my entire life becoming comfortable with being a woman who loves women and i felt like she was taking that away from me. i don’t feel that way anymore, but the guilt is eating me alive.

A:

Riese: You have two separate quandaries here that you’ve conflated into one, so let’s talk about why that is and what you can do now. Being a good ally to non-binary people in your life is one thing. Being in a loving relationship with a non-binary person is another thing. From what I gather, you feel like you failed as an ally because instead of providing familial support and political solidarity to your partner, you made it about you and your feelings. This is true, you weren’t a good ally. But you’re not JUST an ally in this situation, you’re also a girlfriend, and that relationship piece of it is relevant, too. You’re allowed to have feelings about it! It’s completely valid for you to struggle with your partner coming out as a different gender after the travails you’ve endured to accept yourself and your sexual orientation, and to feel as though part of your hard-wrought identity is being threatened by that. But it’s not fair to be mad at your partner. It sounds like you’ve since changed your mind and do feel like you’re attracted to more than just women, including your partner, which is great for you both! So in sum: as an ally, your own personal feelings are not relevant. As a girlfriend, they are! So you don’t need to apologize for having those feelings. But you do need to apologize for something — how and when you expressed them, I imagine — although the best way to know what it is you’re apologizing for is to ask them. “I’ve been feeling really terrible about how your coming out conversation with me went, I know that I was less than supportive because I was so concerned about what this meant for our relationship. I think it was healthy and human for me to have those feelings in the first place, but I’m not sure that how I expressed them was caring or considerate of you and your feelings. I think I fucked up. So if there’s anything specific that was said or anything I can do to make that up to you now, or ways I can be a better ally and girlfriend to you, please tell me.” And if they’re over it and don’t wanna keep talking about it, make room for that too.

Siobhan: Was this reaction internal or external? Because if it was internal then the answer is you forgive yourself and do not burden your partner with this knowledge. That one feels weird because you feel like you’ve betrayed them in some way but thoughts are just thoughts, they only mean something if you act on them. If you actually reacted badly to her when she came out then you need to apologise, but if you’ve already done that then don’t bring it up again because you’d be doing it for you and not her and this should be about her feelings, not yours.

Alexis: I agree with Siobhan in, if the reaction was external and you’ve already apologize, let it be. And if it was internal, then forgive yourself and work to understand your feelings better and to avoid burdening your partner. One of the things I’ve learned that helps me the most is, when I do something that hurts someone else, after apologizing, when I need to vent about it, I make sure the work I do to do better doesn’t depend on them patting me on the back for it. What I mean is, it might help to look into chatrooms and such where other people are experiencing something similar and trying to work through it. And then, if you think there’s something you can do better, doing it one day and consistently doing it if your partner reacts positively to it is like a really big great way to apologize. My sister misgendered me for a good week right after I came out to her and I just completely shut down because of it. I’m not sure who she talked to or what she read, but last week she started calling me by my pronouns and using gender neutral signifiers for me. I don’t care what in her made this change, I’m just glad it did. I’m thinking that, if you’re able to meet your partner where they need you most, it will lessen your guilt and make them feel a lot better too.

Archie: Honestly, let it go. As someone who has had partners/friends make my pronoun change all about them (their resistance to it/how hard it is for them to not fuck it up/how it’s not proper English/yadda yadda) it was real annoying (and hard) to hold their hand through the process—especially because I was juggling coming out to them but also other loved ones, and strangers and myself to an extent. It’s a weird turbulent time and it’s crappy when the person who is supposed to have your back isn’t on your side. But I can tell you: it’s definitely extra annoying to have to hold their hand through whatever guilt they have afterward about not being an ally from the start. I GET IT, you realized you messed up. Instead of wallowing in it (and making them reassure you that it’s all good) just get on their side, correct your pals & family when they mess up, and be a solid partner.

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Q:

is it appropriative to use “Mx” if I’m essentially a woman? I’m fine with being a woman and being addressed as a women, but standing in front of a room or typing in my title and asking to be called Ms makes my insides feel squirmy.

A:

Cee: I think if you feel squirmy using Ms than it’s fine to use Mx. Use what makes you feel comfortable! Be prepared that people will ask you about it, and it’s good to have a short answer prepared to give to people when they do so you’re not caught off guard.

It also feels like there might be more here worth investigating. Maybe I’m digging into this a bit, but it sounds like you’re okay with others reading you as a woman, but perhaps feeling uncomfortable with you labelling or titling yourself as such? And what do you mean when you call yourself “essentially a woman”? This sounds quite similar to me before I came out as genderqueer. I might be just projecting — if it’s not true to you, please forgive me! But if this does sound accurate, perhaps a deeper dig is in order.

Riese: Just to offer an alternate opinion — as a woman who feels uncomfortable about a lot of the words associated with womanhood (like ma’am or miss or mrs or ms), I don’t necessarily think that feeling that way means you might not be a woman.

Siobhan: I don’t think it’s appropriative, I think normalising the use of gender neutral honorifics can only be a good thing (like how moving orchestra auditions behind a screen suddenly meant women were being hired in equal numbers to men), as can challenging how people view gender and gendered attributes. Also these kind of things are about personal comfort and how you relate to your own gender, even if you are cis. Though both Riese and Cee are right; you might well be a woman who is uncomfortable with a lot of the words applied to womanhood and their connotations, or you may be a non-binary woman or non-binary woman adjacent person or other. It worth reading up and thinking about.

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Q:

Hello! Say you’re in a long term monogamous relationship. Is it typical to feel really, insatiably thirsty even when you’re still regularly having sex with your partner? I ask because I have been in a relationship for 10 years and I feel it’s possible the gender of my partner maybe doesn’t match my sexuality. This insatiable thirst, despite good-enough, maintenance kind of sex, is my strongest piece of evidence that I might be too gay for my otherwise hetero marriage. But I keep coming back to the question: if you are in any long term relationship, regardless of sexuality, wouldn’t people go through seasons where sex just isn’t satisfying and you can’t stop thinking about having sex with another, different kind of person? My therapist asked if I talked about this with friends who have also been monogamous for many years. I can’t bring myself to ask my friends. The question feels too intimate and I feel like uncovering any lack of desire for your partner is kind of embarrassing and possibly embarrassing to someone’s partner, who I assume would like to feel desired and wanted. So I ask you, because you always give good advice.

Thanks for reading,

Someone with a caring, kind and engaged partner and coparent for whom I feel little desire.

A:

Rachel: Hm I think the question here is not so much about whether it’s normal or not bc there really is no meaningful “normal” baseline for that, but you can ask whether it’s normal for YOU, and the fact that you are asking this question and have a fully formed theory about what it means suggests maybe it’s not! I don’t think there’s a universal litmus assessment for what this would “mean” but it seems like it’s something important that is happening for you right now and that’s worth paying attention to and letting what you think or fear you want come to the surface, something that seems like it’s probably already in the process of happening. Thinking of you and good luck friend!

Siobhan: Is it possible that you’re a non monogamous person in a monogamous relationship? Or that you didn’t get the chance to have relationships with women before settling down with this person even though you have a preference for women? Because if you are enjoying the sex you’re having with him but want more and different sex that doesn’t mean you’re too gay for him but it does mean that you want something else, maybe in addition or maybe instead. You might well be gay but don’t just think of it in binary terms while trying to figure it out. (Also important to consider, were you attracted to him and greedy for sex with him before? If so, what’s changed?)

Riese: You could try reading Mating in Captivity to see if any of it resonates with you, or maybe even Come As You Are? Yes, of course sex wanes over the course of a long-term relationship, but — and I guess this isn’t the like, PC thing to say or whatever — if you don’t feel a lot of desire towards your partner and most of your desire seems to be directed at women… you might be too gay for your relationship! But if your desire for sex outside of your marriage is for men and women then maybe that’s not the answer, maybe you’re non-monogamous or this is just the ebb and flow of things.

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Q:

Blindfolds. A Good Thing. But they keep falling off my activity partner and then we both feel sad. Is there a solution?

A:

Archie: If you’re using a blindfold with an elastic strap, it might be time to upgrade to a buckle blindfold, or just something more heavy-duty.

Carolyn: If that doesn’t work, order your activity partner to keep their eyes closed and punish them if they don’t. Tease/threaten occasionally. Problem solved.

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Q:

I don’t really have many (any…) lgbt friends that I hang out with in person in real life. But I do have a few pretty good straight friends who I’m out to that live where I do. I feel like I’ve been trying (and failing) to normalize talking about girls and gay stuff in general and issues and life things that I deal with that they just will never understand because they are straight. I came out to these friends (and anyone for that matter) less than a year ago. Was talking about gay shit with your straight friends ever something that was a struggle for any of you? Does it get easier the more I talk about it and normalize it? I hardly ever talk to other queer people face to face but I don’t think I ever have the same feelings of awkward/uncomfortable/weird when I talk to them about gay stuff as opposed to straight people. Is it just because no matter how much I love my straight friends they will just never get me like other gay people will? Is it just something that I need to get over and move on with my life and stop feeling weird about talking about hot girls to my straight friends? I just get frustrated by it sometimes.

A:

Valerie Anne: I FEEL THIS SO HARD. I have been lucky enough to eventually find a few different group of exclusively queer friends, but I still have one group of mostly straight friends, and they can be a CHORE, let me tell you. But here’s a thing I’ve learned: that saying? It’s true: Those who mind don’t matter, those who matter don’t mind. If you’re comfortable saying things about hot girls (to use your example), keep talking about hot girls. Like exposure therapy. The people who truly care about you will power through any initial discomfort until they’re used to it and talking about hot girls WITH you. Those who continue to be uncomfortable aren’t worth keeping around. It won’t always be easy! There will be some days where you have to explain to your straight friend that just because their boyfriend fingered her doesn’t mean she had “lesbian sex” (to use a real example from my life). Or days you you have to explain that just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you’re blind and can also weigh in on whether the dude they matched with on Tinder is hot or not. But once the initial weeding-out process is over, you’ll find some great allies who will help you apply glitter and shop for new rainbow sneakers for Pride.

Siobhan: Is the discomfort yours or theirs? Because if it’s yours and you feel rude or weird talking to them about this because of all the ways society says we’re wrong and gross then yes, it gets so much easier but you do have to work on yourself and your internalised issues. If it’s them then it might get easier and it might not, it depends on if they’re just new to knowing LGBT+ people and willing to adapt or if they’re of the love the sinner hate the sin variety. If its the latter then they suck and its up to you whether or not you want to keep exposing them to see if it helps or give up on it, but either way you’ll meet awesome queer and queer positive friends to replace them with in the future.

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Q:

my ex and I read autostraddle together all the time – we learned how to have sex, what lube and sex toys to buy, what shows to watch, it was very central to the relationship. Now that we’re broken up, like other things that we did together (favorite date spots, food, music, etc) I can’t bring myself to read anything autostraddle because it brings up too much sad and regret and bad breakup feelings ya know? how do i reclaim AS for me? (it’s been ten months :'(

A:

Carolyn: Like reclaiming anything after a breakup, you can either do it all at once so hard that it stops being uncomfortable because it’s hard to be sad about anything for six hours straight, or you can do it in small bites that get bigger over time until you don’t even notice when the song you fell in love to comes on in the grocery store or whatever. Also try changing the context: read alone, read with friends, read on your phone if you used to read on your laptop. Don’t see the sex toys as all the sex toys you could have used with your ex; see them as all the sex toys you can now use in your bright beautiful future.

Natalie: I had a similar experience…after one particularly bad break-up, I had to stop listening to certain musicians because we’d talked about them or seen them together and listening to them without her just hurt. But eventually, those artists released new music…music that sounded different than what I’d heard with her…and listening to them or going to their shows was about my experience, not the one we’d shared.

Likewise, Autostraddle is a site that brings new material and new voices to you on a regular basis. Everything you’re experiencing about this site right now (including this shiny new font) is yours to enjoy on your own (you never actually shared it with her). Sure, you may have talked about TV we discussed here, but did you talk about Jane Ramos on Jane the Virgin or Everything Sucks! or Killing Eve? No, because those things weren’t part of our world 10 months ago. There’s no need to carry the sadness into reading and commenting about them.

Plus, we really just like having you around and want you to stay.

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Q:

I just got broken up with for the second time by someone who said i’m great and they really like me but they’ve got some issues they need to figure out first. Which, I get — but why does everyone end things with me for this reason? And it’s not fair that I can’t be angry at them because they cry when they break up with me and it’s obviously hurting them too! I’m processing a lot of feelings rn and I’m just feeling like I’m never enough for someone to want to be with me in spite of their issues

A:

Rachel: Darlin’ I don’t mean to be dismissive of what you’re going through, and I truly deeply know how hard this is, but anecdotally and on instinct I would say that this is 90% of the reason anyone ends anything with anyone! I have heard variations on this before and given people variations on this too, and I’m sure I will again, and unfortunately I’m sure you will too. The truth is that as a community we are a deeply traumatized bunch — there’s a reason that we have such high rates of mental illness and substance abuse, not to be a bummer! — and even the most well-adjusted of us, who had a very accepting family and a safe home and hasn’t had to experience any major traumatic events, often still have a lot of issues we need to work on because being LGBT in this culture is alienating and isolating and confusing. I would gently suggest that you consider taking these people at their word and accepting that they are being honest about their capabilities as a potential partner, which don’t magically change based on how much we like someone, unfortunately. I’ve also been in the situation of talking someone who said they couldn’t do it and were too messed up into doing it anyway, and guess what — they were right! They weren’t able to meet my needs in a partner, much as they loved me, and I wish I had listened to them the first time. There was no amount of liking me that would have meant they could be a good partner to me “in spite of” their issues; baggage and trauma just need to be worked on, and it’s a long process and there’s no way around it. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be angry at them — someone can be hurting and you can make space for that and still ask them to make space for the fact that you, too, have been hurt and upset. And it’s valid to wish that they wanted to work on their issues with you instead of apart, and you can abe upset about that and it’s fair to let them know — I think it could be really helpful for you to say “I hear you and also I’m mad at you!”

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Q.

Hey, any tips on dealing with crushes when you’re in a relationship? I get that it’s normal to feel feelings, and obviously we’re all human, but it feels weird. It happens to me a lot, and I am SO very happy with my partner so I know that isn’t the issue. I just love cuddling and making out, and just all the squishy feelings you can get with people. I’m inclined to think that I might thrive under some relationship structure that is less than entirely monogamous, but I don’t know how to start that conversation with my partner. There’s been talk of having a threesome someday when and if the right person for that comes along, but that’s the only time it’s really come up. I’m just scared, because I really really love my partner, and I don’t want to alienate them by bringing this up if they’re not up for it. I just also feel like I have so much romantic, affectionate, sexual energy that I’m not really getting any outlet for… also am I a bad person for feeling that way??? On top of the other feelings is GUILT.

A:

Yvonne: You’re exactly right that it’s totally normal to have these crush feelings because we’re all human. So what feels weird to you? If you’re talking just about a crush, does it feel like overstepping boundaries in your relationship? You should figure that out and explore why it feels weird to you. I’m in a monogamous relationship and my partner and I talk about our crushes all the time! It just doesn’t make sense for use to hide that from each other? We both love each other very much and yes, we find other people attractive and so we talk about those attractive people. It’s also fun that we can talk to each other about what our crush did or said and we’re totally fine with that because we know where we draw a line. Our crushes have never moved past anything other than a crush and it can be difficult to navigate if you see you’re catching feelings for a person and acting on them and in that case, it’s moved into a different territory altogether. There was one time when my crushes became excruciating and I was like OBSESSED with them but it was like all in my head and then I knew it was unhealthy. I knew I had to dial it back because it was interfering with my relationship. So if your crush on someone is getting out of control, my suggestion is to hide them on my social media and limit your interactions with them, online and irl, and reinvest that time into your relationship! I mean, this has just been my specific experience and maybe these crushes are a good thing for you? And they maybe indicative of you wanting to explore beyond your monogamous relationship and if that’s what you want, cool! Maybe you would thrive under a different relationship structure and the only way you can find out what’s best for you is if you talk with your partner. It’s scary and they might be hurt but you’re gonna have to sort it out if this is important to you. And no you shouldn’t feel bad for having lots of romantic, sexual, affectionate energy but you should definitely figure out a healthy way for you to have an outlet for them and that is right for you and your partner.

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Q.

Hello! I’m looking for book and/or resource recommendations! I’m not super sure what I’m looking for exists though? Basically: I’m nonbinary, but other than that my gender is like ??? a big ol’ amorphous mess that I’d kind of like to know more about? and I heard about the ‘My New Gender Workbook’ and I thought that sounded pretty perfect – like, a literal workbook to help me work through my gender feels and ~figure shit out~. Only it turns out that’s like, not what that is? I was imagining essentially the DBT handbook but for gender. So… does that exist? Or something similar? Is there a text that’s really helpful for translating gender blob feelings into something that can be actually articulated to other human beings? Would adore your help!!! Thank you!!!

A.

Archie: Hi hi! I think what you might be looking for is How To Understand Your Gender: A Practical Guide To Understanding Who You Are! This book is pretty comprehensive but I think could be useful to you. Also, try and remember you’re not gonna figure it all out right away and that even if you did there’s a good chance it could morph and become something different with time anyways.

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Q.

IDK if this is Important enough for a “find your fit” article (which i have been LOVING btw) but i’m a law student just starting Professional Adult Jobs and I need help figuring out how to dress business casual but still look queer but also not spend ridiculous amounts of money… do any of you have any advice?? thank u i love u

A.

Laura M: Maybe try Uniqlo? I find them very reasonably priced for business casual stuff, and a lot of their pieces have a sort of breezy, blockish fit. I don’t know what “looking queer” means to you personally, but I get real power dyke vibes from their current shirts and blouses section.

Riese: We did a Lez Get Dressed for Work series back in 2013 that might be of use to you. It could be good to invest in some good shirts from Uniqlo, like Laura mentioned, or J.Crew, they have whole woman@work or men@work sections. A good place to start if you wanna look gay and also nice is to wear “masculine” shirts with “feminine” prints. Here’s what a bunch of other queers are wearing to work! I do think this is a good “Find Your Fit” idea if you want to submit it. If you wanna save money, you could always pick up some cheap shirts at Goodwill and then get them tailored.

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Q.

Hi, I’m feeling some bisexual sadness right now. I’m in a monogamous relationship with a guy that I truly truly love, but this tends to make me feel disconnected from the queer community. Added to this, I’ve been wanting to try out threesomes as a way to both get to reconnect with my gayness and as a compromise with the whole monogamy issue. The problem is… I have no idea how to go about it without making anyone uncomfortable, or without queer women hating me for being “one of those unicorn hunters.” Like, this isn’t for my boyfriend to get to have sex with two women; it was my idea, and he knows that he may be only minimally involved. Anyway, my point is that I would very much like to go and find such a person in a respectful. low-key way, but there’s so much hate online about people who do that that I really don’t even know if I can. No one who makes these posts about “predators” and such seems to consider the possibility that it might be wlw trying to set these things up, rather than straight girls. I don’t know what my question is really, except I would love input on “ethical unicorn hunting” or whatever, and maybe also just some reassurance that I’m not a shitty, fake-gay? Bisexuality is hard, and people on all points of the Kinsey Scale want to make me feel shitty about it for some reason.

Rachel: I think there are a couple things happening here — you’re right that bisexuality is definitely hard, and that feelings of being “fake” are definitely a real and harmful experience for so many of us, and that they can be reinforced intentionally or unintentionally by LGBT community and by straight people. Another thing that’s happening here is your interest in experiencing things with a third/s! Right now in this question I feel like you are maybe conflating these things, and I’m getting the sense that you believe other bi women are opposed to joining you and your bf because they think of you as a straight girl. I’m not sure what the specifics of your community or “these posts” are; maybe someone has said something to that effect! Even if they have, though, I would gently suggest that you try out separating those ideas for a moment in your thinking through of this situation and do some thought experiments to see if there are any other reasons why bi women in your community might feel this way, and if there is an opportunity for empathy/connection here rather than defensiveness. By the time most of us, bi women, have reached adulthood, so many of us have experienced at best unwanted sexual advances or at worst sexual violence, and there is a good chance it was specifically tied to our sexual orientation/bi identity and stereotypes thereof, often specifically centered around threesomes — unsolicited propositions for threesomes, propositions from strangers, partners trying to coerce us into threesomes or being punishing/jealous because they assume we want them just because we’re bi, the list goes on! Often in these scenarios we’re being treated (as is any fetishized minority group in situations like this) like a two-dimensional fantasy, not a whole person with needs, wants, boundaries, desires, etc.

By the time your post/dating profile/text/whatever inquiring about a threesome reaches a hypothetical person, they have likely already waded through a lot of life experiences that haven’t necessarily suggested that this will be a good experience — and that’s based on their experiences, not you, or their perception or assumptions about you. Anecdotally, I think most bi women who are solicited for a threesome with a different-sex couple are at least open to the idea that, if not actively assuming that, the woman in the couple is also bi; after all, she does want to have sex with a woman! Even this knowledge doesn’t necessarily assuage other concerns though; lgbt women as a group are perfectly capable of treating other lgbt women poorly, and again, most bi women in this situation have plenty of reason to be wary. I guess my advice here would be to approach looking for a third with some of the same things you’d approach looking for any kind of sexual/romantic connection, and be mindful and clear about what you can offer them as well as what you’re interested in from them. What do you and your boyfriend bring to the table as a couple for this person? In what ways can you concretely respond to any concerns or insecurities about being objectified — or if you’re looking for something purely casual and very NSA, how can you be upfront about that in a respectful way? What, specifically, do you foresee your boyfriend’s involvement being and can you make clear that you’re actively enthusiastic about respecting her boundaries around that? Are you looking for someone to date and spend time with outside of the bedroom too, and if so what will that relationship look like? The more you can communicate about these things proactively and make it clear that you’ve thought about the third person’s experience as well, the better this will probably go!

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Q.

Hey Team AS! I have a question. As an anxious person, what are your tips for calling out something? I’m a mod online and have tried but as an anxious person, feel I am Fucking It Up and The Worst. Should I direct people to resources? Should I stfu? Would love some help for future reference. Ty, love the work you do!

A.

Laura M: Are there community guidelines you can cite? I imagine that writing lengthy responses for each unique case you encounter would be exhausting, and is not really what people want from mods anyway; frequently, they just want someone to enforce the rules.

If there aren’t rules for engagement in your community, maybe you could write them? And then you’ll get to appeal to your own authority when you succinctly point people to a pre-written explanation of what category of thing they’re doing that’s bad. That would be pretty neat!

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Q:

Hello! I’ve been thinking a lot about my gender lately and am having a confusing time with it… I was socialized female, but always felt like I was really bad at “being a girl” whatever that means. Once I realized my queer identity, I figured that had something to do with my feeling different about my gender than other girls I knew, but after learning about non-binary identities, I can’t stop thinking about what that would mean for me. I guess I am just having a hard time distinguishing if I feel weird about being seen as a woman because of the societal implications that has, or if I feel weird about being seen as a woman because I am not really one… how do I separate the two? How do I stop wondering if it’s just men treating me as less that is making me feel this way? Does binding and wanting top surgery make me nb or are those things that can coexist with being a woman?? – a confused 20-something something

A:

Archie: TBH, it doesn’t matter ~why~ you feel weird about being seen as a woman, just that you do. It’s probably some combination of both anyway. Separating the two reasons is pointless because gender-feelings are often a muddled mess of reasons. Remind yourself that you don’t need a reason to be non-binary, you just are sometimes. And remind yourself that sometimes there’s a multitude of reasons that make us non-binary. You can identify as nb because you just are AND because of how society/men has made you feel. There’s no rules here. Binding and wanting top surgery can totally co-exist with being a woman, they can also be indicators of a non-binary identity! There’s a million ways to exist in a body. I’d focus on what makes you feel good about yours and lean into that, whether that be identifying a certain way, changing pronouns (or not), or binding (or not), and don’t feel like you have to justify any of it.

Riese: Part of why I identify as a lesbian and not bisexual is because of how society/men has made me feel, and I’m comfortable with that, so! Also tons of cis women bind for so many reasons. It’s less common for cis women to want top surgery, but I know plenty who have. You’ll figure it out, there’s no clock ticking on any of this.

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Q:

How do you tell a straight person you don’t want to go to Pride with them? A not particularly close friend of mine texted me asking if I’m going to Pride and I am but I just want to go with my queer friends… Of course there are acceptable reasons for straight people to go to pride events but I feel like she falls under the category of ‘looks like a fun party / cool spectacle’ and I’m just not interested in going with her, but I don’t feel close enough to her to have this kind of frank conversation!

A:

Archie: You 100% don’t have to explain ANYTHING to them, and you 1000% don’t have to go to Pride with them. Just tell them, “I actually plan on spending Pride with a bunch of my queer buds, sorry! I’m sure you’ll find someone else to enjoy the festivities with. Happy pride!” Then go live your gayest life.

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Q:

So my new girlfriend used to be straight (or thought so, anyway) and does not understand my obsession with Autostraddle or lots of gay things. She’s also insecure about whether she’s “gay enough” for me and if I’ll decide I need someone gayer. I’d like her to have AS to go to for community and to feel less alone, but I’m not sure the best way to introduce her to the site so that she can understand what it is and what it can mean to people. I tried to start her off with some articles by one of my favorite writers, but it turns out the Erin is for a more refined gay palate :) Any article recommendations for a newly queer woman who doesn’t identify with lesbian (except sometimes she does) because she doesn’t want to take away the genuine-ness (?) of her previous relationships with men, but feels a little biphobic (understands that the label is true for her, but is skeptical when it is used by celebrities) and is most comfortable with “queer”? Ideally I want her to feel connected and to start to understand how AS is more than just gay headlines or random articles.

A.

Riese: Hmmm okay. So I’d say that of all our writers over the years, the ones who have identified as bisexual or else as queer but have been open about also dating men currently or in the past are Rachel, Laura M, Audrey and Hannah H. I’ve written about how even though I identify as a lesbian now, I very much do not discount past relationships with men as things I was genuinely into and seriously had no idea I was gay until my early/mid-20s.

• Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About My Sexual Orientation And Were(n’t) Afraid To Ask
• Our Willow, Ourselves
• Coming Out As An Amorphous Weirdo
• What I Want From My Queer Community: Inspired By An Autostraddle London Meetup
• Like Love Was A Thing I Could Do
• We All Have Feelings For Julia Nunes: The Autostraddle Interview

Also here are 22 of Autostraddle’s Best Articles on Bisexuals and Bisexuality — I know she doesn’t identify that way but you might find something here that would resonate with her. We did that in 2016 though so it’s not TOTALLY COMPREHENSIVE.

And maybe…

• For All The Girls I Loved Before I Knew I Could
• It’s A War Out There: How Queer Female Friendships Can Save Us All

Maybe commenters would have other suggestions!

Laneia: Ok yes but also, is she the kind of person who refuses to listen to the band that everyone’s into right now, or read the book that at least three of her friends have told her is SOOOO GOOOD and that they know she’ll just LOOOOOVE it? Because I am hella that person and if my wife was like BUT THIS WEBSITE IS SO GOOD AND THE COMMUNITY OH JUST WAIT YOU’LL SEE I’d be like, raincheck! I think because I’m a contrarian and want all the cool ideas to be my own! Listen I’m just being real with you. Maybe, much like that album you listened to in 8th grade that changed the way you thought about the whole damn world, Autostraddle is the kind of thing one must introduce oneself to. (Also my own wife doesn’t even read Autostraddle and was super not into labels or being part of a queer community until she went to A-Camp! Maybe you should bring her to camp? Just throwin’ some ideas around!)

8 Fascinating Facts About Bisexual Legend Colette That You Should Know Before Keira Knightly’s Biopic

From the producers who brought you Carol and the studio that brought you Disobedience and the actor who brought you undisputed lesbian coming-of-age story Bend It Like Beckham comes a new film about the French writer/bisexual legend Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. But you can just call her Colette. Everyone else did and so that’s the tile of her movie.

If you know Colette, you’re surely already lined up to buy your tickets to the film. If you don’t know Colette, allow me to introduce you. She is one of the most fascinating queer women to ever have her history recorded — and boi did she ever have it recorded!

Dozens of biographers have compiled tens of thousands of pages about Colette’s life over the last few decades, each of them imprinting on her in some way or another, shaping her words and her actions into the motives that best suited their own personal agendas. In the earliest biographies after her death, Colette was painted as a victim who survived an abusive first husband and paid the price for divorcing him by being driven into stage-acting, poverty, and the arms of women. Biographers in later years, however, have “emphasized the provocative teenager, the resolute bisexual, the consummate artist” and found her to be a “surprisingly subversive modern woman who defied traditional models, was unafraid to reverse sex roles and was blessed with an amazing talent for survival and self-renewal.”

Colette is a compelling historical figure, full of fire and contradictions. Before you go see Keira Knightley portray her, here are eight things you should know about her life.

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1. Colette’s first husband gave her a room of her own — and locked her inside it.

Henry Gauthier-Villars, known to everyone as Willy, was Colette’s first husband and he was an absolute con-artist. He posed as a writer, but never wrote anything at all. He hired composers to write his music critic columns and ghost writers to pen all his novels. He got free labor from Colette, and when she started wanting credit for her massively popular Claudine series and also wasn’t writing sequels fast enough, he literally locked her in her room until she produced enough pages to suit him.

2. Colette wrote the original queer YA series.

The Claudine series consists of four novels that begin when Claudine is in her early teens and follow her through her marriage to a man she ends up despising and cheating on with another woman. Claudine is unapologetically bisexual, in fact, and also a fan of wearing men’s clothes. The series was a huge hit with French housewives and French intellectuals, so much so that it spawned branded soaps, school uniforms, perfumes, and even cigars. The whole thing is just layers of queerness. Colette wrote the book posing as a man who was writing a bisexual tomboy who married a very feminine man whom she fell out of love with to pursue a very feminine woman. Many of Colette’s biographers also count Claudine as the first modern YA coming of age story with a female protagonist.

3. Claudine shares themes with Wonder Woman for a reason.

Colette’s mother was a great student of philosopher Charles Fourier and his doctrine of voluptuousness. Fourier, who is often credited with coining the word “feminism,” was a big proponent of gender equality and allowing people to explore their sexuality outside the confines of monogamous heterosexual marriage. He was very much a proponent of queer polyamory. Colette is believed to have used her mother’s journals and teachings as inspiration for her characters and her own personal ethos. Another student of Charles Fourier? Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston. You see themes of his teachings playing out vividly in many of Wonder Woman’s Golden Age stories.

In Judith Thurman’s Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, she says Colette was “a young woman with a weakness for bondage an old woman with a genius for domination.” That’s Wonder Woman’s history in a nutshell, but literally.

4. Proust was Colette’s arch-nemesis.

Despite being a prolific writer who turned out more than 50 novels in her life, Colette was often denied the critical respect she deserved because she wrote about women and also feelings and sex and sexuality and fashion and food and the elusiveness of the concept of home. Oh, and animals. Lots of talking animals. Nearly every biography and even obituary of Colette will mention that she was the best French woman writer of her time; more often than not she is “second only to Proust.” There’s no evidence she had any personal enmity toward Proust, but critics could not help stop comparing them to each other and finding Colette wanting simply by the “feminine” nature of her writing. Rarely, and wonderfully, major publications did single her out as the greatest French writer of her generation. Famously, the New York Times did so in it’s review of her collection of short stories in 1951:

“She is the greatest living French writer of fiction [and] she was while Gide and Proust still lived,” NYT declared. “These two preposterously afflicted self-adoring, frankly career-geniuses certainly got in Colette’s light; they certainly diminished her standing, though not her own kind of genius.”

5. Colette’s chart puts Alice Pieszecki’s to shame.

In addition to writing about bisexual women, Colette lived openly as a bisexual woman and had relationships with many prominent queer ladies. Her two most famous women lovers are probably American playwright and novelist Natalie Clifford Barney, self-proclaimed “queen of the Paris lesbians” and French noblewoman and artist Mathilde “Missy” de Morny (who also happened to be Napoleon’s niece). Missy was famous for her short hair, the fact that she wore full three-piece suits (despite the fact that it was literally illegal for women to do so) and her marriage to openly gay nobleman Jacques Godart. She even crossed paths and lovers with famous English suffragette/original Shane McCutcheon, Radclyffe Hall.

6. Her queer kisses caused literal riots.

When Colette and Missy kissed on stage after performing Rêve d’Égypte at the Moulin Rouge in 1907, the police were called in to control the crowd, which responded to the sapphic smooch with puritanical hysterics. Their riot spilled into the streets and ended with people smashing windows. This followed an incident where Colette was photographed on stage after her breast slipped out of one of her costumes and exposed her nipple. The public was so frenzied about her behavior, she and Missy had to stop living together (though they continued their relationship for several more years).

7. Colette made Audrey Hepburn.

Colette wrote until her dying day. In fact, one of her last works, Gigi, is probably her most famous — at least among Americans. She published it in her 70s and then hand-picked Audrey Hepburn to play the title role in the Broadway show. A role that launched Hepburn’s career, despite the fact that she couldn’t even pitch her voice so the audience could hear her when she first started rehearsing. The show’s producers and directors were worried about Hepburn’s timidity and the way she “garbled” her lines, but she always had Colette in her corner.

8. Colette did not want to be a hero.

Colette was not without her glaring flaws and weaknesses, none of which she shied away from talking and writing about. She seemed to — at the very least — not care for her own daughter, ultimately abandoning her to paid caretakers. She wrote of being a mother, “My strain of virility saved me from the danger which threatens the writer, elevated to a happy and tender parent, of becoming a mediocre author.” She also confessed that a friend had to tear a horse whip out of her hand when she took it up to hit her child with it. It’s no surprise, then, that the most unflattering biography of Colette comes from Michel del Castillo, one of Colette’s daughter’s longtime friends. Colette also published stories and columns in newspapers and magazines that ran anti-Semitic content during the Nazi occupation of France, despite also helping her Jewish friends and being married to a Jewish man.

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It’s impossible to try to recount all the ins and outs and ups and downs of Colette’s life in one list. The most recent biographies about her life contain multiple volumes. But these are some things I thought you’d want to know! If you’ve got any Colette anecdotes or facts you want to talk about, share them in the comments. In the meantime, here’s the official trailer for Keira Knightley’s film. You know a review is coming as soon as I get my hands on it.

Me, My Doppelgänger, and I

I meet my doppelgänger at a poetry reading. I’m sitting at a tall bar table with two friends, drinking a spiked hot chocolate. I don’t need the dairy, but it fits my low key, cozy aesthetic. We arrived early to get our seats, and are deep into one of our usual existential crises when my doppelgänger walks toward me. They are one of the poets reading that night. I recognize them from Twitter, and have seen them laughing with the other poets. They seem comfortable, excited but not jitterish. I twist around, anticipating their arrival.

“Hey, so, we have the exact same face,” they announce without introduction, in a way that makes me question whether we’ve met before. We exchange names, I assume, but I don’t actually remember that part. I struggle to speak, wanting to be funny and clever, knowing this sort of thing doesn’t happen to me. This is a New York Story, but also a New Friend. Quality among both a rarity. I want them to like me, I already like them. Bold, funny. Our eyebrows appear the most similar, thick and long. Maybe our noses a little, too.

My companions assure us that my doppelgänger is correct —we are deemed the same. They ask if we can take a photo together. “But don’t smile,” my doppelgänger says. “Don’t worry, I’m good at that.”

They walk away without offering to send me the photo, without asking for my number, or even my Twitter handle. Between readers, I find their profile and see that they have posted the photo. I follow them. I retweet the photo. I refresh Twitter. Later that night, during another refresh, they post again: I’ve never felt more alone in my life shouts out to nyc.

Their loneliness is not the real reason I reach out, but it’s a great excuse. I want a friend. I reply to the tweet. Let’s be friends. For real. I invite them to my birthday party. I hope this isn’t too weird, I write. My doppelgänger is a real poet and they are so much cooler than me, yet they respond immediately. Nothing is too weird for us, they say.

Out of six readers, my friends and I agree that my doppelgänger was at least in the top two, if not the best of the night. I feel proud, as if it were my own poem, or at least a good omen for my own poetry. Proud that somebody with a real skill, a skill that I chase, if sometimes halfheartedly, chose me to be their doppelgänger.

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“I don’t think I’d recognize my own face on somebody else,” a friend says at my birthday party, as we await my doppelgänger’s arrival. I nod. Sure, of course. I’m not really listening.

“But you have a twin,” my boyfriend reminds her.

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In the bathroom, my doppelgänger watches me cut a friend’s hair. It goes all the way down to her waist, sunflower yellow, and she needs to trim off the dead ends. In college, she would braid my hair all the time, spindly fingers quick to knot up anything you ask. She says that in elementary school, kids would line up at her lap for braids before class. She doesn’t trust me with scissors, but she’s drunk enough to risk it. Besides, it’s my birthday. She sits on the toilet lid facing the wall, and I place the trash can under her back. I try to be gentle as I pull her hair together, taking off as little as I can. She laughs as I work, probably to push away the fear, but my doppelgänger reassures her: I’m doing a really good job. I do the thing that hairdressers do at the end of the haircut, snipping upwards for texture.

Later, my friend and I lay in my bed cuddling, me stroking her dead end-less hair. She’s here visiting my city on my birthday in no small part because of the breakup that she’s going through. She didn’t see it coming, she tells me. She had no idea he was capable of doing it. She hasn’t heard from him in weeks.

“I wish that I could be set free, guiltless, into the wild.”

I tell her a secret. I’m a little jealous. I love my boyfriend, and I think we’re going to get married someday, and continue to be very happy. But sometimes, I think about what would happen if he left me. I wish that I could be set free, guiltless, into the wild. I tell her a second secret. I’m bisexual. He knows it, along with a few other people. It’s something I decided/discovered somewhere along the way in our five and a half year relationship. Right now, being bi in a long-term relationship looks like wanting to queer my relationship, to open myself — ourselves — up, to charge up the gay inside me until I’m a dizzy battery green, but ultimately, suppressing those desires. Telling them shhh, wait, be still, so that he doesn’t think I’m one of those bisexuals who cheats.

My doppelgänger appears in the doorway and we turn to them. “What are you talking about?”

“I told her I’m bi,” I say. An honest drunk.

“Is that a secret?”

“Well, kind of.”

“You need to free yourself,” they tell me.

“I am free. I’m, like, 89% free. How free are you?”

“100%.”

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Halfway through the party, it has been brought to my attention that my doppelgänger wants to make out with me. Or rather, wants to know if I want to make out with them. They’re into me, my friend who took the photo of us at the reading tells me. She and I are standing in my kitchen alone, her resting on the window sill catching the breeze, me leaning into the wall, trying to stay close to keep her attention. “What do you want me to say to them?” She asks.
“What do you want me to say to them?” She keeps asking me this same question. I do not understand if I am supposed to be responding to a question (Yes I Will Make Out With You / No, Sorry, Maybe Next Year), or simply listening and taking note. I am also worried that, like a game of middle school crush telephone, the message has been distorted by the amount of vodka that my friend has had to drink. A head pops quickly in then out of the kitchen. My friend nods and I don’t need to ask who it was.

“Barely queer, unshaved legs hidden safely under thick black tights, I know who I’m cast as in this film: Straight White Girl In Boring Relationship Wants Some Adventure.”

As the party begins to dwindle, my doppelgänger remains. My two friends from the reading prepare to leave, slurring through the story of the two, no, three? cigarettes they had with my doppelgänger. One encouraged them to try to talk to me — “Theresa’s always down to talk about sexuality and stuff,” she says she said. The other tells me that my doppelgänger is always, apparently, that person who queers a straight couple. I don’t know if this is something they said in support of why I might want to make out with them, or a quip whipped in accusation. Barely queer, unshaved legs hidden safely under thick black tights, I know who I’m cast as in this film: Straight White Girl In Boring Relationship Wants Some Adventure. The girl who flirts, but, when called out for flirting, recoils. Rejects. I’m embarrassed for the caricature of myself.

The party dwindles more. I pick melon balls from my fruit basket and my doppelgänger asks me to sit on the couch. I can’t remember if this next part happened in real life, or just in my head, but I see them pat the seat next to them softly with a hand. Come Hither, Child.

“What do you need right now?” They ask, then wait. My doppelgänger is very patient, I’ve noticed. What have they noticed about me? My doppelgänger speaks deliberately, maintains eye contact. My eyes run around the walls and I speak quickly, spitting words out before I lose the courage.

“A friend?” I am too preoccupied by the rest of the people in the room, some of my oldest, closest friends who have come to celebrate, for some reason, me. Yet it’s no longer so crowded in my one-bedroom apartment that the bodies act as walls. A few conversations here and there, but in our silence, I feel more and more eyes on our eyes. Are they listening? Almost nobody in the room knows I’m bisexual, and I’m not sure that the way I want to tell them is by letting them eavesdrop on this conversation.

My golden-haired friend, drunk and smiling, plops onto my lap, oblivious to the mirror I’m staring into. Whatever conversation my doppelgänger wants to have, I cannot have right now. I see disappointment in their eyes, I think. Later, I decide it’s probably only what I hoped I had seen.

I spend the rest of the party trying, then pretending, briefly succeeding, then pretending to be asleep. I lean against a warm shoulder while listening to my doppelgänger argue with the blonde friend about poetry in the kitchen. Finally, my doppelgänger looks for me. “Is she sleeping?” I open my eyes slowly. We hug goodbye. Their rideshare home will be expensive, and I offer to pay part of the ride. They scoff.

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My doppelgänger’s name is — well, let’s say H. H is not older, like I assumed they were. There’s a certain amount of shame that accompanies the realization that somebody is not, in fact, supposed to be more mature than you; they just are somehow. H is 23. As of midnight, a year younger than me.

On my birthday, everything I know about H is in relation to me. H is a real poet, who tells me that all poetry workshops should be free, and open. I am a fake writer, who paid $400 for a crappy fiction workshop, because I thought I should. Where I look plain, small, straight, they look patterned, tall, queer. I am ironic to a fault. H is sincere, so far, always. I tell them I’m looking for more more short-sleeved collared shirts, like what they’re wearing. I can’t find them anywhere. They tell me, in different words, that I must not really be looking.

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My dad says this thing sometimes about how when we interact with people, we don’t see them as who they are today. We’re interacting with our idea of them, which is informed by our imperfect and emotional memory. When he and an old friend fight, he explains, that friend isn’t fighting with my dad as he is today, but with the version of him as he is in their heads, which was formed 10, 20, even 30 years ago. But even when we talk with somebody we’ve just met, they are conversing with a person in their head that they’ve made up completely.

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“Your truth is always your truth, whether said or silent. It just might not be the idea of your truth that somebody else has in their mind.”

On my first morning as a 24-year-old, my boyfriend and I watch television along with a few party stragglers. Sitting next to me on the couch, he texts me, asking if I have ever made out with a certain friend of mine. Not H, but another person that wasn’t at the party. I have never cheated on you and I am not going to cheat on you, I type. Ever. There are many things that I don’t say. I don’t say that I would, actually, like to kiss another human sometimes. I don’t say that I would like to open our relationship, but I’m scared that he will be jealous, consenting on the outside, accusing me of cheating on the inside. I don’t start a fight about the difference between cheating and being open. I don’t say that I am willing to let parts of myself wait, atrophy, while he adjusts to truth. I don’t say that even though I wanted to make out with my doppelgänger, I didn’t want to make out with my doppelgänger. I don’t say that I carry these truths with more love for him than anyone but he and I could ever understand. I don’t say that I’d rather lose that part of myself than lose him. It’s not a heroic, independent woman-like thing to say, and on my birthday of all days, I’d like to be a heroic, independent woman.

I do say I love you. I do say I want to be with you forever. I do say I need you to trust me more. Your truth is always your truth, whether said or silent. It just might not be the idea of your truth that somebody else has in their mind.

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A few days later, I don’t attend a poetry reading that H had invited me to, because I am on a train to another city. I re-read the text I sent to thank them for coming to the party, to let them know that, drunk, I had forgotten about the train and the other city. They don’t respond. Later in the week, I try again. How was the reading? Were you the best one again? I apologize for any awkwardness at my party. No response.

I remember that, upon settling into the buzz of the party, they told me that the reason they responded right away to my invitation was because they were already on their phone. “That’s always the reason for a fast response,” they said. And a slow response is always due to not being on their phone. “You never just pretend you hadn’t seen it yet?”

“No, never.”

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In my first dream as a 24-year-old, I dream that a tooth falls out of my mouth. I don’t remember the context. Just the tooth rolling around in my hand, roots and all, yellowing.

On the toilet in the morning, I search online for the meaning of this, even though I already know. It means that you have let something out of your mouth that you shouldn’t have. It means anxiety about self-worth, self-image. It’s powerlessness. It’s an unanticipated loss.

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H responds one week after the party. I’m at, of all things, a book club meetup when I receive the text. It’s long, and I try to scan for tone without arousing suspicion from the girls around me. H apologizes for the delay in response, saying that they have been busy, but also weren’t sure how to respond.

I don’t think your party was awkward, they say, so much as I felt incredibly tokenized the entire time. I suck in my breath and a curtain falls.

There are certain phrases in H’s messages that will never leave my mind. Queer guru. Dehumanizing. The Big Queer. I had thought it was the most badass thing to show up to a party where you don’t know anybody. Never did I stop to think what it might feel like to be at a party where you don’t know anybody.

H tells me that they felt like they were brought there to solve a problem. The problem being how queer you are and the solution being me, because I’m Visible. I think back to when they walked in on me and my friend.

I told her I’m bi.

Is that a secret?

Kind of.

I think of the conversations that others had with H, that I didn’t hear and my friends don’t remember. I don’t know how one wins a game of drunk telephone, but it sounds like we all lost. A fuller picture of H comes into view. I can see clearer somebody who has been asked over and over again to provide guidance, to do work, and who felt themself being pulled into that situation, again.

H says they don’t blame me, but I feel guilty all the same. I’m embarrassed to have assumed that any tension was centered around the question of making out, and realize I played the role of Straight White Girl Pretending to Look For Some Adventure all too well.

I talk to my boyfriend again about my queerness, my desire to explore it. Our realities haven’t melded just yet, but we’re getting there.

H and I still follow each other on Twitter. I try not to think that I know them any better now that I know their online persona, but it’s a powerful illusion. They’ve been tweeting a lot about Anne Sexton lately, reading her letters. I want to talk to them about my favorite poem of hers: For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further. I wonder if they like that one. I tapped my own head; / it was a glass, an inverted bowl. / It is a small thing / to rage in your own bowl.

I looked at H and thought I was looking into the eyes of my twin, my doppelgänger. But H is just a person, and doppelgängers aren’t real.

Tessa Thompson Is Queer, Confirms Vibrating on the Same Frequency as Janelle Monáe

On screen or off, it always feels like Tessa Thompson wants to let you in. Genuine authenticity is part of her brand. She’s vocal about her feminist politics and speaks out against racial injustice; her roles on screen are carefully curated to read like a “Strong Female Lead” Netflix algorithm; she even finds time to joke about her epic love of goats with fans on Twitter. As open as Tessa feels to us, she considers herself to be fiercely private. She doesn’t talk about her family or personal life in interviews, and she doesn’t address the growing, swirling speculation about her sexuality. That is, until now.

In her cover feature for the digital luxury fashion magazine Net-a-Porter, Thompson quietly comes out to her interviewer over an avocado toast breakfast. True to form, her coming out moment is also thoughtful about her relative privilege. She reflects, “I can take things for granted because of my family – it’s so free and you can be anything that you want to be. I’m attracted to men and also to women. If I bring a woman home, [or] a man, we don’t even have to have the discussion.”

It’s 20GayTeen and Tessa’s potentially romantic relationship with musician Janelle Monáe has been hot gossip all year (it’s definitely something that we’ve gleefully theorized about a few times). Thompson hears us, and she’s been thinking a lot about it. Earlier this week she changed her Instagram bio to a Pride flag with all capitalized word “YES” next to it, a playful winking nod to us all. Choosing to come out now was something she felt conscientious of “in terms of this declaration around Janelle and myself. I want everyone else to have that freedom and support that I have from my loved ones… but so many people don’t. So, do I have a responsibility to talk about that? Do I have a responsibility to say in a public space that this is my person?”

It’s still rare to see a celebrity be this introspective and caring in their coming out, to lead with their heart and be purposeful about the responsibility of their fame, recognizing the huge impact their openness can have on their queer fans. (Also, excuse me while I fangirl squee over the prospect of Tessa Thompson indirectly calling Janelle Monáe “her person.”) She goes on, “It’s tricky, because Janelle and I are just really private people and we’re both trying to navigate how you reconcile wanting to have that privacy and space, and also wanting to use your platform and influence.”

Janelle Monáe came out as pansexual just a few months ago, so does that mean the two are ready to become the Ellen and Portia of my queer black girl dreams? Thompson doesn’t directly answer the question, but is reportedly “tickled” and “unfazed” by our collective love for the possible couple. When speaking of Monáe, she shares, “We love each other deeply. We’re so close, we vibrate on the same frequency. If people want to speculate about what we are, that’s okay. It doesn’t bother me.”

She’s also very proud of the effect that the R&B star’s coming out has had on her fandroids this year, “I get text messages from friends that are like, ‘Would you please let Janelle know I came out to my family because of her?’… I think that work is really helping people and probably saving some lives.”

As for Tessa Thompson on her own, I don’t know where we are going from here. But, I know that we are in good hands. From respected television player, to indie movie darling, to Marvel Superhero Badass — she’s building her career out of sturdy Hollywood stock. At every turn there is pressure to hide yourself, to be smaller, to shut part of yourself down for gain and opportunity. Particularly as a queer mixed race black Latina, the world is not kind. In spite of all that, Tessa Thompson keeps making the much harder choice. She tells her interviewer, “This is not just a job, this is my life… So, I’m like, how do I want to spend it? What do I want my story to be?”

What do I want my story to be? Well, damn. That’s the kind question we can all ask ourselves as we close out Pride this weekend.





Also.Also.Also: There’s a Bisexual Revolution Happening on Television and Other Stories From Your Week

Hey there lovebugs! You may have noticed already, but I am not Laneia! (Of course you noticed, you observant rockstars.)

She’s on the side of a mountain somewhere making friendship bracelets (at A-Camp!) and I am here, keeping the lights on for you! Honestly, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

Let’s have some fun!

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Queer as in F*ck You

DALLAS ‘STRADDLERS! Heads up! This is serious and important. Dallas Police Department is asking for assistance in identifying a black trans woman’s body. Please share this in your circle if you can.

Maryland is the latest state to ban “conversion therapy” for minors.

Keo O’Neal, The First Openly Trans Man To Graduate From Spelman College, Encourages Trans Youth ‘To Be Brave.’ Spelman, a historic HBCU women’s college, has also been struggling with a few incidents of anti-LGBT discrimination among its students in the last year.

It’s not changing fast enough. LGBT teens are still reporting depression at high levels.

How bisexuality on TV evolved from a favorite punchline to a vital storyline. (This one is SO GOOD, and has interviews with Sara Ramirez and Stephanie Beatriz! I want to plaster it on every wall!)

But also, What’s Happening to ‘Queer’ Cinema in the LGBT Film Boom?

23 Impossibly Colorful Places To Visit If You Love Rainbows. Yeah, you do!

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Welcome to the Hellmouth

I know I should’ve developed a thicker skin by now, but the cruelty of this administration still breaks my heart a thousand times. Trump admin is preparing to put migrant children in warehouses on military bases after separating them from their families.

See above point re: heartbreakingly cruel. During Roundtable, Trump Calls Some Immigrants ‘Animals.’

Jeff Sessions is actively considering ending asylum for domestic violence victims.

Seeing The Devastating Impacts Of Trump’s Global Gag Rule Firsthand. Thanks to a policy that requires organizations abroad receiving U.S. funds to agree that they will not mention abortion to clients, provide abortions, or refer clients to legal abortion services, women worldwide are being left without access to proper reproductive care.

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Doll Parts

In 28 years and 327 issues, Allure magazine has only had two Asian women on the cover: Lucy Lui in 2000 and Olivia Munn in 2014. This year, they’re changing that with Soo Joo Park, Fei Fei Sun, and Fernanda Ly on three separate covers in May. Michelle Lee, Allure’s Editor in Chief, wrote about the new issue and the importance of inclusivity. Happy APA Heritage Month everybody!

https://twitter.com/kimmythepooh/status/996814376098238465

Idaho just inched closer to electing the nation’s first Native American governor. Congratulations to Paulette Jordan! She’s also the state’s first woman major party nominee for governor!

Emma Goldman Clinic, one of the first and last feminist women’s health clinics in the U.S., faces fresh challenges.

Lesbian rapper Young M.A. hosted a Mother’s Day Brunch for mothers who lost their children to gun violence.

20 Women Sized 32A to 40DD Test-Drive Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty Bras. I almost didn’t include this, but you know what? Women talking about why representation matters while looking hot in their underwear. Just saying.

This Inclusive Greeting Card Company Founded By Women of Color Acknowledges Periods, Breakups And Celebrates Great Sex.

Saudi’s First Female Filmmaker on Fighting the World to Find Your Own Voice.

Why Don’t We Hear Fat Women’s #MeToo Stories?

Latinas On The Fear Of Speaking Spanish In Public. Jeez, I WONDER WHY?? Stares blankly into the abyss

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Keep Up

Bill Cosby’s sentencing for his sexual assault conviction is set for September. He’s on house arrest until then. And I hope he never sees freedom again. Not sorry.

Speaking of predators who can rot for all I care, Michigan State to pay Larry Nassar victims $500 million in settlements.

Millions of American Women Live More Than 100 Miles from an Abortion Clinic. According to a new study, 27 cities in the US qualify as “abortion deserts.”

Hey White People, Stop Calling the Cops on People of Color. Just a friendly ‘lil suggestion.

Incels aren’t really looking for sex. They’re looking for absolute male supremacy.

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Saw This, Thought of You

The Story Behind How Brooklyn Nine-Nine Was Canceled and Rescued in 31 Hours!

Guess who’s hosting a little watch party by myself in my pajamas on Saturday morning? With mimosas and a side of television commentary! (I can’t believe I’m like this, you guys. I watched A LOT of Disney Princess Movies as a child. And it stuck.) — How to Host the Ultimate Royal Wedding Viewing Party

Where Killing Eve Gets Its Killer Costumes. I still haven’t seen this show? Should I? Lemme know in the comments.

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And Finally

Meet the Young Woman Who Uses Skateboarding to Spread Positivity

Drawn to Comics: You’re Gonna Love Sarah Winifred Searle’s Bisexual YA Graphic Novel “The Greatest Thing”

First Second Books is one of my favorite publishers, with books like Cucumber Quest, Tillie Walden’s Spinning and On a Sunbeam, The Prince and the Dressmaker and This One Summer — and I’m excited to announce another book that I’m sure I’ll love, Sarah Winifred Searle’s The Greatest Thing. The Greatest Thing is a high school story about a girl named Winifred (the book is a fictionalized memoir of Searle’s teen years) and the group of friends she makes in her sophomore year who help her figure out how to survive high school, body image issues, depression and bisexuality happening all at the same time.

Winifred faces her sophomore year of high school with dread until she meets a pair of queer, punky freshmen. They teach her how to modify her clothing to feel more comfortable in her skin, using pins and patches to create a suit of armor. These new friendships and the comic zines they produce together keep Win afloat as she navigates issues of body image, disordered eating, and depression. The Greatest Thing is a fictionalized memoir about the kinds of well-meaning moments and quiet mistakes that help a person figure out not just who they are, but who they need to become.

You might remember Searle from her work on Fresh Romance, which I’ve written about here before, or her comics featured on The Nib or in Jem and the Holograms and Adventure Time. She also has an upcoming middle grade graphic novel called Sincerely, Harriet. She said she wanted to write this book for several reasons, including giving a highlight to bisexual characters at a time when queer teen lit seems to be thriving. “I fell for girls as well as boys, but it was never to seek attention,” she said, “And despite the fact that I was fat, a broad spectrum of romantic experiences did not elude me –– seemingly against all odds, I was loved. But the fact is, it wasn’t against all odds. This stuff happens all the time, and teens need to know that.” She also wanted a chance to tell her own version of a story about teen mental health.

Searle says that she wanted to tell this story because she wants teens to have a wide variety of depictions of how people their age deal with mental health issues like depression and eating disorders. She hopes this book will give another perspective to these very common experiences, a perspective that can be very important for people to see.

…Popular media often sensationalizes teen suicide to the point that the character who dies ceases to be a fully-dimensional person and becomes this fetishized symbol of struggle, reduced to impetus for other characters’ arcs. It’s not that stories that explore this issue can’t be done well –– the manga Orange will forever be one of my most favorite series of all time –– but Orange’s strength lies in the fact that it’s not about Kakeru’s death as much as it is about his life. I wanted to push that even further; my book will focus the story on survival and how even small successes in mental health management are worth celebrating.

 

The Greatest Thing will hit bookstores and online retailers in 2020.

New Releases (May 16)

The Wicked + The Divine #36

Infinite Loop Vol 2 TP

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic #66

Batwoman #15

Bombshells United #18

Green Lanterns #47

Harley Loves Joker #2

Supergirl: The Silver Age Omnibus Vol 2 HC

All-New Wolverine #35

Fence #6

Steven Universe #16

Cucumber Quest Vol 3 Melody Kingdom

Riverdale #12

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Welcome to Drawn to Comics! From diary comics to superheroes, from webcomics to graphic novels – this is where we’ll be taking a look at comics by, featuring and for queer ladies. So whether you love to look at detailed personal accounts of other people’s lives, explore new and creative worlds, or you just love to see hot ladies in spandex, we’ve got something for you.

If you have a comic that you’d like to see me review, you can email me at mey [at] autostraddle [dot] com.

Janelle Monáe Is Queer: Star Comes Out in Rolling Stone as Bisexual/Pansexual “Free-Ass Motherf*cker”

In her new cover feature for Rolling Stone, Janelle Monáe has something she’s finally ready to share with the public. She takes a deep breath in. On the exhale she comes out once and for all.

“‘Being a queer black woman in America”, Monáe tells Brittany Spanos, her interviewer, “someone who has been in relationships with both men and women — I consider myself to be a free-ass motherfucker’”.

She goes on to explain that she identified as bisexual, but has been reading more about pansexuality and felt “Oh, these are things that I identify with too.” She’s open to learning more about herself in life’s journey.

Monáe has been discussing queer sexuality in her music for most of her career. In the Rolling Stone interview she shares that the original title for her 2013 hit single with Erykah Badu “Q.U.E.E.N.” was “Q.U.E.E.R.”, and that you can still hear the word in the track’s background harmonies. Q.U.E.E.N. asks, “am I freak because I love watching Mary?” and “is it weird to like the way she wears her tights?”

Most heartwrenching is the song’s refrain: “Hey sister am I good enough for your heaven? Say, will your God accept me in my black and white? Will he approve of the way I’m made?”

Dancing to that song, barefoot in my kitchen, until I worked up a sweat, was one of the first moments I knew — Janelle Monaé saw me. Her music has been the soundtrack for a lot of queer women, particularly queer black women and women of color, for the last eight years. We found kinship in her sci-fi fantasy of androids who fell in love with robots beneath the cosmos.

We’ve been having a lot of fun covering Janelle Monáe at Autostraddle this year, but Monáe has never spoken publicly about her sexuality before now (and when asked about her rumored relationship with Tessa Thompson in the Rolling Stone interview, Monáe declined to discuss her dating life). She’s one of the most fiercely private musicians currently in the public eye; hell, she created an entire fictional Android persona to keep herself safe from the glare of paparazzi lights. That is part of what makes this moment so brave and so sweet.

In the feature, Monáe talks about her struggles with perfectionism and the years she’s spent in therapy. A lot of queer people can relate to the drive of hiding yourself behind a mask — of keeping your loved ones at arms’ length, of being afraid that if you exposed the soft side of your underbelly, it wouldn’t be enough. We’re taught to hide. We’re taught to overcompensate.

Today, Janelle Monáe is facing those fears. She’s letting us see her, in all of her vulnerability. Five years after dancing alone to her music in my kitchen, she’s asking if she can come dance with me. She’s asking if she can come dance with us. Under the cosmos and in our real life, the way she always intended.

In talking about her new audio-visual album Dirty Computer (which drops TONIGHT!! At MIDNIGHT!!! What a coming out party!!!), Monáe has a message for her fans, “I want young girls, young boys, non binary, gay, straight, queer people who are having a hard time dealing with their sexuality, dealing with feeling ostracized or bullied for just being heir unique selves, to know that I see you… This album is for you. Be proud.”

Be proud, indeed.

You Need Help: You’re Gay but Oh No You’re Falling for a Man, What the F*ck

Q:

I’ve identified as lesbian/gay/queer for a long time now, and coming out was extremely liberating to me and I felt like I really came into myself and became more confident, more open, more honest, more willing to be vulnerable, etc. Being queer just fit me. And now… I’ve developed feelings for a man. Like, not just noticing in passing that he’s attractive or nice but holy shit really intense crush/emotional feelings. And it’s fucking me way up. Not only because I feel like my identity is shifting in a major way, but because moving through the world as a queer and women-centered person allowed me to shed or ignore so much of the shitty cultural messaging we get w/r/t bodies, internalized misogyny, internalized homophobia, etc. And now I feel like my self-esteem is really taking a dive because I feel like since having developed feelings for a man I see myself through “the male gaze” and am sure that I’m too fat, too loud, too ugly, not smart enough, etc., for anyone – particularly a man – to be interested in me. I’m not gonna say that I had like perfect self-love all the time before this, but I have these feelings much more intensely now and they change not only the way I feel about myself but the way I dress, eat, present myself, and just generally show up in the world. It fucking sucks!

How does one successfully navigate such a dramatic shift in a long-held and cherished identity?! Is it possible to have relationships with men devoid of internalized homophobia, misogyny, etc? Is it worthwhile to tell this person how I feel – could I possibly expect anyone to navigate all this baggage with me? What do I do to feel good about myself in the interim? Any and all thoughts/advice are appreciated. And BTW, I am going to therapy, exercising, journaling, trying to practice good self care, etc… but it’s especially challenging right now!

A:

First of all, congrats on being so self-aware! I know this doesn’t feel good, but honestly you’re leaps and bounds ahead of so many women who are experiencing this as they relate with men in some way or another but don’t even know how to name it. You’re articulating your internal experience and working to take care of yourself and navigate this as healthily as you can, so you’re doing great.

It feels to me like we’re talking about at least three things here: what it means about your identity that you’re into this guy, what your options are as far as navigating the sudden renewed pressure of internalized male gaze, and how you want to navigate your actual dynamic with this actual person. Obviously they all relate, but let’s talk about them one by one for a minute.

What you’re talking about here both in terms of identity and gaze is really real! I know you know this but it bears repeating: being attracted to this dude does not make you not queer anymore. It does not make you less queer. It does make you probably not a lesbian, and to the extent that that was a specific identifier that felt important to you — I’m not sure about it from your question — it’s a good idea to take some time and space to let yourself feel how you feel about that, whether that feeling is loss or sadness or confusion or something else entirely. What you shouldn’t feel or at least let yourself wallow in, though, are shame or self-loathing. You aren’t bad or letting anyone down for having an identity that’s different than what you thought, or being attracted to someone you thought you couldn’t be. It’s a real experience and feeling; at the same time, it doesn’t mean anything about your character or personhood. You aren’t going to lose your community, history or sense of self over this; you may be in a transitional place for a while and feel like you don’t have all the answers, but you aren’t going to lose everything you’ve built in this part of your life that matters to you. Your connection to this identity and community have always been real, and will stay that way. There are so, so many other women who have been (and are!) in the position you’re describing — I hope you can find some of them in your local community and be affirmed in how normal an experience it is to realize your identity is a little different than you thought even after you were sure it was locked in. (Maybe some of those people will comment on this post, even! Who knows!)

You’re right about the internalized stuff, too: it fucking sucks. One of the most powerful and liberating aspects of queerness can be how hot and affirming queer desire can be; how the things that make us most ourselves in our bodies and our identities can also make us really hot to people we find really hot. It’s also true though that a lot of those same things about our identities and our bodies don’t track the same in straight spaces and mainstream culture — the same things about me that make me feel hot and interesting in queer spaces often make me feel awkward or like a failure at being a woman right in straight spaces. Which is not a good way to feel! And it’s especially not a good way to feel around someone you’re into and particularly want to feel good and sexy with. It’s a tall order, I think, for you to take on exorcising yourself of internalized misogyny and male gaze all on your own — it would be the emotional equivalent of deciding that you personally had to be accountable for stopping climate change by shaving down your shower time and recycling more. You’re caught in something that’s much bigger than you, and it wouldn’t be fair to expect yourself to just white-knuckle your way out of it. It’s great that you’re in therapy, and probably that is already giving you the tool of naming and noticing the harmful stories you’re unintentionally telling yourself about your clothes, your body, your choices, etc. Even just saying to yourself “wow, that was some internalized misogyny!” or noticing “I would be livid at anyone who said about a friend of mine what I just thought about myself!” is a good start.

One thing I have come to notice over years and years of navigating the weird tension between queer desirability and the relentless internalized gaze is that the first one is generally reciprocal: in navigating desire and desirability with other queer people, we tend to think not just about our own goodness or hotness but about what we want and like in other people. Knowing that we like a lot of the visibly queer or gender nonconforming or fat or “too loud” things about other people — that we’re actually really attracted to them — informs how we see ourselves. In straight spaces and culture, especially for women, that dynamic doesn’t exist in the same way? Women are encouraged to obsessively nitpick and curate themselves and their behavior to be as desirable as possible, but not necessarily really encouraged to evaluate or have desires for the same things in their partners. The question tends to be “Am I good enough for him to be into me? How could he ever possibly be into me?,” maybe sometimes “Are there any red flags/is he just a TOTAL mess” rather than “Are we both into each other, and why? How does he make me feel and what does he offer that I want in a potential partner?”

I’m not saying women who date men in straight contexts can’t or don’t have standards or desires for partners, but that the overwhelming cultural narrative is that they should work to be desired, not to desire. When you’re caught in these spirals of “too fat, too loud, too ugly, not smart enough, etc., for anyone – particularly a man – to be interested in me,” I suspect you’re caught up almost entirely in the former question, and not the latter. It might help to regain some sense of your agency and remember your own self in this dynamic if you start consciously focusing more on the question of what you want, and whether this guy or any other potential person meets it. What do you like about him; how does he meet or not meet your hopes and dreams? How does he make you feel, and what does he offer? What about him is desirable? This isn’t to cut him down to size or to find flaws as a self-esteem booster, but so you can reframe yourself not as a passive participant in this dynamic, but as an active one, a person who has wants and needs and desires in a partner and deserves to have them met too. People of various genders should — and will! — strive to be what you want. Those are the people you deserve, not the person who does you the favor of deciding you’re good enough.

Is this particular dude someone who can and will do those things? I don’t know, and probably you don’t know, and maybe he doesn’t know either. Is it worthwhile to tell him how you feel? It’s impossible to say, really; at the end of the day you’re going to have to ask yourself what the opportunities for happiness and the risks for harm are here when deciding how to move forward, just like you would with anything else, and factor in the identity questions and internalized stuff this is bring up for you. I don’t know whether things will work out such that navigating those things in the way you are now feels “worth it;” I do think that in general, being honest with ourselves and with others even and especially when it’s hardest to turns out to be incredibly rewarding. If you do tell him how you feel, you might learn and grow from it in ways that are hard to anticipate from here regardless of how he responds. And from what’s come up in your question, it sounds like the response you’d be looking for may be more than just reciprocated interest, but interest in spite of all these things you’re feeling about yourself. You asked, “could I possibly expect anyone to navigate all this baggage with me?” Oh sugar, it breaks my heart to hear that question. Yes, yes you can possibly. Is this guy going to be a person who can and will navigate it with you? Again, no idea! I wish I could tell you, but I can’t. I can tell you that there are so, so many people — who could be in your life in any number of ways — who would consider it an honor and a joy to navigate this baggage and more with you. You aren’t a burden on the people in your life! You aren’t difficult to love, or annoying to show up for!

You asked if it was possible to have relationships with men devoid of internalized homophobia and misogyny, and it is with a heavy heart I must tell you the answer is “not really.” I don’t know if it’s even possible to have relationships not with men that are devoid of those things; again, they are bigger and older than us and the roots run very deep. It might, though, be possible to have a relationship with a man in which internalized homophobia/biphobia and misogyny are addressed in an ongoing way, and where everyone involved tries their hardest to take care of each other. That’s how it should be. If you do end up dating this man or men later on, your queerness and the complicated feelings you have about your relationship in that context won’t be something to apologize for or repress away. Your queerness and everything that goes with it are special and valuable and integral to you, and that’s something that he should be always working to make space for and honor and treat with incredible care. Which might be good for you to remember, too! I hope that you can go forward with this, however you choose to, with a sense of how valuable your own identity is and will always be, and treat it with incredible care.

Abbi Jacobson is Bisexual: Ilana Wexler Has Called Dibs Though

As Jews around the world archive their breads of affliction to mark the end of Passover, a new reason to be grateful to the Lord our G-d has presented itself: in an interview with Vanity Fair to promote Heroin Drama 6 Balloons, Broad City actress Jacobson revealed that she is single and ready to mingle with both men and women:

“I kind of go both ways; I date men and women. They have to be funny, doing something they love. I don’t know—I’ve never really been interviewed about this before.”

Jacobson’s sexual orientation has previously been of unhealthy interest to the queer community due to her perhaps (i mean) prior relationship with Portlandia actress / Sleater Kinney front-woman Carrie Brownstein. Unfortunately for their Jewish mothers, it appears that relationship no longer is in action, but I think we can all agree that the fact that it once was; dayenu.

Aforementioned not-comedy 6 Balloons premiered on Netflix streaming last night.