Alyson Stoner Likes Girls: Former Disney Star Comes Out in Touching Personal Essay

Actress and singer Alyson Stoner, who rose to fame through dancing in music videos and starring on the Disney Channel has come out in a beautifully moving and deeply vulnerable personal essay about falling in love with a woman. In her essay on Teen Vogue, Stoner talks about struggling to reconcile her sexuality with herself and with her religious beliefs. She writes about her struggles and her journey to self acceptance and loving herself as a woman who loves other women. Stoner doesn’t use any specific labels in her essay, but does say that she is “attracted to men, women and people who identify other ways” and that she’s currently in love with a woman.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BhCgBdLgTmO/?hl=en&taken-by=alysonstoner

Anyone who’s been a fan of hip-hop, dance or the Disney Channel over the last 18 years knows who Alyson Stoner is. She was Sally, the sister and co-host of Mike’s Super Short Show. She was the girl dancing in the Missy Elliot videos. She was In Suite Life and Phinneas and Pherb and a half dozen other Disney shows. She was Caitlyn in Camp Rock. She was Camille in two of the Step Up movies. Alyson Stoner was known for her sweet dance moves, bubbly and energetic personality and just a little bit of edge.

In the essay, Stoner describes seeing the woman that she fell in love with for the first time. “There she was, wearing loose jeans and a backward snapback. She flipped and rolled her body around with adventure and total abandon,” Stoner writes. “As a Type A perfectionist, I was mesmerized and intimidated.” After that first encounter, Stoner says she knew this woman would be a huge part of her life. They became very close friends, then Stoner says they moved on to kissing and then onto being in love. However, Stoner was internally struggling. Her faith was important to her and she had grown up believing being gay was a sin. Like many others who grow up in Christian churches, she tried to find ways to explain away her feelings.

My faith at that time played a large role in every aspect of my life, and my worldview neither supported nor accepted same-sex relationships. I prayed in turmoil nightly, begging to be healed from these desires. Certain pastors and community members tried to reverse and eliminate my attraction to her. I pursued physical relationships with men to convince myself that my love for her was just a spiritual battle attacking my character and discernment. I pored over texts, contemporary and ancient, seeking truth and answers from professors, scientists, church leaders, friends, and family.

Being one’s self can only be hidden for so long, and soon, Stoner found herself praying to God, begging for forgiveness because she knew that she had to be herself even though in her mind, that meant going to Hell. But when she did that, Stoner says she “felt an inexplicable embrace. Slowly, a curiosity set in, as if giving up might actually be the impetus needed to see life, God, love, humanity, and (literally) everything in a new way.”

Alyson Stoner has gone through an extremely difficult, and far too common journey to self acceptance. And by sharing it in such an open and beautiful way, she’s going to be helping so many people who will come out after her. Thank you Alyson for sharing your experiences with us, this means the world. Congratulations on finding happiness and love, and welcome to the family.

Polyromantic Bisexual Comedy “You Me Her” Returns With More Girls Who Like Girls Like Boys Do, Something New

You Me Her, a charming little television program that bills itself as “TV’s first polyromantic comedy,” returned to the elusive Audience Network last night for its third season, promising further explorations into questions like “is three a crowd or the secret to true happiness?” and “how do we hold onto the ‘me’ in ‘You Me Her’? Although its tone is more conventional than the subject matter suggests,You Me Her is a winning, feel-good series with eminently lovable characters and a smart indie rom-com feel that tackles issues rarely explored on television and, relevant to your interests right here in this space, has two bisexual female protagonists.

We’ve not talked to you about You Me Her before, which’s strange and unlike us but also kinda like us ’cause it’s hard to find! It’s been released on Netflix in Canada and abroad, but not the U.S.. Stateside, your only access to You Me Her is through its network, Audience, which’s available exclusively to Direct TV and AT & T U-verse Subscribers. DirectTV Now’s free trials and cheap monthly plans aren’t too pricey, though, and you’ll also get access to Audience Network’s original show Mr. Mercedes, which features Breeda Wool as a lesbian techie and also stars Mary Louise Parker, Holland Taylor and Kelly Lynch. But listen, we’re all here now and they sent me screeners and we’re gonna talk about it.

The backstory goes like this: Jack (Greg Poehler, sister of Amy) and Emma (Rachel Blanchard) are a middle-class couple who live in what they refer to as “the suburbs of Portland”¹ (a very odd choice for a show in which literally everybody is scandalized by polyamory) (I’d venture to suggest that You Me Her would’ve been better set in literally any American city EXCEPT Portland) and are trying to get pregnant but also rarely have sex. Following his terrible brother’s advice, Jack hires an escort to re-invigorate his sexual spark — Izzy, a spunky, scattered grad student. They hit it off, kiss a little, he feels guilty, and immediately tells Emma about it. Emma responds gamely by booking her own appointment with Izzy, during which she receives an admirable under-the-table foot job and sparks fly all over the place. Emma reveals to Jack that she saw Izzy and by the way, she’s actually been with women before and in fact dated multiple women but for some reason this never came up throughout nine years of marriage in, I must remind you, PORTLAND. Although “sex worker falling for a client” is my least favorite sex worker trope (for its very real-world ramifications of clients expecting sex workers to fall in love with them), I forgive it here, mostly ’cause it involves a girl but also ’cause there’s so much excitement around Izzy’s frenzied feelings for Emma and Jack that I didn’t have the time to care.

Season One sees Jack and Emma struggling with their growing genuine feelings for Izzy and Izzy’s feelings for them both. In Season Two, they make an official public stab at thrupledom, but eventually Jack starts feeling squeezed out, begins to fear that Emma’s actually a lesbian and, as they start considering surrogacy, Emma starts wondering if she really wants kids or if that was mostly Jack’s thing.

Season Two ended with the trio at a crossroads: Emma had been offered a prestigious architecture job in Seattle that improbably came with access to a private jet, and in the last episode’s final moments, we see Emma boarding the improbable private jet while Izzy and Jack sit on a random bench, gushing over Izzy’s genuine desire to have children.

A few months have passed before Season Three rings its opening bell. Between then and now, Izzy and Jack have settled into semi-blissful coupledom, divorce papers are in the works, and Emma is semi-blissfully sipping champagne on a Seattle rooftop with her power lesbian girlfriend Kylie. But previews suggest the love story is far from over for Direct TV’s favorite throuple, and Season Three will see them drawn back to the tangled web they’ve woven.

I was torn by the premiere’s series of events — I’m always delighted by a lesbian couple, of course, but still shipping hard for Emma and Izzy in whatever context that transpires. Furthermore, preview clips featuring a reference to “Seattle’s top five power lesbians” has ignited a deep, primal joy within me that the atmosphere could never hope to contain. But Jack’s assertion that Emma “realized she was gay” was puzzling, too, considering everything that happened before and also the Season Three trailer being 50% Jack/Emma/Izzy being a throuple, but I’ll reserve further puzzlement until we see how it all shakes out. The series copy asks:

Will Emma return to her “lesbian dream life” in Seattle, leaving suddenly heteronormative couple Jack and Izzy to start a family without her? Or will they realize being together was complicated but being apart is unbearable?

https://youtu.be/6JiLgEnICUE

You Me Her‘s creator, John Scott Shepherd, was apparently inspired to make this show by “Sugar On Top,” a Playboy article about a Sugar Daddy / Sugar Mommy couple who had a regular thing going with a college student they’d met on Seeking Arrangements dot com. He “wanted to look at the ways extramarital sex could benefit a relationship, rather than harm it.” It’s a refreshing angle and an authentic one, too — having been in that situation many times myself and seen friends do it, bringing in a third partner or seeking out other lovers on your own can have a surprisingly invigorating impact on sex with your primary partner, and that dynamic is rarely portrayed on television. Seeing Jack and Emma react to each other’s initial liaisons with Izzy without completely losing their shit and leaving the relationship was refreshing.

There’s a lot I love — a lot to love — about You Me Her. Emma and Izzy are incredibly hot together and they’re together a lot — with Jack and without Jack. It’s witty and clever with a surprisingly magnetic (if annoyingly to me personally heteronormative) ensemble of friends and neighbors. It maintains conflict and drama without succumbing to the lure of cliche. I love the premise, in and of itself, and that a television show with an otherwise entirely mainstream aesthetic is telling the story of a non-traditional, poly relationship involving two queer women. As a person who once upon a time dated an established opposite-sex couple and kept it mostly a secret as it was happening, it’s always interesting to see these complicated emotional negotiations played out onscreen, which I’ve really only seen before on reality shows. But at times it did feel like the team had been informed about certain poly concepts and wanted to employ them but said employment often betrayed a lack of genuine understanding of the concepts themselves.

You Me Her is adept at the nuts and bolts of good television, but sometimes the characters within it, while emotionally authentic, can feel undercooked. Although… maybe I’m just talking about Jack. Every lesbian or bisexual woman I’ve talked to about You Me Her shares the same primary complaint with it, and although we all fear a bias towards women on TV in general could influence our opinion, here it is: Jack fails to impress as an interesting, funny, unique or captivating partner — certainly not the kind of guy a woman as irresistible as Izzy could fall for as quickly as she does (read: immediately). He also is a sucker for bad advice and doesn’t seem to have anything in common with Izzy or Emma besides enjoying sexual intercourse. I kept wondering how on earth this guy landed himself two girlfriends?!  Admittedly I quit the series once before due to my overwhelming underwhelming feelings about Jack, but then I grew as a person and returned with a more intentionally objective attitude.

When assessing fictional romantic relationships for authenticity I often impose a When Harry Met Sally Test of my own divination: could Izzy or Emma write a speech for Jack akin to the one Harry gives Sally at the end of the film? My friends, I do not think they could, at least not using information the audience is privy to. In my lesbian defense, I could definitely write WHMS speech for Kevin, one-third of my favorite ever thruple, Shameless’s Kevin/Svetlana/Vanessa!

You Me Her’s production team is mostly female, and the first season was anchored by out lesbian Co-EP/Director Nisha Ganatra, who also Directed/Produced Transparent and Better Things as well as the lesbian film Chutney Popcorn. As Natalie noted in the comments of a BOYT before she became an Autostraddle Staff writer, “[Ganatra]’s deft direction creates a level of intimacy that’s almost palpable.” Subsequent seasons have brought on another female director, Sara St. Onge, a Canadian with a few indie films under her belt, as director. It’s unclear, though, if anybody poly or LGBTQ is presently involved with the production, or you know, anybody who’s spent any time in Portland outside of shooting there (although most of the show is shot in Toronto). (I mean literally at one point Jack, a straight cis white man, calls himself “the first person in this town to do something new” ’cause he hired an escort. IN PORTLAND!!!!) (PORTLAND!?!!) It’d be interesting to see how the show could grow with more input from the communities it represents or having the characters come into contact with AHEM Portland’s THRIVING queer and/or poly community. This trailer, though, is promising:

https://youtu.be/Z-fZzT0P7LU

I’m honestly stoked for Season Three and will absolutely be watching — even though the previews give a lot away, the path between here and there is unpredictable, and for a story like this one, there are few tropes we can use to fill in the blanks.

In conclusion, Priscilla Faia is so adorable I can’t stand it and I’m excited for her to make out with Emma again:

---

^{1 Jack and Emma refer to their neighborhood as Hawthorne and appear to live on the corner of 22nd and Market, which’s Southeast Portland, not the suburbs. Also, it’s chock-full of queers, hipsters, hippies, and poly folks!}

How About That Study Claiming Bisexual Women More Likely to Be Psychopathic Narcissists, What a Ride

In an article published this month in Evolutionary Psychological Science, researchers found that moderately bisexual women reported higher levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism (aka. manipulative, self-interested behavior). As a group, bisexual women also reported less-restricted attitudes, desires and willingness to engage in to uncommitted sexual behavior. If this sounds familiar, that’s because these findings essentially uphold the insidious, well-worn trope of the Depraved Bisexual! Super cool, I know! Let’s take a closer look.

In the first of the two studies covered in the article, researchers deployed Jonason and Webster’s Dirty Dozen scale, asking participants to rate how much they agreed with 12 self-referent statements, including “I tend to be callous or insensitive,” and “I have used deceit or lied to get my way.” The scale measures personality traits known together as the “Dark Triad” (Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and narcissism), and in general, is studied in applied psychology through the lens of “these socially nonconformist traits are undesirable” and “let’s figure out why you’re like this.” Historically, studies have shown higher prevalence of DT traits among men, who as a group are positively correlated with masculinity. Given that lesbian and bisexual women tend to evaluate themselves as being more masculine than straight women, this study asked, is there also a positive correlation with DT traits?

To answer this question:

A total of 446 female students at a Midwestern Canadian University completed a questionnaire for course credit in their introductory psychology course. Three participants were excluded due to missing data, leaving 443 for analysis. The average age of the participants was 20.81 years (SDage = 5.03; Range = 16–57). … There were 308 self-identified exclusively heterosexual individuals, 108 mostly heterosexual, 20 as bisexual, 3 mostly homosexual, and 0 exclusively homosexual participants. Four participants declined to answer.

As lead author Scott W. Semenyna explained to Psypost, “This study was conducted on an extremely WEIRD sample (i.e., Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). It’s unclear whether these differences apply only to university students, if similar differences may exist in the general population, or what possible cross-cultural variation exists in these patterns.” Yes to that, and also: there were no lesbians. This doesn’t mean the findings are “wrong,” necessarily, but it does seem quite a significant gap in coverage for a study on female sexuality; be careful interpreting the results.

In the second study covered in the research article, a recruitment script specifically invited non-heterosexual women to participate, resulting in 13 Kinsey 6 lesbians, 340 Kinsey 0 straight women, and 247 in-between responses. Again, the WEIRD biases apply, with an average respondent age of 20.40.

This time, DT traits were assessed using Jones and Paulhus’s Short Dark Triad scale, with 27 self-referent statements (9 for each DT trait) including “You should wait for the right time to get back at people,” and “I insist on getting the respect I deserve.” Using this method, study 2 did not replicate the findings of study 1 regarding sexual orientation differences in Machiavellianism and overall Dark Triad traits.

Also in study 2, sociosexuality was assessed using the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI), which assesses individual’s behavior and attitudes pertaining to uncommitted sexual relationships. The SOI contains open response questions such as “with how many different partners have you had sex (sexual intercourse) within the past year?” as well as scaled items to which participants indicate the extent to which they disagree (1) or agree (9) with statements such as “sex without love is okay.”

Researchers took a look at the relationship between different groups on the Kinsey scale:

Most strikingly, study 2 found that somewhat ambiphilic (Kinsey 2) women have higher sociosexuality [specifically, more favorable attitudes towards casual sex, and a higher sex drive] than most other groups, with moderate to large effect sizes. The relationship between women’s sexual orientation and less restricted sociosexuality was found to be curvilinear, replicating previous studies showing bisexual women to be higher in sociosexuality than heterosexual or homosexual women (Lippa 2006, 2007; Schmitt 2007), but adding granularity regarding sexual orientation groupings. More specifically, mostly androphilic (Kinsey 1) and somewhat ambiphilic (Kinsey 2) women exhibited higher sociosexuality compared to ambiphilic women (Kinsey 3–4), although all of these groups have been characterized as “bisexual” in the literature.

Translation: self-identified lesbians and straight women report similar attitudes about casual sex, and within the umbrella of bisexuality, it seems to be a very particular bucket (Kinsey 2 “somewhat bisexual” women) reporting less caution about uncommitted sexual activity. It may be that Kinsey 2ers represent “the upper end of female sociosexuality scores, and this sexual openness leads to more sexual experience overall, some of which occurs with women.”

Speaking about the findings, Semenyna noted, “Primarily such evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that female bisexuality and female homosexuality are the result of different developmental processes. If female bisexuality and homosexuality were simply the result of the same underlying developmental processes, one would expect that any differences between heterosexual and bisexual women in personality or interest in casual sex would be even larger when comparing heterosexual and lesbian women.”

To me, the interesting takeaway here is that “bisexual” may be too broad a term to be useful in some research settings, as there are distinct subgroup behaviors (perhaps due to different bio-developmental roots). I would love to see more research done in this vein, in particular to address the biased study population. Interesting as 20-year-old students studying psych are, it seems obvious that their answers are going to differ from the general population. (Pretty sure we didn’t have this many bisexual Slytherins at A-Camp, for example. Or maybe I was just hanging out in the wrong cabin.)

Petra Solano’s Bisexuality Is a Love Letter to “Jane the Virgin” Fans

The wildest thing keeps happening this year on television. Characters I wish were queer keep… being queer. Relationships I thought were wild fantasies I would only see play out in fan fiction just started… happening. To name a few, Sara and Ava on Legends of Tomorrow, Cheryl and Toni on Riverdale, and now, Petra and Jane on Jane the Virgin. As fellow TV writer Kayla said, maybe it’s time for The CW to change their slogan to “dare to be bi.”

Ever since the first time Rosario Dawson’s Jane Ramos walked into Petra Solano’s office, sparks have been flying between them. This week, Petra does the very relatable thing where she low-key panics every time J.R. is touching her, which is, in my opinion, a lot.

But Petra is having a hard time figuring out if she can trust J.R., because frankly Petra has not had the best luck in putting her faith in people, and J.R. has already admitted to originally being kind of out to get her, because blackmail. Before I tell you what happens next, I feel compelled to tell you that one of my all-time favorite tropes is when people who have feelings for each other have to pretend to be a couple for a sting/undercover/to not be seen/etc. And so, you guessed it, the first time J.R. kisses Petra, it’s to distract the car J.R. said she saw watching them. At first Petra doesn’t know and thinks her wildest fantasies are coming true.

But then J.R. clues her in — during NECK KISSES which seems a little more than necessary for a distraction but it’s fine.

The two decide they’re going to tell the mystery blackmailer J.R. had to seduce Petra to try to keep her from getting too suspicious and I dunno I think the blackmailer ships it.

Later, Petra very subtly (read: not at all; Petra has nary a subtle bone in her body) tries to invite J.R. to spend the night. J.R. says that as much as she could tell Petra was into that kiss, she’s not interested in being a straight woman’s experiment. I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt here, and am going to assume she only said this to try to get Petra to assure her she isn’t straight. But I will say, at that moment, the ghost writer typed “clitourist” which is officially my new favorite word.

Petra then asks the very valid question — Who says she’s is straight? Because she’s Petra, she doesn’t just say, “I know I haven’t been with a woman yet but I do have real feelings for you/this isn’t an experiment for me,” which I think J.R. would have responded well to. No, instead she’s like, “I am obviously an expert at sleeping with women like I am an expert at all things” and goes in for the kiss her own self.

Petra had been waffling on what to do with her feelings for a little while (even lying about being twitterpated when Jane Villanueva caught her giggling at her phone when she got a text from J.R.) but as soon as the conversation was out there, she did what Petra does best and went for what she wanted head on. The next morning, Petra tries very hard to look casual as she confesses that she hadn’t actually been with a woman before J.R.

But the thing is, J.R. knew that. Of course she did. Because though she might be alone in having this skill, J.R. can see through Petra’s bullshit. (With the possible exception of the other Jane.) But obviously J.R. likes Petra enough to a) not call her out on the spot b) not hold it against her for lying about it. She knew the lie meant Petra was serious about being into her, and so she went with it. Petra is called on her second lie, though, when J.R. says she has to go and Petra pretends like she does too, right as a breakfast-for-two shows up from room service. J.R. gives Petra a look that could mean, “You really have to stop lying to me if you want this to go anywhere,” and that is all she wrote.

Even though there’s still the chance that J.R. is evil, because there’s the chance literally everyone on this show is evil except maybe Jane Villanueva, I still love her and am excited to see where this goes next.

And even though I witnessed it with my own eyes and recapped it for you, I kind of can’t believe it’s happening. From the beginning, Petra has always looked at everyone like she wanted to devour them, the line between seduction and destruction being very thin. The writers heard what the audience wanted — Petra and Jane to get together — and this is their way of giving it to us. In the front half of the season, they showed us why it couldn’t have been Jane Villanueva: she isn’t queer. Maybe she’ll realize otherwise later in life, but she did a lot of internal reflection when Adam came out to her as bi, and where she is right now in her story is pretty straight. Even Gina Rodriguez, who loves playing queer so much she basically cast herself as Rosa Diaz’s girlfriend on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, has said as much.

Petra on the other hand — why not? Petra has been growing and changing as a character since day one. We’ve seen her grow a little softer around the edges, become a little more self-aware. She’s slowly been learning to open herself up to people, and letting herself admit she’s capable of caring about others, even if sometimes she still has a hard time showing it. Plus, it makes sense that Petra would be attracted to J.R. — she’s smart, strong, and she doesn’t react to Petra the way other people do. Petra has gotten so good at pushing people’s buttons and/or pushing them away. Riling them up or playing them like a fiddle. But J.R. isn’t falling for any of that. She’s calm when Petra’s not, she sees through the boss bitch act. So when J.R. reached out to touch Petra — literally and figuratively — for the first time in a long time, Petra didn’t pull away.

On most other shows, upon hearing the audience reading Petra as queer, specifically reading chemistry between her and Jane, they would have cut back on the screen time they had together, stopped letting them share a frame. Or they would have given them both male love interests and stop developing their characters outside those relationships. Or have them both say the word “friend” so much the word almost becomes meaningless. Or said, “We already have Luisa, Rose and Krishna as queer women on this show; sure Rose is on the lam and Luisa is MIA and Krishna only has a few minutes of screentime per episode but ISN’T THREE ENOUGH?” Or they would have purposefully and strategically played up the chemistry without any payoff, baiting and baiting until we couldn’t take it anymore. We know. We’ve seen these things happen endlessly, relentlessly over the years.

Instead, Jane the Virgin saw the audience reading Petra as queer and gave her a female love interest. Simple as that.

Demi Lovato Playing “Who’d You Rather” on “Ellen” Is F*cking Delightful

On yesterday’s Ellen show, our collective girlfriend Demi Lovato was invited to play a rousing game of “Who’d You Rather?” The object of “Who’d You Rather?” is never made clear, but the contestant is urged to choose between two attractive celebrities in favor of whichever one they would rather… engage in a hypothetical activity with. Now that Lovato is apparently comfortable discussing dating both men and women in the press, we were really hoping Ellen would at least reference that during their interview. To our collective delight, Ellen peppered the “Who’d You Rather?” playing field with both male and female heartthrobs, and Demi answered almost exactly the way we silently prayed she might throughout the entire game. Ellen looked on, clearly as delighted as we were.

Demi Lovato made a lot of dreams come true on this day, and inspired a lot of dreams few of us realized we even had.

“The Alternative Is Awful”: Sexual Justice Pioneer Carol Queen on Why Sexual Justice Needs to Evolve

Feature image by Marlo Gayle.

“As Wilhelm Reich believed, if a state can control peoples’ sexuality, it can control them — politically, culturally. This is a huge challenge for organizers, theorists, justice advocates,” Dr. Carol Queen, founder of the sexual justice movement (and my queer fairy godmother since I interned for her at the Center for Sex and Culture), tells me.

As a pivotal figure of the sexual justice — formerly sex positivity — world, Dr. Queen is no stranger to that challenge. “The deeper definition of sex positivity — way more than just enthusiasm about sex, which was never intended to be the definition of that phrase — is about social justice: access to information, resources, freedom from shame, a focus on consent, diversity and more,” she says.

Dr. Queen has decades of experience uniting social justice and sexuality through advocacy, education, and community development. She has written extensively on topics ranging from bisexuality to queer kink; co-developed sex education resources to combat the AIDS crisis; and mentored up-and-coming activists, artists and educators. One of her key accomplishments is founding the Center for Sex and Culture along with her partner Robert Morgan Lawrence in 1994 after they noticed the lack of spaces for sexuality workshops in the Bay Area. The center has become especially important for subcultures and marginalized communities in the world of sexuality and gender: queers, leather and kink communities, sex educators, sex workers, erotic artists and more. “[The Center] tries to make space for multiple needs: giving diverse people a space to gather, collecting cultural materials in the library and archive and making them available to researchers, etc., [and] presenting creative work about sex/gender, which is the way more people develop their understandings about sex more than any sex ed class,” says Dr. Queen. In other words: the centre gives people the chance to learn from and build connections with each other, pointing us towards the future.

“I want more conversations that help us connect and unite across identity barriers.”

“I want more conversations that help us connect and unite across identity barriers. This is an era when we must, must revive alliances. I came out in Eugene, Oregon, in the 1970s, and the importance of alliances was one of the first lessons I learned. It has never seemed so relevant to me as it does now,” says Dr. Queen.

She would know. Key to her work in sexual justice is understanding the diversity of identities and “sexual possibilities” through education and advocacy, especially in “respect[ing] each person where they are and helping them appreciate their own point in the diversity mix.” “This is important because too many people have been taught there is only one way to be, and honestly don’t understand they may have their own unique sexuality,” she explains.

As a bisexual woman and longterm LGBTQ rights activist, Dr. Queen believes that sexual justice is especially important for queer women, and that queer women are in turn a key part of sexual justice movements. “Queer women have the gift given to all queers: we must wrestle with cultural notions of normativity to be able to live our lives, find our people, create our alternative relationship variants. Sure, we can marry now, but many queer women don’t want to and wish to connect in different ways. This intersection makes us really important stakeholders in sexual justice and sex positivity,” she says.

Bisexual women, for instance, were key to work changing sexual attitudes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a 2000 paper co-written with Lawrence for the Journal of Bisexuality, Dr. Queen documents the importance of bisexual people in the fight against AIDS via their contributions to the Sexual Health Attitude Restructuring Process (SHARP), a safer-sex-oriented program that exposed participants to accurate sexual health information and the possibility of diverse sexual experiences that Dr. Queen worked on directly for several years starting in 1987. SHARP’s active and hands-on education was part of the acclaimed “San Francisco model”: “community-based effort to educate, prevent infection, and provide services that does not primarily rely on governmental or medical direction and intervention” that inspired other work around HIV/AIDS across the United States and worldwide in the 1980s.

Dr. Queen has observed significant shifts in the discussions around sexual justice and sexual diversity since SHARP. “I don’t see the basic underlying activism or kinds of sex as fundamentally different, mostly, but discourse about sex is out of the box and so many issues have been more or less mainstreamed that it’s striking,” she says. “It means more and more people potentially are exposed to the idea that sex, relationship and gender possibilities are many and varied; communities exist; normative ideas can be oppressive and sex/gender/relationship are not ‘one size fits all’ constructs. This is mildly interesting for some people and a matter of life and death for others.”

“[Sexual justice] has to adapt. The alternative is awful.”

“I think many people in the world of sexual justice activism believed that the path forward would only grow more progressive,” she explains. “The reality is way more fraught, and more entwined with tons of other issues: electoral politics, civility and respect on the internet, reactionary responses to identity politics, educational policy, racial justice, feminist issues, so much. And [sexual justice] has to adapt. The alternative is awful,” she says.

To look forward, for Dr. Queen, the long arc of sexual justice requires more deeply examining the healthcare matrix for reproductive rights and gender confirmation; reexamining consent and its intersections with the criminal justice system; more comprehensive sex education that incorporates consent, pleasure, and media literacy especially around pornography; the removal of laws that penalize sex workers as well as certain consensual sexual behavior and relationships; and more respect and understanding around diversity and intersectionality. It also requires looking backward. “I’m sick of all discussions that revolve around the notion that people who came before didn’t know as much as people who are setting the terms of the discourse now. That is, to me, so disrespectful. And it’s my belief that the internet age has made understanding our history, ironically enough, more difficult,” she explains.

Looking backwards to look forwards, what’s her best advice for following in her footsteps? “To do something like I’ve done, one would have to be entrepreneurial, have help from other people who want the project/s to find their audience or community and who help broaden perspective, get as much education as you can manage, realize your own experience is significant but not the marker of everyone else’s, be an ally for other peoples’ genius and identities, and consider it a gift whenever you learn more about other peoples’ perspective and struggle,” she says. The work has never been more urgent.

You Need Help: Coming Out When Your Girlfriend Is Amazing but Your Family Super Isn’t

Q: When I came out to my mom as bi earlier this year she said that I’d gained a lot of weight and she thought I was just interested in women because I couldn’t get a man now. She also spent the entire day telling me she wanted grandkids and condescendingly asking if i wanted to “end up like” every queer person she knows (all of whom are happily married). As you can probably guess, my parents can be pretty toxic. I’ve been angry and avoiding the subject since and I never told my dad at all (I expected him to be worse, he almost voted for Trump). I have an amazing girlfriend now and all of my friends and many coworkers know. I feel like I’m lying to my my parents, hiding part of myself, and disrespecting my girlfriend by constantly avoiding mentioning her or referring to her as my friend when my parents ask what’s going on in my life. I live in another state (thankfully), so it’s not like I see them often but they do call and my mom is pretty nosy. I don’t want to hide anymore, but I know it’s going to be ugly (I still weigh the same). I’ve been thinking of talking to them after the holidays so I don’t need to see them again until next Christmas if it goes badly. Of course, I know coming out can be difficult in general, but I’m wondering if you have any advice for coming out in the context of a toxic family relationship? How can I best protect myself from the inevitable insults, yelling, and criticism while still being honest? This closet is getting old.

A: You’re right, coming out is often difficult in general; you’re also right that it gets especially complicated when queer stuff is suddenly in the sights of an already dysfunctional dynamic. Your mom sounds like a lot! Your dad also sounds like a lot! As I think you are aware, it sounds like your mom is less actually interested in how happy you are or how you “end up” and more interested in preserving her mental construct of who she thinks her kid is, and whatever she has invested or projected onto that construct. The good news is that it sounds like you have really realistic expectations for and understanding of your family; some people go their whole lives struggling with that! Also congrats on your amazing girlfriend! You’re doing great.

It sounds like you’ve managed the hell out of your expectations for how your family will react — “inevitable insults, yelling and criticism” — and you’re off to a solid (if disheartening) start as far as knowing that you can’t control how they act in this situation. I think the next step for you would be thinking about expectations for yourself as far as what you’re hoping to get out of it. How are you hoping to feel after? What are your worst fears about how you might react or how you might feel? You mention feeling like you’re “lying,” “hiding parts of yourself,” and “disrespecting your girlfriend” (which, for the record, I don’t think you’re doing at all!). The first two things might mean that personal integrity or openness are important to you in general as a person, or that as imperfect as your relationship with your parents might be you want to know that it’s based on who you really are, not who you’re letting them think you are. You can’t control how your parents perceive you, but you can take control of how you navigate your own authenticity within your family dynamic. I’m not sure, unfortunately, how much you can protect yourself from your family’s reactions; maybe a different way of asking the question is “how can I go about this conversation in a way that honors my values, and prioritizes the outcome I want to feel personally in all this?”

It’s also worth thinking about what this means in the context of your relationship, especially since it seems like you’re concerned about how this is affecting her. If you haven’t already, you can talk to her about what’s important to both of you in terms of out-ness in general and in family dynamics. Family is so fraught and we carry so much expectation and anxiety around it — it’s possible that your anxieties about how she’s feeling are totally different from what’s actually going on with her, and that she’s carrying around some whole other set of concerns that you had no idea about. Love is a beautiful journey, etc. The decision about coming out to your family in regards to your girlfriend specifically — because it sounds like you’ve already come out to your mom to a degree, and she just doesn’t know about this specific relationship yet — might also be tied up in your feelings about your family in general. Family, especially when it’s dysfunctional, is such a difficult thing to share with someone; it’s literally where we came from! It’s a part of who we are, or at least part of how we became who we are, that we can’t edit or control. I don’t think you’re disrespecting your girlfriend by not letting your family know about her specifically, but I think in some ways you might be letting yourself imagine that your dynamic with her and your dynamic with your family can exist in isolation from each other, and telling your family about her will collapse that fantasy. That isn’t good or bad; it’s just true, and something to think about for yourself and to talk to her about.

In general, a lot of logistical advice about coming out applies here. Keep expectations realistic (you’re already doing that, congrats!). Have a sense of what boundaries you want to maintain and how you’re going to enforce them — do you need your mother to stop bringing up your body or the concept of grandchildren every time you mention your girlfriend? How will you respond when she inevitably tries to do so anyway — leaving the room or hanging up the phone until she gets the message? Ignoring her? Have a plan for the worst-case scenario outcome, whatever that would mean to you in this context. What’s the worst way you can imagine your family reacting, and what would you do if that actually happened?

At the end of the day, though, there’s only so far logistics can carry you here. The core of what your’e talking about here is the project of trying to exist as your full, complicated self in a family that isn’t comfortable with that, in a way that I suspect goes beyond sexual orientation, and to assert your right to do so within a toxic dynamic. It’s a lifelong effort, and you’ll feel like you’re being forced to take steps backward probably at least as often as you feel like some progress has been made. But again, in terms of what you can actually control, it sounds like your motivations and intentions in pursuing this are coming from a really healthy place. As long as that’s the case you have the opportunity to get something positive out of this endeavor no matter how your family chooses to react. Good luck out there, friend!

Rosa Diaz’s Big Coming Out on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” Was Bittersweet — and Specifically Bisexual

Last week we got the long-hoped-for treat of queer fan favorite Rosa Diaz coming out as bisexual on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, an experience made better by the fact that she’s played by out bisexual actor Stephanie Beatriz, who’s openly advocated for her character’s queerness. As Heather wrote when the episode aired, a lot was done right that’s often done wrong with bisexual storylines — Rosa explicitly says she’s bisexual, something we rarely see, and the writers included Beatriz and her input in creating the storyline.

And it shows, even more so in “Game Night” than in “99.” After being kind of outed by Boyle’s nosiness in the previous episode, Rosa decides to intentionally come out to her coworkers and, later, her parents. It’s established that while Rosa’s coming out to others is new, coming out to herself is not — she tells Amy she’s known she was bi since seventh grade. It’s notable how much this arc is focused on sexual orientation as a character trait rather than a plot point — the focus is never on Rosa’s relationship with this new woman (although I do want to know more about that!) but the fact that bisexuality is an important part of Rosa’s identity and always has been, something that’s refreshing to see. Parts of Rosa’s coming out are probably pretty relatable to all queer people, like Amy asking “when did you know?,” Boyle’s awkward overcompensating allyship, and the implication that Hitchcock was going to say something gross and sexualizing if given the chance. Especially in her interactions with her parents, though, Rosa’s coming out arc feels specifically and uniquely bisexual in a way I’m not sure I’ve seen on television before.

There isn’t one conversation with her parents, like ripping off a bandaid; there are several, and even after all of them Rosa’s relationship with her parents as an out bisexual woman feels rocky and bittersweet in a way that’s very real. It’s clear they love her, but they still can’t readily accept her — and to the extent they do, it’s conditional upon an imagination of bisexuality as a version of heterosexuality. As her mother insists, “because no matter what you call yourself, you still like men. So you can still get married and have a child.” Rosa reminds them that she can do those things regardless of the gender of her partner, only to be told by her father, “Yes, but it will be a man, because this is just a phase.”

A minute later, we get to complete bisexual coming out bingo when he admits he thinks “there’s no such thing as being bisexual.” Rosa’s response is clear and simple and painful: “I know there is, because that’s who I am.” The entire scene is a more thorough exploration of the way that bisexual people’s acceptance by their loved ones so often depends upon our willingness to reassure them that we’re still “basically straight,” or that we can at least pretend to be. Later, when Rosa’s dad apologizes but explains that her mother “needs more time” and that maybe Rosa shouldn’t come by for family game night anymore, we see how Rosa’s refusal to cosign a straight-with-an-asterisk or going-through-a-phase narrative of her own erasure has at least for now cost her exactly what she was afraid it would. This is a coming out conversation that feels like it was intended to feel authentic from the inside out, not only to be legible or recognizable to straight viewers, something that still feels like an unexpected treat.

What stands out to me maybe even more than the nuances of Rosa’s coming out to her parents are the (unfortunately few!) interactions between her and Captain Holt, her openly gay captain. The homophobia and isolation Holt faced when he first came out in the police force decades ago has been previously discussed, something he alludes to briefly when Rosa comes out to the squad: “This is going considerably better than when I came out to my colleagues.” At the end of the episode, when the squad comes together to comfort Rosa after the complicated experience with her parents, Holt tells her,

“Diaz, you should be very proud of yourself. I know things aren’t exactly where you wanna be right now, but I promise you they will improve… Every time someone steps up and says who they are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place, so thank you.”

It’s very cool to see two entire openly gay/bisexual characters talking explicitly to each other about coming out in a mainstream sitcom. It’s also very cool that this reads as a moment of emotional growth and closeness between two characters who have been consistently socially and emotionally withdrawn. In fact, in previous seasons Holt has reacted to younger colleagues’ comparatively easier coming out experiences with (misplaced but understandable) resentment — it’s really neat to see him moving past that to be genuinely happy for Rosa, and to see her allowing him to comfort her about the hard parts of it. It made me wish Holt could have been the team member Rosa chose to help her with coming out, rather than Jake — and that we could have seen her discuss the process with other queer people too, like her mystery girlfriend.

Maybe in the future we can! The way this story has been unfolding so far, I’m hopeful that it will remain a tangible throughline on the show rather than an arc that opens and closes, and that we can see Rosa’s identity and ongoing relationship with her parents and girlfriend continue to play an active role in her storyline and dynamics on the show. Also, duh, that Gina Rodriguez or Jen Richards can play her girlfriend. Fingers crossed!

How YA Novels Unexpectedly Enabled My Own Bisexual Revelation

I read a lot of queer books in high school. (I mean I read a lot of fiction that centered gay men.) I read them on family vacations. I read them during lunch when my friends had clubs. I read them when my homework was done at night. I decided without deciding that for every Giovanni’s Room and At Swim, Two Boys and Kiss of the Spider Woman and A Single Man I had to read two books that didn’t touch on gayness at all. Star of the Sea. The Gathering. When these interim books whispered queerness, my whole head buzzed like I’d gotten away with something.

It didn’t occur to me to be bisexual. It didn’t occur to me that I already was. All I knew was that I was different than, outside of. It was easier to assume that I was unattractive or standoffish than it was to scrutinize why I was holding myself apart. Very little of my high school journal reveals anything of the person I was then. It’s easier to find me between the lines of my creative writing assignments. There, I grappled with shyness, with inability to give voice to fear or desire. Only now do I realize just how loudly my writing echoed my reading.

A handful of my parents’ queer friends, noting my reading habits, recommended titles. Usually I’d read them already, though I downplayed this. I was afraid, though I didn’t have the words then, that I would be seen to be appropriating an experience that wasn’t mine, that even by reading and loving these books I would encroach. The books I read did not tell my story, and I didn’t identify with the wobbly shoes that best fit: those ostensibly straight girls shrieking about their gay best friends.

College. I’d never had a boyfriend. I’d never had a girlfriend. I’d never had a conclusive crush on a girl. All I had were suspicions, but I convinced myself that every girl also felt like this: like feelings for a boy might be all-consuming but also might not be the beginning and end of desire. I read Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, its spine and cover pressed to the table. That wasn’t me, either, but for the first time in my life I’d found something that could be. I sat in Small World Coffee worried about what anyone who saw the cover might think.

At some point I stopped referring to myself as straight, and long before that, whenever I threw out a self-deprecating smokescreen like, “Who’s this straight girl taking all these queer theory classes?” I would start to itch. Shit. Shit. I shouldn’t have said that. Now I have to start all over again. Hoping that when I found words, I wouldn’t have to fight even harder out of false impressions of my own making.

When I came out to my parents this January, my mom asked, “Have you been dropping hints?” and I said no because I hadn’t been, not in the way I thought she meant. But what was this verbal switch, trading “straight girl” for “girl,” if not a kind of hint? Or maybe not a hint but a code, the kind a close reader, an invested reader, a reader angling for reassurance, might understand. I yearned for someone to pick up the book of my life and read my queerness there, but finding the words didn’t come easy. They never have. I remember being four or five years old and standing in the kitchen doorway emitting frustrated grunts. My parents, equally frustrated, although with cause, stood in front of me. “Use your words,” one of them said. “Jackie, use your words. We can’t read your mind.”

The fact is there was some of Judith Butler’s performative language in my subsequent early-summer 2017, wide release, Pride parade-induced Facebook declaration. Writing it felt like launching myself out of a plane, and knowing that having done so I would have to open my parachute, ready or not. It was some clearer version of what I had not quite found in all those books: validation, relief, the knowledge that I would no longer be so misread, a certainty of an identity that has never come cheap. I stopped asking everyone to read my mind, and wrote it instead.

I could tell the story of what allowed me to use my words in a lot of different ways. Most of them involve Adam Parrish, one of four central characters in Maggie Stiefvater’s YA fantasy quartet The Raven Cycle. Fiction’s heritage is a stealth how-to, a model of ways of being less threatening and fraught than nonfiction. I found a little of myself in The Raven Cycle, pieces I had never investigated or questioned, when I started re-reading it this May. My weeks stretched out cold and rainy. I slept too late and awoke exhausted and spent the day hunched over my computer, applying to jobs. At night, I made dinner and watched YouTube. It was shaping up to be a repeat of two summers ago, when I felt adrift and untethered and really came into my own as a person predisposed to anxiety. That was the summer my friend Tanya, perhaps sensing that I would find them comforting, sent me three sketches of characters from The Raven Cycle as Russian icons, a faithful triumvirate. This May, I found myself examining these sketches closely. “We’re with you,” they seemed to say. “We’ll keep you safe.”

Adam Parrish is not my favorite character. He is prickly, hard on himself and on others, and on my first read-through this was difficult to embrace. Nonetheless, Adam Parrish haunted me between books. He haunted me between re-reads. Now he haunts me to a lesser extent. For the years that I read him, Adam Parrish represented the greatest of my unfinished business. The dawning of possibility, the trying on of selves. Over the course of The Raven Cycle, Adam dates a girl and then begins to date a guy. Within the context of the series, this is no big deal. The Raven Cycle is not a coming out series any more than it is a coming of age series, which is to say, it is not at all and nothing but. The characters are constantly coming out, just as they are constantly coming into themselves.

No one says “bisexual” in The Raven Cycle. Your mileage may vary, but for me, the absence of the word seems to come from a place not of baiting and erasure, but of possibility. Adam is in flux. His second relationship is a paradigm shift, but it also comes easily to him, as few things have. Adam struggles mightily to balance the forces of his life over the course of the series, so there is a quiet beauty in his casual acceptance of this lovely chance.

Reading The Raven Cycle for the first time, the fourth book still unpublished, I found myself very invested in the idea of a bisexual Adam Parrish. The text seemed to be moving in that direction, but I couldn’t be sure whether my reading was canon or fanon. New in this was the fact that what I wanted most for Adam was not one particular same-sex relationship, but an identity to house it. Many, many times in my reading life, I had thought, I need this character to date x. Never before had I read a book and thought, I need this person to be x.

I still wonder why the story of a bisexual teenage boy is the one that allowed me to explicitly consider my identity as a bisexual adult woman for the first time. I recall reading Fingersmith, the danger and hyperawareness in it. It could be that the distance between my life experiences and Adam’s is precisely what enabled the connection. My defenses were lowered against him. It is also true that I am practiced in reading the stories of boys, of men: my BA in English is a literal degree in decoding their experiences. Although I wish it were not the case, redolent as it is of internalized misogyny, I am most at home in their narratives.

Whatever the reason, the first time I read it, I put down the fourth and final installment in The Raven Cycle in a haze. In receipt of what I’d hoped for, I was left with was the memory of the hoping. What was that about? I sat down with myself and asked again. What was that about? Then, like time lapse vines, connections I would have thought self-evident began to knot themselves together: all the books I read in high school, but also the dreams about women. The time I started crying and couldn’t stop. The feelings for men were still there, but somehow dependent on being outside patriarchy; I wanted to open the door for them; I wanted to hold the door open.

I’m not sure I would have seen myself in an Adam who defined his relationships more clearly. Where I see myself in him is a partially aspirational recognition of how he allows himself to remain open to and unafraid of previously uncontemplated possibility, how he lets himself make new sense of his past.

Representation does not always — should not always — look like this. YA carries an added imperative to provide its characters with labels, the better to open its readers’ eyes to potential. This is as it should be. Nonetheless, breadth and diversity of representation is important, even in this decidedly dystopian world. We may as well provide as many paths, experiences, trajectories, words, and non-words as possible, and ground them in people who feel true enough to trust.

When I did come out, I came out as a step along the way to future journeying. In June, I went to the Columbus Pride Parade (my seventh in my third city) wearing a teal tank top under a white lacy shirt. This was not the first shirt I put on that morning. The first was black, printed with “Post Subtext Queer,” as though I was a narrative myself. My friend Molly designed and sent me this shirt, a reference to our conversations about Black Sails, a show where queerness is manifold and incidental. Post Subtext Queer narratives are not centered on coming out, but rather celebrate the diversity of what queerness is and means. Adam Parrish is a Post Subtext Queer, and we may not yet be at a place where that is the only representation we need, but there is still value in its expression.

I am not yet a Post Subtext Queer. I almost wore the shirt to Pride, but at the last minute I chickened out. I feared running into someone I might know. I feared having to explain it and stumbling over the words. I wanted to wear the shirt (I wanted, I wanted, I wanted), but to do that, I had to set the record not so straight.

At home, after the parade, I sat down and edited a split screen photo of my two outfits, the worn and the rejected. I composed a message. The words I used were mine, free of literary reference. I hit post. I could see the front of my t-shirt vibrating with my heartbeat. The moment was cathartic. I turned the sound off on my phone, flipped it over, and fled the room. I sat, fully clothed, on the toilet for a long time. Then I strode back over to my phone, never ready but determined to see how my words, my self, had been received.

Adam Parrish is a work in progress, trying not to be terrified of his own unfinished nature. So am I. Since coming out, I have continued to consider what being bisexual, or queer, or whatever, means for me specifically. That is something no single text can tell me. One thing I know has shifted already, however, is this: I have stopped rationing the books I read. There is a reason I prefer queer narratives. These books are mine to read. These books have been mine all along.

Sunday Funday Is Full of Bisexual Luxury

Hello cutie pies! How the heck are you? I’m currently overly sleepy and watching one of my cats sleep in a box of my clothes. It’s…really inconvenient because I have to be a more vigilant lint brusher, but also y’all, she’s beautiful. I could cry.

---

Sara Ramirez is Still Perfect

+ Sara Ramirez has been killing it lately. First she blessed our entire 2017 with a photo announcement of her new role on Madam Secretary (next Sunday!!). Most recently though, she gave a speech about the importance of bisexual and non-monosexual visibility in media! ????

---

Queer Oppulence

+ Have you heard about Tiffany’s new line of ridiculous thousand dollar replications of everyday objects? For instance, there’s a sterling silver and vermeil “tin can” with a Tiffany blue pop of color for a super affordable $1,000! Let’s all get one of each, we deserve it!

---

Queers and Babes

https://twitter.com/JoePack/status/929090453269442560

+ “Congratulations to Caroline Ouellette ?? and Julie Chu ?? Olympic rivals, CWHL teammates who had their first child today.”

I opened my big mouth, didn’t I. pic.twitter.com/AStMXoiv1e

— Alana Dickens (@deathtodickens) November 9, 2017

+ Autostraddle’s own Dickens brought a new adorable babe into the world right after the emoji mom gave birth!!

---

Queers in Theatre and Film

+ Jennifer Reeder’s new film Signature Move is a lesbian rom-com about a lesbian Pakistani lawyer and the Jewish-Latina bookstore owner she falls in love with. There are no white men in this film; I repeat: no white men.

+ Through a series of vignettes, PlayGround Lessons asks the question, “Can you see yourself in my experience?”

What’s more, the show will donate one hundred percent of proceeds to The Trevor Project and Live Out Loud. The Trevor Project offers crisis and suicide prevention services to LBGTQ youth, while Live Out Loud connects queer youth to role models and mentors passionate to share their stories and knowledge, as well as career advice, with their mentees.

Playground Lessons takes place at New York’s Alchemical Theater Laboratory, and runs December 7 – 9. For more information, click here, and donate to their GoFundMe, here.

---

Have an amazing week I love you so much! If you need a laugh, maybe sing Keith Urban’s new song “Female” to the tune of The L Word theme song.

The Day My Students Found My HER Profile

I had been aware of my bisexuality all throughout my entire time in college, but I was always uncertain about how to approach being with another woman, mainly due to the fact that I was smack dab in the middle of my transition from male to female. In later years, I realized that my reluctance to publicly acknowledge my attraction to women stemmed from some misguided notion that being attracted to women while being a trans woman somehow took away from my gender identity.

It wasn’t until I had graduated from college and had fully transitioned that I finally decided to act on my attraction to women, something that I had no idea how to do after so many years of only allowing myself to have sexual relations with men. Looking back, my fear of how to approach another woman was nothing short of sheer insecurity, but back then I felt that woman would have much rather been with a cisgender woman than with someone who was transgender, such as myself. For some reason, I felt more confident with men than I did with women. I rationalized thinking that in comparison to a man, I was far more feminine and he wouldn’t think twice about the fact that I was a woman, whereas, I felt that another woman would surely take note of what aspects of my body were more masculine than her own. Unfortunately due to the fact that I passed up four years of prime opportunity to explore my identity under the inclusive tribe of fellow LGBT individuals while in college, my options were fairly limited in the small North Carolina town that I had moved to in order to teach high school theatre arts.

Up until that point, I had regularly relied on Tinder to provide a steady stream of male suitors, and after nearly a year’s worth of frantic swiping in order to try to find a woman in the nearby area that shared the same inclinations such as myself, all I came up with were more men. The idea of trying to pick up someone at a bar seemed highly unlikely to me, and I didn’t know where else to turn so I called up my best friend from college, Nadine, who I had set up with an old friend of mine years earlier and someone who I considered to be the perfect lesbian. She was someone who I wanted to be like in each and every way. From the way in which she talked to other women at parties to the way she effortlessly rocked flannel button up shirts, she could do no wrong in my opinion, and she was just the person to turn to in a dire time of need. Nadine had several years’ worth of firsthand knowledge about how to find and retain the perfect woman, if she couldn’t help me, then no one could, I thought.

“Do you use HER?” she asked as though the three simple letters contained all of the answers to my romantic woes.

Her question greatly confused me. At the time, I had no idea about the dating app HER or the possibilities that it held. Nadine informed me that she frequently used the app when she and her girlfriend were on breaks in order to connect with other women, and that it was simply the best way to cut through all of the noise of social and dating apps that were initially designed for straight people.

After downloading the app, I uploaded several pictures that I thought highlighted my best assets, and crafted a simple personal statement. I was reluctant to broadcast my trans status right off the bat, and decided to do the same as I did when I hooked up with guys on Tinder, and simply disclose my trans status to the individual if I felt our conversations were headed in a promising direction. I had always been squeamish about including anything overly embarrassing in personal statement, mainly because I’ve always found blunt personal information to be tacky beyond belief, and thank goodness for my modesty considering what followed.

After less than a week of being on HER and a handful of pleasant conversations with women who lived in the closest metropolitan area, Greensboro, something concerning presented itself in one of my classes. The class mainly consisted of freshman and was the most rambunctious of the semester. On the particular day in question, I had the students circled around in the middle of the room while we were discussing Elizabethan theatre, specifically Christopher Marlowe, my favorite of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century European playwrights. For some reason, I found the life of the questionably bisexual young playwright to be far more interesting than the overexposed William Shakespeare.

Just as I was getting into all of the gritty details of how Marlowe was stabbed to death by a local businessman, I heard Taylor, a particularly high-strung student who loved to stir gossip, loudly whispering to several other students. At first I didn’t pay much attention to the content of her conversation. I simply urged her to stop talking and to focus on the passage at hand, and continued on with my lecture.

To my frustration, she only took my advice for roughly thirty seconds before returning to her previous state of gossip. I specifically decided to ignore her loud whisper instead of acknowledge it further, which I assumed would only ratchet up her defiance even more. As I tried to talk over her, I was able to make out some of the things she was eagerly telling to the other students around her. To my surprise, I heard her say, “Someone who works at the school is on HER.” My heart sank. I knew without a doubt that she was talking about me. She proceeded to inform the other students what HER was, specifically emphasizing the fact that it was predominantly a lesbian dating app.

Although in hindsight I probably tipped my hand by doing so, I quickly turned to her and asked, “Are you gossiping or listening to me?” As though the fact that she had something on me empowered her to do whatever she desired, she flashed a sinister look my way, and proceeded to pull out her phone and showed a screenshot of my profile to the students around her.

“Taylor,” I called out in my best rendition of an authoritative voice.

She then smiled at me with a knowing grin and said, “Oh I’m just telling them about a teacher that’s on a very interesting dating site.” I could tell she was trying to undercut me.

Unsure as to how to play the situation, I simply said, “Oh.” I tried to calculate the situation, taking into account my personal observations of her classroom behavior pertaining to a student who had come out as female to male trans earlier in the semester during a monologue assignment that I had given the class. The more I thought about it, I realized that she was fairly accepting towards other students based on all accounts that I could think of, but considering the fact that I was the individual in question, an authoritative figure who regularly had to call her out for her immature actions, I knew that she was out for blood.

“A lesbian dating site,” she added rather loudly, which garnered the attention of most of the class.

The last thing I wanted was for it to come out publicly in the middle of class that I was on a lesbian dating app, especially considering the state’s well-known track record of LGBT issues, most notably with HB2. Since starting teaching, I had managed to successfully conceal my trans status, and even though I thought the public knowledge of my attraction to women would have gone over far better than being outed as trans, I still feared that the relatively conservative town would have been up in arms over the fact that one of the teachers was a known lesbian, not to mention that she was actively pursuing a relationship. All I could think to do was come out swinging and to deflect.

“How do you know that someone who works at the school is on a lesbian dating app?” I asked her. “I guess that means that you spend a lot of time on lesbian dating apps yourself.”

The class erupted into a thunderous fit of laugher at Taylor’s expense. The minute the words slipped out of my mouth, I felt guilty for going after a student so strongly, but more importantly I felt horrible over the fact that I raised the notion that a lesbian dating app was something to take pause over, which of course they aren’t.

Feeling as though I had just managed to avoid a major catastrophe, I promptly took down my profile and decided to leave romance up to a chance encounter, which of course hasn’t yet happened despite all of the feel-good life lessons that my addiction to romantic comedies have engrained into my mind. Immediately following the class, I was terrified that I was going to receive a bunch of angry phone calls from parents or a visit from the overly religious principal as a result of word getting out that I didn’t fit the heteronormative cookie cutter mold that all of the other teachers at the school did.

Taylor and I didn’t dare mention our usage of HER or anything that didn’t directly relate to theatre for the rest of the semester. No one seemed to pick on her despite my snide remark. It was as though the whole class period had been one big nightmare because no one as much as whispered anything about HER in my classroom ever again.

Looking back, I now know that I should have taken a stand for both my identity and dating life. I shouldn’t have deflected away from myself only to out a student, instead I should have embraced the moment in the hopes that today’s youth aren’t nearly as judgmental as the people I went to high school with. I should have also kept my profile up, because who knows, if I had, I might have met just the right woman.

Demi Lovato’s “Simply Complicated” Is Amazing, Includes That Hotly-Anticipated Sexuality Convo

Former Disney Star and Pop Queen Demi Lovato has long been open and honest with her fans about her life. She’s talked before about struggles with being bullied, mental health, eating disorders and other issues. She’s never shied away from letting her fans into her life in order to connect with them and build meaningful relationships. She takes all of this a step further in her new Youtube documentary “Simply Complicated,” which premiered last night. Through archival footage, behind the scenes shots of Demi working on her new album Tell Me You Love Me and interviews with friends, coworkers and Demi herself, we learn more about the vulnerable pop star than we’ve ever known before, including hearing her talk about dating both men and women. It’s available for free on YouTube!

At the outset of the documentary Demi tells us, “I’ve learned that secrets make you sick. I’m learning how to be a voice and not a victim. I’ve learned that sex is natural. I’ve learned that love is necessary.” We also hear the kind of honesty that we’re going to see throughout the documentary when she opens by saying she’s nervous because “the last time I did an interview this long, I was on cocaine.”

Lovato grew up with an emotionally and mentally abusive father who was an addict, and at a young age she started drinking with her friends in Texas. By 17 she had started using cocaine. All of this got worse as her stardom increased. She talks about how much she struggled with the grueling schedule of a Disney star as a teen girl who hadn’t yet figured out she also had addiction and mental health issues. She details anger issues, depression, constant partying and drug use and the breakdown that lead to her first time in a treatment facility. Getting better was a struggle for her, one that she’s still dealing with, and she doesn’t hide any of that. Demi and her friends talk about how it took years and several trips to rehab and psych wards for her to finally decide she wanted to get better, to stop drinking and using cocaine and Adderall every day. While she’s doing better now and hasn’t used in five years, she discusses her ongoing struggles with eating disorders; she’s in therapy and spends regular time meditating and working out in order to keep her life on track.

In terms of her love life, Demi says that she never loved anyone like she loved long time boyfriend Wilmer Valderrama, but that “there’s just so much of my life I hadn’t explored yet,” when talking about why the two broke up. She’s just turning 25 this yea and has been sober for five of those; she’s never lived on her own before and she’s got a lot of work to do to figure out who she is.

At one point Demi’s assistant relates how at one concert alone, she had set up four possible suitors in the audience for Demi — when they start to try to figure out their names, it becomes clear that Demi has a lot, and I mean a lot, of suitors. Demi’s using the dating app Raya, and says “I am on the dating app with both guys and girls; I’m open to human connection, so whether that’s through a male or female, that doesn’t matter to me.” She loves dating, she loves having casual sex, she loves men and women. She talks at length about how she’s felt discouraged from being open about her sexuality, but she’s proud to be a sexual person and isn’t going to be ashamed of it. There’s no reason to doubt her sexuality or suggest she’s still in the closet when discussing Demi; she’s into girls, she says so explicitly; let’s believe her. Demi Lovato is a queer woman who likes to have fun and likes to have sex. Her singing songs like “Cool For the Summer” isn’t her cashing in on the “trend” of being queer, it’s her celebrating who she is and what she likes to do.

Demi ends the documentary by talking about her connection with her fans and saying it’s the most important part of her career. She wants to build trust with them and be honest with them, and she’s happy that she’s able to do that. Artists that connect to their fans and talk about their struggles and their strength and their identities are important; women like Demi Lovato, Kesha and Hayley Kiyoko are all being radically vulnerable about their personal lives in their work and in interviews. They’re not letting anyone feel alone. Demi wants you to know that if you struggle with substance abuse or body image issues or eating disorders or suicidal thoughts, she’s there with you. She wants you to know that no matter who you love, she’s on your side. She wants you to know that no matter how many people bully you and call you names for being who you are or the way you look or who you sleep with, she understands and she’s been there too. And Demi wants you to know that she’s working on it, and she’s seeing the light at the end of the storm, working every day to be the best version of herself she can be. And she’s letting you know that you can do the same thing.

Demi Lovato Is Candid, Honest and Into Dating Women In New Interview

Demi Lovato’s been teasing for weeks that she’ll finally explain her sexuality once and for all in her new documentary, “Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated.” While we wait with bated breath, she recently dropped a few interesting tidbits in an interview with Entertainment Tonight, including a stated interest in dating both men and women.

The “Cool For The Summer” singer explains that her goal with the documentary is to be honest with her fans, in an effort to connect with people who might be experiencing something similar to what she went through. “I lay it out on the line and I’m very, very honest… When I share things with my fans, I want it to be honest and real, so I do. I share all that with them.” For example, when she discusses trying cocaine for the first time at age 17, she admits that she “loved it” – a polarizing confession that she hopes will help humanize addiction and help fans avoid a similar fate. “That’s the type of honesty that people need to hear in order to protect themselves from possibly going down that road, because drugs and alcohol [are] so tempting.. There are times where you are faced with the choice of, ‘Do I do this, or do I not do this?’ and I want to prevent my fans from going through the things that I’ve been through.”

Later, Lovato discusses her experiences with treatment and her ongoing commitment to sobriety. She is currently a co-owner of CAST Centers in Los Angeles, the same facility she used to get sober in 2011. “I just feel like I have a bigger purpose than just singing and I want to make sure I use what I have for good – it’s incredible. I actually get to co-facilitate some group classes and I feel kind of like a therapist at times and it’s really cool I get to be hands-on.”

While Demi has historically been happy to discuss being in a healthy place with regards to her sobriety, she’s been hesitant to discuss her romantic affiliations in great detail. She was most recently seen holding hands with Lauren Abedini at Disneyland, throwing off vibes that body language expert Stef Schwartz described as “definitely doin’ it.” In an interview with PrideSource this past September, she dismisses Forever Queer Anthem “Cool For The Summer” as a light, breezy ode to bisexuality and explains that her sexuality is irrelevant to what her music’s about. She also noted that she would explain her orientation further in her documentary.

However, while speaking with Entertainment Tonight, Demi mentioned that she’s currently using dating apps (our guess is Raya) and is open to dating both men and women. She notes that she’s still in the process of finding herself, and isn’t “diving into” a relationship with anyone, which is bad news for me because I’m pretty sure we’re already in a committed relationship.

“I value my time by myself now, and I value my time with my friends. And I just have learned to really appreciate my me time and getting to know myself and learning to fall in love with myself before I fall in love with anyone else,” she explains. When the interviewer asked how and when she decided to search for a human connection instead of gender-specific attraction, Lovato answered, “That’s how I’ve always felt.”

---

“Demi Lovato: Simply Complicated” airs on YouTube on October 17th.

Alex G Is Bisexual: YouTube Musician Inspired by Evan Rachel Wood to Come Out

25-year-old singer-songwriter Alex G has known about her bisexuality since she was 13, but due to her “weird religious background” decided to “hide it away.” “I thought that it was dirty and wrong and disgusting,” she shared in a moving YouTube video yesterday for National Coming Out Day. Her family never talked about sexuality, she remembers, so she just kept wishing and hoping that she’d “get over it.” But, of course, she couldn’t. She kept having crushes on female celebrities, for example, and eventually this brought her to about two years ago when she had to start facing an element of herself she always feared was sinful. She journaled, she cried in therapy, wrote a lot of songs — yannow ,the usual.

At the start of 2017, she had a breakthrough after watching Evan Rachel Wood speak for the HRC in an online video. “Seeing Evan Rachel Wood talk was the first time I had seen myself in someone else who claimed bisexual as their identity,” she remembers. “And I was like, whoa, I guess it’s like, okay to say that I’m bisexual? That makes sense to me. This makes sense for who I am.”

Alex wants to embrace and promote the label of “bisexual” specifically, in order to combat bisexual invisibility. “In the LGBTQ community there’s not a lot of people coming out saying ‘I am bisexual,'” she declared. “And I wanted to do that because it really has been helpful for me to see other people out there with influence talking about their sexual orientation in a way that made sense to me.”

With over 1.5 million subscribers, her coming out as bisexual will make Alex G one of the top ten most popular LGBTQ women YouTubers. She launched her channel in 2010, playing covers including some especially popular covers of “Roar” and “Thrift Shop,” and quickly gained a massive following. She released her first EP, “Found,” in 2012, and her debut album, “Growing Up,” in 2014, which reached #24 on the iTunes Pop Chart. Her concept EP “Share Your Story,” released this year, featured five songs based on personal stories fans shared with her.

Here, watch this perfect cover of “Younger Now” with (DREAMer!) Gustavo Guerrero that she did last month:

Welcome to the team, Alex!

Autostraddle Bi+ Week Roundtable: Choosing Visibility

In the week leading up to what was initially Celebrate Bisexuality Day on September 23, we think a lot about visibility — characters in media who resist tropes, how we accomplish positive but nuanced representation, what it looks like to intentionally see and create space for each other, and looking at books and music that show us ourselves. Although it’s obviously crucial and beautiful, visibility is also complex! How do we want to be seen in our daily lives? How much control do we really have over it? How do we make ourselves visible in a world that often chooses not to see us clearly, and what risks and complications come with it? There’s no one answer, which is why we had all these Autostraddle staffers who identify somewhere under the bisexual umbrella talk about it for you!

---

Nora, Fashion & Beauty Editor

I don’t feel personally compelled to describe my sexuality in a single word or limited terms. The way I tend to phrase it to interested parties is that I am attracted to certain people regardless of gender, and that I feel lucky to have so many opportunities to give and receive love — though in a pinch, I’d say the most comfortable approximation of that sentiment is “queer.”

I ascribe this attitude largely to growing up in a family with two moms and a non-binary sibling, and in a social circle that knew and embraced us as such. My friends and relatives know I’ve dated people of different genders, but I’ve never had a real official “coming out”; I imagine that would feel more urgent had hetero and cis been presented as the default in my immediate community, the way they are in the world at large.

That said, I find clothing and other ornamentations to be helpful in expressing and protecting myself. My style — loud and often “unflattering” according to conventional beauty standards — tends to insulate me from interactions with toxic heteronormative jerks, and conversely opens up lines of conversation with wonderful, radical, and often babely men, women, and non-binary people. It’s a pretty sweet situation, if you ask me.

---

Mey, Trans Editor

I’ve still not even been bisexual for a year, and I struggle a lot with internalized biphobia. Sometimes I think that I’m not as queer or not as radical as I was when I identified as a lesbian. But that’s bullshit. And I want people to know that I’m bi. I have to keep on reminding myself that my bisexuality is awesome and queer and important, and I want to remind everyone else too. So whenever I get the chance, I remind people by saying “Hey, I’m bisexual.” I love labels, and this is a label that’s very important to me, so I’m going to say it as many times as I can until it’s stuck in both my mind and the minds of everyone I talk to.

---

Stef, Vapid Fluff Editor

As a person who exists and writes on the internet, I do think it’s important to make myself extremely visible as bi/queer/etc. The more we speak up, the more easily we’re able to find each other – and without that, it can be a little lonely out there. I’ve been lucky in that I started coming to terms with my sexuality around the same time I met Riese and this website happened, so I never really had to go searching for an inclusive online queer community before we actively built this one.

I struggled enormously to come to terms with my sexuality in my 20s, and now in my 30s it’s still not necessarily something I can clearly define. I’ve mostly stopped trying to limit myself with labels, and over time I’ve found that to actually be pretty common (I will use “bisexual” or “queer” but have never found a term that particularly resonated with me). I will admit that it’s tricky sometimes helping my straight friends understand the language regarding my orientation that feels comfortable to me. I’ve also definitely had issues with partners who didn’t understand that my sexuality was/is real and valid. Interestingly enough, those partners are no longer around.

---

Laura M, Staff Writer

I feel like I’ve gotten much more chill about labels over time. I primarily identify as bisexual, but I find myself using “lesbian” and “gay” as adjectives to describe myself just as often. Outside of LGBT-specific contexts, I generally find any word that indicates “not straight” to be good enough. I guess I just don’t care that much if coworkers and casual acquaintances know the granular details of my life experiences and feelings? Broad strokes are fine, whatever.

Outside of my personal life, I do think it’s important to advocate for greater bi visibility in the media. People seem to have such a hard time with the concept, and honestly, it’s not that hard?! (Which is perhaps why I’ve ceased to care; it’s tiring to repeatedly explain myself.) From the rapid advancement we’ve gotten on other issues, it seems clear to me that solid portrayals in popular mass media are the quickest path to better understanding. We have a few, but still not enough. I would love to see more.

---

Crystal, HR Director

Visibility is important and so my preference will always be for people to know that I’m attracted to folks of various gender identities, although it’s not always doable. With friends and family it’s easy: I’ll either describe my orientation for them (these days I tend to avoid using any kind of label) or let them piece it together by being openly discussing past and current partners.

What continues to be a struggle is sharing this very specific information to acquaintances, like work colleagues and mutual friends. My outings to those people almost always result from me referring to Katie by name or correcting someone who misgenders her. It feels inappropriate to divulge more detail and so I don’t, even though I’m aware it may lead to incorrect assumptions about my orientation. I’m not certain there’s a work-around, I’m guess I’m still figuring it out.

---

KaeLyn, Staff Writer

I knew that “bisexual” was the word that made sense for me when I came out to my parents (in a fit of tears and teenage angst) at 17. I came out to the rest of the world a few months later when I went three hours away to my undergraduate college. Over time, and because of the times (early 2000’s), “queer” became a term that best resonated personally and politically with me.

I love the openness of being bi/pan/queer/whatever and the reality that who I’m attracted to changes over time and it’s totally natural and chill. I have a hard time conceptualizing monosexuality. Like, how? How can you just be attracted to one gender? I know it’s a real thing, but it’s bizarre for me to imagine ruling someone out based soley on their gender.

Since I came out-out to the world, I’ve always been out. I dated a straight cis guy for three years in college and I’m married to a gender non-binary queer boi now, so being visibly queer is not always easy. I’m femme-presenting, too, which doesn’t help. There was a time I felt like I had to announce it. Now, I just let it be a thing that is real and if people make assumptions, that’s on them. My partner flags as queer to other queer people, so when I’m with him, I feel very seen, but when I’m on my own, it’s a crapshoot whether that cute barista will know I’m flirting with her or not.

I flag queer in small ways. I have a fairly drastic undercut that I can cover or show off based on how I’m feeling on any given day. I choose to associate myself with queer things like writing for Autostraddle and serving on boards of LGBTQ nonprofits and being very visible in my social media presence. I don’t wear the bi flag on my sleeve and I don’t worry much anymore about how people see me, but I think that’s partly just getting older and more chill about life and giving less fucks.

The only thing that is sometimes weird is, being femme and bi, I can relate to other feminine women in a way that makes straight cis women assume I’m one of them and I don’t always like that. Even more than getting hit on by gross men, I hate feeling like I’m part of a straight sisterhood I don’t actually belong to. My favorite part about queer-exclusive spaces is that I don’t have to navigate that middle space aka talk to straight people at all.

---

Raquel, Staff Writer

Over time, I’ve identified as many different things — heteroflexible was my first label, dipping my toe into the waters of multi-gender attraction but afraid to go so far in the lady pond that it would disrupt my life. Then, inevitably, it did—I fell in love with a girl and my world turned upside down. I didn’t know what to call myself after that for awhile, and I was just beginning to tiptoe into the world of gayness. I wanted to respect the fact that I’d just spent four years of my life dating a man, and years of my life before that with crushes on boys (and girls, but I hadn’t let myself look at that straight in the face, just yet). So, I tried “pan” — a term I’d learned on Tumblr, and a term I liked because I liked the ability to both have a label and be very vague about everything. (“I just like people” — thanks, Skins Series 5 Frankie!) Also, it reminded me of the creepy greek half-goat god, which for some reason I liked?

I even ended up starring as the token non-lesbian in a friend’s documentary short, with long mermaid hair and dressed in a vest and tie, explaining what “pansexual” meant — mostly, that it’s not so much about the parts as about the people. Pretty soon, I was trying my darndest to read as gay as I possibly could — I cut off all my hair and started to dress exclusively in doc martens and button-ups, usually also with suspenders, a tie, a vest, a blazer… (I definitely could have benefitted from Coco Chanel’s advice to “before leaving the house … look in the mirror and remove one [or two or three] accessory”).

After I’d been in the gay community for awhile, however, I started to meet other queer and bisexual women who talked to me about why pan was a frustrating label for them, and how important it felt for them to identify as Bisexual, openly and politically. I learned that it was shitty to call it transphobic — and actually, the “bi” refers to having an attraction to both your own sex and other sexes — making it not inherently transphobic, but just as inclusive as I thought pansexual was. This is my opinion — I still have friends who like “pan” as a label as well — but to me, it started to feel unnecessarily academic, niche, and thus standoffish, like I was using the term just so I wouldn’t use bi, and so I could be using a term other people couldn’t understand. I didn’t want to be that person.

I started to want to be bi, open about it, and smarter than the people who gave me shit for it.

And I had started to get shit for it. I was accosted for threesomes, accused of being in a phase, asked if I’d “go back to dick when we break up” and what my “percentage” of preference was—i.e., 50 – 50 gals and guys? 60–40? 80–20? (The answer is, 0% for you, asshole, and what a stupid, binarist, and erasing question. Go buy me a drink and go away.)

Interestingly, being called bi by others as a slur made me start to think harder about why I felt negatively towards the term. It make me look at my internalized biphobia. I wanted to be more visible, this time not by dressing as “gay” as I possibly thought I could, but by showing up to my community and speaking up when someone else had some wrong, or hurtful ideas. I wanted to be openly bi in a way that allowed me to be a good representation.

At the same time, I love having a glut of terms I can use interchangeably. I love the term “queer,” which I usually use as a more umbrella term, to include myself amongst other women and non-binary folx who like women and non-binary folx (and men and whomever else they damn like). It’s the term I started using on my twitter and other social media, and the term I use to self-identify as a member of a community (as opposed to my specific, personal identity, for which I still like “bi”). I like identifying as, like, “sooooo gay, dude.” And I like being bi, regardless of who I’m dating or not dating at the time.

Added bonus? So many good puns. Bi, bitch.

---

Audrey, Writer

I fought hard to find the word bisexual and even harder to believe I could have it, so the word itself and naming myself is very important to me. I spent so many years loving boys and kissing girls and wearing my denial and confusion like chain mail — full of holes and yet still so powerful. In the five years since I first uttered the words “I’m bisexual,” I’ve taken great joy in proclaiming them fiercely. I want everyone to hear me say it in case they don’t believe we’re real, in case they won’t sleep with us, in case they’ve literally never thought about it, in case they need an opening to say it too. I use other words also – I identify as queer, I appreciate the cultural shorthand of gay, and I’ll call my behaviors or clothes or social circle “so lesbian” when the occasion calls for it. But if I ever suspect there is a seed of doubt or erasure, I butt in: “Actually, I’m bisexual.” It’s simple, and so far it’s never caused anyone to yell at me, and it’s the least I can do to maybe make things a teeny bit easier for those who are still out there searching for the word.

---

Natalie, Staff Writer

For most of my life, I’ve been particularly good at making myself invisible. It was an instinct borne from surviving sexual assault… a way to regain the control that had been stolen from me. I held tight to the truths about myself, including my sexual identity, and doled them out selectively. It read like heterosexuality to some people, like confusion to others or self-hatred to a few, and I never bothered correcting any of them because that control felt safe to me.

But as I began to heal from the trauma, I started to cede some of that control and my grip on those truths began to loosen. My attraction to women was, surprisingly, easier to accept than the realization that my attraction to men hadn’t ended that fateful night. I told the people I cared about most… and, at some point, healing and establishing visibility as a bisexual woman became invariably linked. Both remain daily pursuits.

There’s still a lot about visibility that I don’t have figured out yet. The conversations between me and potential romantic partners have gotten easier but the everyday conversations… those conversations — with straight and queer audiences alike — which are completely avoidable, yet probably necessary to create a better space for bisexual people? Those conversations are fraught and require far more energy and patience than I often have to give.

---

Araguaney, A-Camp Staff

I very rarely think about visibility. More specifically, I rarely think about my own. I think it is because I’m consistently outing myself by virtue of my gender, and so with that in/visibility has been normalized as a daily practice, as routine as taking a shower. I’m genderqueer and my pronouns are they/them, so if I want to go through a meeting without feeling like I might suffocate I have to out myself from the get go. In/visibility is just routine. I say my name, I say my pronouns, I say my title, I get going with my meeting, presentation, etc. This is not to say I don’t think about safety on a daily basis, to varying degrees according to the environment, it just doesn’t manifest as a sidekick to visibility.

I used to think about my own visibility way more when I wasn’t out as genderqueer. When people thought I was a cis woman, I was exposed to the bullsh*t of “you are either gay or straight” way more frequently. I felt it deeper, too. I don’t have a control group of myself, so I don’t know if it cut deeper because there were other parts of me that also didn’t feel accepted (even by me, at the time) or because I was exposed to it so much more often. What I can say is that doesn’t happen nearly as frequently now that I’m out daily as a genderqueer person. It’s like the idea of sexual orientation is out the window once we come in with a fluid gender identity.

Are all genderqueers, queer? I do wonder, if a genderqueer person is only attracted to people of a gender other than genderqueer — does that make them heterosexual, by definition? I am by no means advocating labeling other people, just thinking out loud if the same rules of sexual orientation apply to genderexpansive folks like me, and whether other genderqueer folks have thought about this too. With a gender so happy to be outside the binary, how do we relate to words that were created with only binary identities in mind?

I don’t have an answer to that yet, and I’m excited to see the definition of words to continue expanding to include us. In the meantime, while I think this through, I can let you know it is my loud mouth that keeps me visible everyday.

---

Rachel, Managing Editor

I’m in a unique position as far as my visibility as an out bisexual person because of this job and the website you’re reading this on — although my presentation and visual markers are such that in the “real world” I’d usually be read as straight woman, but my “real world” is an online one where both me and my identity are highly visible in specific ways. In some ways that’s been really positive — it relieves me of the burden of constantly making choices about my visibility and having to come out at least in some ways constantly and to everyone. On the other hand, in some ways it sucks — it takes away choices about my visibility, because anyone who knows what I do for work or who googles me can find out a lot about my experiences and how I identify.

Most of the time that’s totally fine; I’m happy to use the public online platform I have for increased visibility, and my other identities and situation in life mean that that’s generally safe for me. Sometimes, though, it’s uncomfortable, and being legible to others as specifically bisexual brings stuff up that just being out as queer or not straight hasn’t in my experience — I’ve had a lot of specific interactions with a lot of people making assumptions about my relationship to monogamy, about my sexual history or availability, my relationship to the rest of the queer community, a whole range of truly bizarre things. When possible, I like having a little more control over how I’m read and who I make myself legible to; Natalie’s thoughts on wanting to maintain a dynamic of control over how others see you really resonated with me. In real-world interaction I find myself often reaching for cues or forms of communication that will resonate with other queer people but not straight people — a classic vagueness around the pronouns of former partners, etc. I’m sometimes ambivalent around concepts of visibility (I wrote a whole essay about it). I definitely wholly understand the importance of as many visible and authentic bisexual identities as possible, but I sometimes feel concern about a certain flattening of me and my community — I worry that when I identify myself as bisexual specifically, I can feel other people’s expectations and connotations related to that identity suddenly superimposed onto me, and they can be exhausting to navigate. At the end of the day, though, I think that’s a challenge that can only be addressed with even more depictions of us, more varied and authentic and complicated visions of us that make the weird cookie-cutter ideas of us that people have obviously and inarguably absurd.

Playlist: Bi Visibility Week

It’s getting close to September 23, which means Bisexual Visibility Day (or Bisexual Christmas, as I like to call it). It’s about raising awareness and celebrating bi folks of all kinds — across gender, race, class, disability and so much more. It’s a celebration of people who are attracted to same and different genders. It’s a day where we talk about what bi erasure means in this day and age. It’s a day where we talk about what it means to be a part of the greater narrative within the LGBTQIA community.

One way to get amped for this important day in September is listening to some music and thinking about all the different ways identity seeps its way into what we dance to. I’ve made a playlist of some of my favorite bi, queer and trans artists that I’ll be listening to as I think about what it means to identify as bi in 2017. Music can be a really cool way to learn about yourself and bring people you love close to you. In this playlist, I’m bringing my favorite queer pop stars together with some amazing DIY bands that I’ve seen live or am just totally obsessed with. This playlist starts with a great song by Michelle Zauner (aka Japanese Breakfast) about dating a girl and moves through anthems like “You’re No Rock and Roll Fun” by Sleater Kinney. I’m also sharing songs from bands like T-Rextasy, Emma Lee Toyoda, Adult Mom, and so many other amazing, wonderful queer folks.

Make it a goal to listen to music for fun but also with intention this year. Bi visibility is bi strength. Music can be a way to socialize as well as a jumping off point into a larger discussion in how visibility operates in pop culture. For me, listening to music has always been a source of power, especially when the music I listen to is by other bi and queer folks. I love getting to know myself through the music I listen to, I have countless memories of moments, whether it be on public transportation or on a walk to class, where the music I’m listening to has served as a device to strengthen my own relationship to my identity. On bi visibility day I’ll be jamming out all day, thinking about the way who I am intersects with what music I love.

Sharon Stone Crossing and Uncrossing Her Legs

The first time I saw Basic Instinct was at a party. Was it New Year’s Eve? Was I 27? I think so. Let’s say the answer is yes. My friends and I had this bit where we’d put dystopian movies from the 80s or “erotic thrillers” from the 90s on in the background when we hung out; we were big on irony. We’d get high and fall asleep on the couch and wake up hazily to Eyes Wide Shut; come back from getting another beer and find someone in latex climbing into a helicopter in Demonlover. It was in this spirit we put on Basic Instinct, a movie I had somehow managed to know nothing about other than the cultural fact of Sharon Stone uncrossing her legs.

The friends I was with that night were all straight, bless their hearts. As the movie progressed, they started to give me the looks you give your girlfriend in the middle of family Christmas dinner. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so embarrassed. And also: you know I’m not like that, right? You know I’m different? We’re still good? They would have turned it off if I had asked; they’re good people. They are different, mostly. I didn’t ask. Instead I watched her zip up her white dress in the mirror; I watched her cross and uncross her legs; I watched her, and my friends watched her, and in the movie we were watching the other characters, men and women, watched her. I hated her so much, and so purely, with such satisfaction. I couldn’t look away.

Basic Instinct came out in 1992, when I was four years old. Catherine Tramell, played by a lithe and leonine Sharon Stone, is a bisexual crime novelist suspected of the murder of her rock star boyfriend. Nick Curran (Michael Douglas) wants to prove that she did it, and also fuck her. Does he care more that she’s a murderer or more about fucking her? Does it matter? Isn’t that always the question. The top tags for the movie on IMDB are “manipulation,” “mind game,” “kissing,” “female star appears nude,” and “strong female lead.”

Catherine’s girlfriend is not featured on the VHS packaging or really anywhere except one very posed and very sultry screencap on IMDB. Her name is Roxy, which I felt was about right. Roxy does not survive to see the end of the movie. My friends got high and drank PBRs and put different items in the apartment on the dog’s head like tiny hats. I watched the movie. At some point — I’m not sure whether it was when Catherine and Nick are reflected fucking in Catherine’s ceiling mirror, or when Roxy’s car flips over dramatically in the middle of the night, or when Nick’s brunette love interest is sprinting virtuously down a dark hallway — my friend M turned to me, a little apologetic. “This is like, really bad,” he said, or something like it. I think he meant something like is this bothering you? Are you okay? It did and I wasn’t and also I didn’t want to stop watching; I hated her and I hated me and it felt good to do it. Sharon Stone crossed her legs, reached for an ice pick, nothing but sex and death behind her eyes. And suddenly I could scratch a particular itch that I hadn’t been able to reach any other way, something unhealthy and also soothing in a way I couldn’t articulate.

The thing about Basic Instinct is that it’s very bad. It’s not just bad representation, it’s a stupid movie, as erotic thrillers from 1992 are wont to be. Why does Catherine write under a pen name and then put a 3×5 inch photo of her face on the jacket anyway? Why the intense revulsion at wearing underwear and using ice cube trays? How is it possible to have that many friends who are convicted murderers? Why does a tense conversation between Nick and Gus happen in the middle of a crowded country bar that we never return to and has nothing to do with the rest of the film? It’s so bad in some places it’s funny actually — Nick snarling “it was the fuck of the century” to a bored and amused Catherine after some truly, deeply run-of-the-mill sex is actually incredibly funny. And although it’s one of the worst portrayals of bisexual women imaginable — sociopathic, hypersexual, lying and manipulative — I think I could have found a way to find that funny too if M wasn’t watching me watch it, if I wasn’t in a room full of kind, well-intentioned straight people watching me watch it. I knew my friends didn’t think I was a narcissistic psycho; I knew they weren’t repulsed or horrified by me. But as Catherine and Roxy gyrated bizarrely in a tacky 90s nightclub could feel their secondhand embarrassment for me — something close to pity, letting me feel something close to shame. It was a feeling I hadn’t put a name to yet, and that night I could feel it solidify in my chest with a weight that was somehow comforting.

Before my first time seeing Basic Instinct was my first time at a Midwestern gay bar. Back home, on the East Coast, we didn’t have gay bars per se, or at least not lesbian bars. Gay men had some leather bars and we had Second Saturday at Machine, scheduled dyke nights across the city you had to keep track of on a calendar, and queer karaoke with Jack and Cokes on Thursdays. But in Indiana, paradoxical to my coastal elite experience, you could visit an institution that had obviously been a sports bar in a previous life but was now wholly dedicated to serving weak drinks at small tables inside a dim wood-paneled room with a small stage for drag shows. My memory of it is that first view, dark and cluttered and mostly deserted, as I walked in with the natural foods store employee I was sleeping with. She had beautiful dark hair and liked to tell me about the biodynamic energy in the carrots she sold. I could never be sure whether she was kidding about that or not. I was nervous about being there — I think we both were, and I wonder now if she had never gone to that bar even though she had grown up there, if she needed someone like me to buy her a drink and put a hand on her leg during a drag king performance of “Pony.” I don’t know what either of us needed, honestly.

There was a group of straight people in the bar that night — inasmuch as you can perceive without asking somebody whether they are “straight” or “not” or “at a gay bar to celebrate a birthday because it seems like a novel thing to do,” they were a group of middle-aged straight people at a gay bar for somebody’s birthday, presumably because it was a novel thing to do. We watched them giggle and nudge each other in the ribs, and we drank our overpriced Indiana drinks, and we all listened to the drag queen on stage lip sync “How Many Licks.” I had been to plenty of straight bars with girls before, heard all the things sneering men say when you’re too drunk to remember you shouldn’t kiss her like that while you’re still out in public, the looks straight people give you as she lights your cigarette out on the sidewalk. The straight people had never followed me before, though, to my own space — and this was ostensibly my own space, right? In some way? I was kissing her in the back of the bar, her white white teeth in the dark tasting like vodka cranberry, the drag queen on stage lip syncing designer pussy, my shit come in flavors in the middle of this tired little bar that was like the experience of drinking warm beer underneath a pool table, and she was all I could see in the infantile disco ball light — but not through my own eyes, not really, more theirs.

I don’t know for sure if they were watching us, but I know that we were part of what they came there to watch on a fundamental level — as I have been so often, in my role as a girl kissing a girl in a dark corner of a bar. Set dressing, something titillating for the sake of ambiance. I don’t remember anything about how I felt that night, not really. I don’t remember leaving, not because I was drunk but because I think I floated away quietly at some point that night, flitted off to the wet asphalt of the empty parking lot with my fingers still tangled in my date’s. I had a body worthy of spectacle when it was next to another particular kind of body, as well as shame and hatred but nowhere to rest it, nowhere to put it down, and so instead I disappeared. I felt overexposed, but more than just me — something about the sweet sadness of the rundown bar was special to us queer patrons, or could have been. But seeing it as a straight birthday party it felt tacky, worthy of pity.

We left the bar and later I would leave that girl too, tell her at 4 am I couldn’t stay over because I had somewhere to be in the morning even though it was a Saturday and the lie was obvious. It wasn’t because I minded so much falling asleep next to her but because she lived with her parents and because the idea of them seeing me so clearly in the light of a Saturday morning felt unbearable. I guess I was worried they would see something true, something I was trying to avoid seeing in myself.

I was new to the Midwest then, and I didn’t know how much to worry about being seen, especially with her. I remember walking with an arm around her on a nighttime sidewalk, snowflakes spiraling through the streetlight glow in a way that was somehow particularly Midwestern, and feeling a low note of panic — was this the kind of thing people noticed here? If so, what did they think? She had grown up here and she didn’t seem nervous, so I followed her lead. Later on she held my hand in a bar that had enough people in it to obviously notice us, and also spectacularly bad service. The bartender realized this and, apologetic, slid us two complimentary drinks: white gummi bear shots, sickly sour-sweet. I knew instantly that we had flown under the radar; somehow nothing signaled perceived straightness as much as being offered a gummi bear shot. I felt relieved and insulted at the same time. We both took our shots before we left.

Catherine Tramell is never not being watched. She knows this, and seems to revel in it, even. When she realizes the door is cracked open as she gets dressed she slows down, takes her time, enjoys it. Catherine is, literally and figuratively, the suspect in the interrogation room who knows who’s watching her from behind the one-way mirror. There is an implication, I think, that this is part of what is supposed to be off-putting about her. It is more believable that this woman might have murdered her boyfriend in cold blood because she is the kind of person who, when she feels men’s eyes on her, becomes more comfortable and controlled rather than less. I don’t say this to point out some kind of ironically feminist element, subverting the gaze or whatever you want to call it. It was because of this that I hated her so much, at least in part, not in spite of it. She grins as she crosses and uncrosses her legs in that fucking white dress, smiling wolflike into the interrogation room camera lens that she knows transmits to men who are staring at her. The irony of the fact that, in real life, Sharon Stone didn’t know the cameras could see her exposed genitals in that one famous shot is not lost on me.

Catherine loves being watched which is great because Roxy loves watching! We see Roxy before Catherine; in a weird moment of slippage, the cops first assume she is Catherine, probably because she’s hanging out alone in her house. There are a few moments later in the film where it’s almost possible to mix them up anyway; they’re both blonde in an intensely 90s way and love staring dramatically from across a room. Roxy is always staring, always watching. She watches Nick watching her with Catherine, she watches Catherine dance away from her and into Nick’s arms; according to Catherine, Roxy watches her fuck the parade of annoying dudes she takes to her bedroom with the mirrored ceiling. According to Catherine, Roxy likes this; Roxy does not behave particularly like she does. “She wanted to watch me all the time,” Catherine says. It is not made clear why this would be enjoyable for Roxy specifically, whether it’s something that brings particular pleasure to Catherine either. The movie seems to consider this point so obvious it requires no explanation; who doesn’t want to watch? Eventually Roxy watches Nick from inside her car before trying to run him over and kill him, arguably the most realistic character decision of the film.

The first time I remember being aware of a man watching me, really watching me, I was fifteen. I was taking the commuter rail into Boston’s South Station, slumped sullenly into the squeaky vinyl seat like the teenager I very clearly was. The tall, thin man with the briefcase and suit across the aisle didn’t care; he glanced over at me the whole ride, long wide-open looks that he didn’t bother to make furtive. As I realized this I looked over at him, surprised, and accidentally met his eyes. He didn’t look away. After the train reached the station, he became the first man to follow me in public. “Where are you going?” When I told my mother about it later, and how I had unintentionally made eye contact, she said “You have to be more careful.” I was mad at that, but also, she was right.

For all that we get to watch her every move — through the camera lens, through other characters’ eyes, through the plentiful mirrors scattered throughout the film — so much about Catherine remains unclear, impossible to read. Why did she murder her boyfriend? Why does she get so fixated on Nick, who is obviously and objectively a scary and violent person? What does she want, exactly, that motivates her to become a full-time sex kitten homicidal maniac? Why does she do any of the things she does? What does she do when no one’s looking? What kind of person do the sum of her choices add up to? We’ll never know, because bisexual murder nymphos from 90s erotic thrillers aren’t designed to make sense. They are points so obvious they don’t require explanation. They’re designed to be thrilling, in every sense of the word. What a thrill!

In graduate school I took a class in narratology, the only school of theory I ever really liked, because it was kind of like watching How It’s Made for stories. Or maybe because it was someone finally admitting that stories are, in fact, made; consciously created by real humans who are flawed and have their own stupid preoccupations and were sometimes hungover. Narrative theory says, in part, that narratives have layers to them: the characters interact with each other; the narrator or lens of the story itself communicates with the conceptualized audience, the idea of a consumer; and bracketing all of it, the actual person or persons who made the story are saying something to the actual person or persons who are taking it in. I used to draw diagrams of this in class: neat brackets that read “implied narrator, implied reader,” and so on. There’s Nick looking at Catherine, and Catherine watching him watch her, a room full of male cops watching them watch each other. There’s the camera lens watching both of them, the screen upon which it’s later projected. There’s the glassy-eyed people I imagine were on set and behind the camera in 1992, and me watching from M’s couch with a warm beer in my hand, tired eyes and tangled hair, a few hours away from the ball drop and stoned laughter and falling asleep on an air mattress. I am, in this framework, at the “level of nonfictional communication” as my friends pass me a drink and check how long til midnight and the dog makes a strange high whining noise from the corner.

Of course, this theoretical model can’t account for how messy it really gets. It is successful, maybe, in describing one singular narrative; it doesn’t illustrate how there are dozens of them and they build on one another, layer over and dovetail with and derail each other. How that man followed me off a train one day but how later, a year or so on, I walked back onto the same one with a girl out of the pouring rain, both of us soaked to the skin and shivering all the way home. It doesn’t explain the two drunk men who leaned down to leer one night in the theater district while I was kissing someone — I can’t even remember her name really — on the curb outside the straight bar, how they stared and hissed. The straight people in that Indiana gay bar watching me and my date while I watched the drag queen looking like the Virgin Mary in brown lipliner and pure white spotlight mouthing stop look and listen get back to your position. M watching me watch the TV screen in his Chicago garden apartment while I watched Sharon Stone reach for an ice pick on the floor and pretended this could be fun for me. The way I watched a 100-lb girl I had just met that night drink a bottle of red wine by herself in 20 minutes, and put an arm around her stumbling little body; the way he watched me do it and yelled later I saw you with her, I saw you, like I had loved her rather than just wanted to keep a girl, any girl, from harm. That photo I still have of the first girl I loved tangled in blankets, looking up into the camera lens and at me aiming it like she loved me too, like there was nothing and no one else she wanted to be looking at. The look from across the crowded room, his eyes on mine in the dark when everyone else was watching the stage and how I could hear a pin drop inside my ribcage. How my husband asked once don’t you worry about people seeing you with me and thinking the wrong thing?, how I didn’t know how to say everything they could think is the wrong thing, anything they see they would misunderstand. How the therapist looked at me, sincere and kind, when she said Maybe you’ll just never be able to have healthy relationships with men. You know, because of your father. How I look to myself in the bathroom mirror in the middle of the night, the aggressively yellow cast of the godawful track lighting I hate, how it feels like I’m never alone even then.

Catherine Tramell is never alone, never outside a line of sight. Nick’s view is our view; we only see of her what he looks at. She only exists because she’s looked at, because you can’t be thrilled by something that isn’t in your field of vision. I understand, obviously, that she was never conceived to be a fully realized person or even character, that that was what created such an easy and convenient void for me to place my loathing of her and of me. But I still thought that maybe the problem was her audience; science tells us that when we view something, even as minute as a single atom flung through space, we are in some way affecting it, informing its trajectory. She could be a real person if she could do it in private, without the weight of other people watching. And that by some transitive property I couldn’t understand, I thought this could be true for me too, maybe. I thought that if I could be alone, outside of anyone’s view at all, I would have a chance to finally figure out what I actually meant; that I could relax and just be rather than be constructed. That was my problem: I needed to be viewed less, to be flung through space without witnesses. I wanted freedom from narrative, which requires inherently a narratee.

This summer, I got on a plane with one carry-on and came back to my teenage bedroom in my mother’s house, leaving behind my husband and partner of many years and the life we had cobbled together for ourselves. By the time I did I had already felt like a bad movie character for a long time, and whoever was doing the role was pretty clearly phoning it in. I wanted to be alone; to be somewhere isolated and by myself. My mother’s place is in the kind of area where it’s almost too eerily quiet to fall asleep at night; you can change with the window open because there’s no one around to even see. I thought that by doing this a sense of self would materialize for me; that I had a fully realized character that other people’s ideas of me had just been obscuring. This was a fantasy I had for a long time, maybe longer than even I really know. I was quietly shocked to realize that the self I had hoped was silently developing without my having to tend to it, like a sweet potato left in the back of the pantry, seemed not to be there. It felt like nothing was, really. Sometimes the parts of ourselves we ignore don’t just grow fallow and untamed in our absence; they turn inward, crack concave, become a void. And you just have to sit there in it, waiting for something to materialize, waiting to be able to see yourself in that anemic early morning light for as long as it takes to make out the faint outlines of your self against the dimly lit past.

I Get Bi with a Little Help from My Friends

Sometimes it feels like bisexuality is the biggest secret club in the world. We make up the largest percentage of the queer community and there are bi people of every race and gender, but sometimes it feels impossible to find each other. It’s one of my favorite things to whisper “I’m bisexual” to a relative stranger in a lesbian bar or a church pew or on Twitter and hear them say “me too.” These electric moments feel like a gift from the universe.

Because of the ways queer and straight communities erase bi folks, sometimes it feels like we have to shout just to hear each other, and that makes it all the more essential for us to create friendships with other bi people and build community.

“I freaking love having bisexual friends. If I wasn’t friends with y’all I never would’ve come out as bi,” said Trans Editor Mey Rude. “Bi friends are the best because they remind you that you’re just as queer and valid and cool as that lesbian over there. I still struggle a lot with internalized biphobia and it’s my bi friends that help shake me out of it.”

There are some things that my bi friends just get. I often feel self-conscious talking about my romantic and sexual history of mostly cis dudes because some lesbians (and straight people who assume I’m a lesbian) keep waiting for the punchline where I talk about how horrible it was. With my bi friends, I can tell all my stories without hesitation or editing, and it makes me feel like a whole person. On the other hand, I don’t have to talk about my past relationships in a floundering attempt to prove my identity is valid. I can just be a human who has dated and kissed and pined after some other humans and it’s not a big deal!

In general, my bi friends understand the alienation, erasure and self-doubt that comes with being bisexual in a “can’t you just pick one” world. By seeing and believing each other’s negative experiences, we help each other reduce the harm of those things.

While I was writing this, I asked my roommate Antonia what she thought and she said something incredibly true that I had never thought of: Being bi can mean the way we enter into platonic intimacy becomes more complex and freeing because a person’s gender is never the most obvious thing about our dynamic with them. In a way, the ostensibly broader range of romantic possibilities reduces the internalized pressure to filter every person of a specific gender through the lens of whether we want to date them.

Staff writer Raquel puts it this way: “It’s so helpful to just dish and vent about various partners and life experiences with people who share that experience. I mean, it’s so fun to rant, uncensored, about being asked for unwarranted threesomes or if I’m switching back to dick, to an understanding ear. (And one million eyerolls.) My bi friendships have been a safe space to just be myself and bitch, and that may not sound like much, but it’s everything. The understanding friendships you feel safe enough in to rant and to be vulnerable are the best.”

I’m lucky: I have a bisexual best friend, a bisexual roommate, and once a year I get to go to the Bisexual meet-up at A-Camp and hang out with a room full of people who ask each other questions and believe each other and are all very cute. But I know how hard it is to begin the journey of forging connections with other bi folks who will support you and teach you new crafts! There are a few easy ways to start:

• Literally just tell people you’re bisexual all the time. I know not everyone feels safe or comfortable doing this but if you do, I highly recommend it as the most efficient option. It has the added benefit of weeding out biphobic people in your quest for friends! And maybe you don’t carry around a blue, pink and purple neon sign, but seriously, the risk of someone reacting badly when they find our you’re bi is far outweighed by the reward of making a life-affirming connection. Sorry for being a sap but it’s true!

• Join online communities. As for any marginalized group or group with a relatively small population, the internet has changed the way we find and connect with each other. I recommend the BiNet USA group and the Autostraddle and A-Camp Bisexuals group on Facebook as a starting point.
• Celebrate Bi Visibility Week! It’s your lucky day, because bi week is going on right now. Watch social media for people you didn’t even know were bi posting specially filtered photos on social media or using the #biweek hashtag. Also get into the comments on all the great bi week articles here on Autostraddle this week!

When it comes to making bisexual friends, here’s what Staff Writer Alaina has to say:

All of my friends are bisexual. The weird thing is that I’m only sort of kidding; I have a lot of bisexual friends. And I love them so much, and they’re so important to me because I can talk about attraction with them in a really easy way. I think I’ve been able to find so many bi friends through being open about who I am. I don’t use bi as an identifier typically, but I’m open about being attracted to people who are my gender and who aren’t, and like, if you tell someone you’re bisexual/bisexual adjacent, if they are too, they’ll let you know. Also, a lot of my bi friends are nonbinary, and that’s been awesome, because we’re able to talk about our genders and our sexualities and like, can you even really be straight or gay if you’re not a woman????? And it’s super low pressure, and funny, and not this serious and awkward conversation. The best part of making new bisexual friends is the Bi Meetup at A-Camp every year. It’s amazing to meet so many people with the same sexuality as you but who are defining it and dealing with it in a ton of different ways. Plus there are always cute craft ideas, and what better way to make friends than crafts?

While on your quest to create more beautiful bi friendships, I hope you will insist that all your variously-oriented friends treat you with respect and kindness and take your identity and relationships seriously. Only you know what that means to you, but whatever it is, you deserve it. I promise.

15 Must-Read Bisexual Nonfiction Books

In honor of Bi Visibility Week, here are 15 must-read bisexual nonfiction books, including memoir, theory, studies, and anthologies. Whether you’re looking for powerful personal bisexual narratives, insightful political analysis of bisexual issues, or information to help understand bisexuality, there are books in here you won’t want to miss!

---

Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution by Shiri Eisner

This book is essential reading for any bisexual person and anyone who wants to understand the bi people in their life. Bi takes a comprehensive look at bisexual politics, from biphobia and monosexism to feminism and trans issues. Eisner tackles topics like bisexual stereotypes, accusations that bisexuality “reinforces the gender binary” and otherwise contributes to the dominant social order, myths about bisexuality (like it doesn’t exist or that everyone is really bi), the fact that bi men are deemed gay and bi women are deemed straight, the issue of bi people being accused of having heterosexual privilege and more! Reading Bi changed my life as a bi person.

---

Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

Chronology of Water is a beautifully written memoir with rich language and stark images. As Yuknavitch chronicles her life, she jumps back and forth in time, deconstructing the very concepts of memoir, memory, and time. She writes, most of all, about her body: drug use, child birth, gender, destructive relationships, abuse, swimming, grief and sex. Chronology of Water prominently features Yuknavitch’s bisexuality, including a lot of hot sex writing featuring women, men and BDSM. She also writes wonderfully about the craft of writing itself: “My first book came out of me in a great gushing return of the repressed. Like a blood clot had loosened. …Words from my whole body, my entire life, or the lives of women and girls whose stories got stuck in their throats.”

---

The B Word: Bisexuality in Contemporary Film and Television by Maria San Filippo

This 2014 Lambda Award winner for bisexual nonfiction fills a gigantic gap in both queer studies and film and media writing. If you’ve ever been annoyed at the ludicrous ways in which movies and TV shows manage to avoid the “b” word, San Filippo’s book is a godsend. She writes about all sorts of different genres, from art cinema to vampire movies to “bromances” to popular TV shows. The book discusses, among other topics, Chasing Amy, Mulholland Drive, Angelina Jolie, Roseanne, The L Word and plenty more. Not only does Filippo make a strong argument for how pervasive compulsory monosexuality is in media, she also does really surprising bisexual readings of familiar movies and TV.

---

A Cup of Water Under My Bed by Daisy Hernández

Hernández’s coming-of-age memoir is simply stunning. In elegant, evocative prose liberally peppered with Spanish, she writes about family, Colombian and Cuban American culture, Latinx spirituality, losing your mother tongue, racism, money, growing up working class and, of course, her bisexuality. There’s a stark honesty in Hernández’s writing, especially when she’s discussing her bisexuality: “There isn’t a good verb for what begins happening to me in college. Yes, I am meeting lesbians, but I am not one of them. I still find men attractive; it is that I am thinking of women in a new way. It is as if I am learning that I can shift my weight from one leg to the other, that I have a second leg. Kissing women is like discovering a new limb.”

---

Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out edited by Loraine Hutchins and Lani Ka’ahumanu

Bi Any Other Name is a seminal collection first published in 1991. In fact, it’s often lauded as the book that sparked a national bisexual movement in the US. Edited by two legendary bisexual activists, who together founded BiNet USA, this groundbreaking anthology was re-issued in 2015 with a new introduction for its 25th anniversary. The book includes more than 70 bi people from a variety of backgrounds describing their lives as bisexuals in prose, poetry, art, and essays. Most of the pieces address coming out and what bisexual identity means to the writer. It’s one of those collections that will make you feel less alone, whether you’re just coming out as bi or have been comfortable your identity for decades.

---

My Awesome Place: The Autobiography of Cheryl B by Cheryl Burke

This Lambda Award winner is an authentic snapshot of the exhilarating art scene in the East Village of NYC in the 1990s as told through the eyes of Cheryl Burke, a bisexual spoken word poet, performance artist, playwright, and journalist. My Awesome Place chronicles Burke’s journey from her working-class New Jersey roots and an abusive family, her series of disastrous relationships with men and women, her “intense, intimate relationship with drugs and alcohol” and her queer creative coming of age in the East Village. Despite — or perhaps because of — the dark material, Burke’s sense of humor shines. The book was compiled from Burke’s papers after her early death and was finalized by her close friend Sarah Schulman, giving it a captivating urgency and immediacy.

---

Getting Bi: Voices of Bisexuals Around the World edited by Robyn Ochs and Sarah Rowley

A now classic bisexual anthology with its first edition in 2005 and second in 2009, Getting Bi is admirable for how it really follows through on its promise to pay attention to intersectionality. It features short biographical essays from a variety of bisexual people, with attention to race, class, ethnicity, gender identity, disability and national identity. When they say “around the world,” the editors mean it: Getting Bi features writers from 42 different countries! With so many queer anthologies only representing the Anglophone world, Ochs and Rowley have really achieved something with Getting Bi. In addition to the affirming personal stories, the book also includes a wonderful — though American-centric — resource guide.

---

Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire by Lisa Diamond

Sexual Fluidity might help you understand yourself in an entirely new way. Using years of research on bi-identified women and women who’ve experienced changes in their sexualities, Diamond argues fiercely against beliefs about sexuality based on research conducted almost entirely on men. Sexual Fluidity is a passionately defended book explaining that for (cis) women, sexual and romantic desire is much more likely to be neither hetero- nor homosexual, in contrast to (cis) men. Her work shows that for many women, sexual and romantic orientations are context-dependent, shifting as they age, and have different friend groups and relationships. If you’ve ever felt like stifled by traditional narratives of sexual identity, this book will be extremely validating.

---

Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me by Ana Castillo

“‘Paloma Negra,’ Ana Castillo’s mother sings the day her daughter leaves home, ‘I don’t know if I should curse you or pray for you.’” A memoir written with a poet’s language, Black Dove is searing account of what it is like to be a single, brown, bisexual, feminist parent in the United States. With love and humor, Castillo tells her story, integrating those of her family and ancestors, from Mexico City to Chicago. She chronicles coming into her feminist, bisexual, and polyamorous identities, her son’s arrest and incarceration, and her complex relationship with her mother. The result is a powerful, beautiful Lambda Award winning memoir that puts a personal, human face on familiar depressing statistics about the effects of institutional racism and sexism.

---

Bad Dyke: Salacious Stories from a Queer Life by Allison Moon

Moon’s collection of 18 memoirs are fun, raunchy autobiographical stories. There’s a lot of sex, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t also a lot going on emotionally and intellectually. Moon writes about falling in and out of love, as well as in and out of bed in bold, honest, and very funny prose. The stories are a tell-all of all sorts of often hilarious sex-related escapades, like masturbating in trees, getting an erotic piercing to fend off boredom, sleeping with porn stars, and more. She also writes about her long-term bisexual boyfriend and how they negotiate a queer relationship despite appearing to the outside world as a straight couple. Above all, Moon’s utter lack of shame and sex-positive attitude are infectious and just lovely to soak up.

---

Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham by Emily Bingham

This scandalous biography written by the great niece of the book’s subject was a Bisexual Nonfiction Lambda Award winner last year. Born in 1901, Henrietta Bingham lived her life “like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character”: travelling the world, seducing people of all genders left and right, riding horses, drinking to excess, and singing the blues. Bingham came from a very powerful and wealthy family in the American South, and was expected to follow in her father’s footsteps to take over their publishing empire. She preferred, however, to “selfishly and shamelessly” pursue pleasure in many forms, while also struggling with depression and addiction. Her life is a fascinating story of a bisexual woman living in the 1920s and 30s who fiercely resisted the day’s gender and sexual conventions while also being unable to entirely escape them.

---

Bisexuality in Education: Erasure, Exclusion, and the Absence of Intersectionality edited by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli

Winner of the 2015 Bisexual Book Award for nonfiction, Bisexuality in Education is a diverse anthology of essays about bisexuality in different areas of education by writers from the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Some essays focus on the perspectives of bisexual students, such as a two-spirit person in Canada and a bisexual New Zealand woman, while others discuss bisexual health in the context of schools, educational policies and practices affecting bi people, and the use of bisexual books and film in an educational setting. Pallotta-Chiarolli emphasizes how three key concepts affecting bisexuality — erasure; exclusion by inclusion (bisexuality being conflated with homo- or heterosexuality); and the absence of intersectional thinking — underscore all the essays.

---

Dear John, I Love Jane: Women Write about Leaving Men for Women edited by Candace Walsh and Laura Andre

This powerful anthology offers a wide variety of experiences of queer women, including many on the bisexual spectrum. It’s a collection of personal stories about sexuality and coming out, but none of the narratives are of the “I’ve always known” variety. Similar to Sexual Fluidity, Dear John I Love Jane is an extremely validating book for women whose experiences with sexual identity don’t conform to mainstream gay or straight narratives. The kinds of stories you can look forward to include ones by a woman who falls in love with a woman for the first time at age 69, women who’ve only ever been attracted to one woman, and women who married men and were completely blindsided by their later (sometimes exclusive) attraction to women.

---

Advice from a Wild Deuce: The Best of Ask Tiggy by Tiggy Upland

It can be really hard to navigate being a bisexual person in places where there isn’t much room for it. Luckily, Tiggy Upland is here to help, with her Ask Tiggy advice column for and about bisexuals, the best of which is collected in this book. Her advice, which originally ran as a column on the Bisexual Resource Center’s website, is compassionate but frank, always with a hint of her trademark eccentricity and wit. This is a rare book that is supremely entertaining while being informative at the same time. Advice from a Wild Deuce also features other content, including tips from Tiggy on coming out as bi, scripts from her performance art, a great index of resources, and sections from her delightful bisexual webcomic of miniatures “Upland.” Check out the webcomic on her website.

---

How Queer!: Personal Narratives from Bisexual, Pansexual, Polysexual, Sexually Fluid, and Other Non-Monosexual Perspectives edited by Faith Beauchemin

How Queer! is a two-fold collection including 14 autobiographical essays by a variety of non-monosexual-identified folks as well as five essays by Beauchemin putting the writers’ perspectives in the broader context of social justice and social change movements. The personal stories represent a nice range of different experiences of bi+ identity and life, while also having a thread throughout of how pervasive biphobia and monosexism can be even in supposedly liberal and tolerant places. Beauchemin’s essays are a great overview and introduction to 21st century queer politics and history — with an emphasis on the non-monosexual, obviously — which means this is an excellent book for someone who isn’t really familiar with them or needs a refresher.

---

Do you have any favorite bisexual nonfiction books to add to this list? Do you have thoughts about how these book titles under- and/or overuse the punning potential of the word bi? Let us know in the comments!

SaveSave

The Bisexual Character in My YA Novel Isn’t “Perfect” — Which Is Perfect

When I was a wee baby bisexual, I combed through every book and TV show and movie for validation that I deserved love and sex and friends and everything the people I saw in media had. I was 12 and I didn’t have much luck beyond the boring lesbian couple on Queer As Folk. (Seriously, everyone else gets to have wild sex but they just fight all the time? Ugh.)

When the Internet came around, I became addicted to LiveJournal. By that time, I was incredibly depressive and lonely, and was self-harming. I didn’t see a future when I was allowed to be the way I was. But then online, for the first time in my life, I started to read about happy queers.

There was the rocker chick living with her girlfriend in Boston, and the single and lonely Aussie gay guy who documented all his dates, and the other teenage bisexual comic book fangirl in Canada. I didn’t see these people in media, but because of blogging, I knew they were out there IRL. Bisexuality was real. Queer people had fulfilling and exciting lives. I could read about a potential positive, hell, even normal, outcome for my life. This idea kept me living it.

When my comedy partner Allison Raskin and I were given the opportunity to write a young adult novel last summer, I knew one of the main characters would be a bi teenager. I Hate Everyone But You, out September 5, is about two odd-couple friends starting their first semester of college on opposite coasts. We borrowed heavily from our real experiences for the lead characters. “My” character, Genevieve, attends the LGBT-friendly Emerson College, my alma mater, and comes out as bisexual, my identity. Since Emerson’s environment is so “gay,” I wanted to accurately portray the student body as I experienced it: with a variety of wacky, smart, emotional queer and trans characters.

Thus, I Hate Everyone But You is a very queer book. And one aimed at a teenage demographic. I didn’t do this to be controversial. I did it because it was realistic and obvious. I went to Emerson. I was a bisexual teenage girl. Emerson’s student body is gay as hell. Queers hang out with other queers. And given my empty youthful search for myself in media, if I could make a drop in the bucket of content created for our community by our community, why wouldn’t I try?

I had a lot of fears about broaching bisexuality in a young adult book because, for one, I couldn’t possibly encompass every bi’s experiences. Low representation to begin with means I initially felt like I had to portray Gen as some sort of perfect model minority. Stereotypical bisexual characters, many of whom have their bisexuality tied up in evil or duplicity or cheating, means the identity has a dirty reputation. But that “scarlet B” has also brought us to a place where bisexual characters have to be explicitly monogamous or prudish to be considered “good portrayals.” I worried about Gen fulfilling the bisexual stereotype of the “slutty bisexual.” But I also knew that that wasn’t fair. I was never malicious or “evil,” but “perfect, normative” behavior was never my reality.

I remember watching a YouTube video about bisexual stereotypes. Bisexual people stood against a dramatic black background and said: “I’m bisexual but I’m not… non-monogamous” or “I’m bisexual but I’m not easy” or “I’m bisexual but I’m not into casual sex or threesomes.”

Videos like that one strike a lot of self-hatred in me. Because… I am those things. So am I, in real life, bad bisexual representation and then by association, is Gen the same? Sure, it’s not okay to only show one kind of bisexual. But it’s also not okay to imply that one kind is more worthy than the other. Taking in that kind of rhetoric made me hate myself for a long time. Why does Gen have to meet normative standards in order to be a valid human being? Why do I?

Writing for Gen, I only focused on what I knew to be true to my experiences — I am bisexual and I like casual sex and threesomes, and I’m non-monogamous and hey, I may even be easy! And so is Gen! And that’s awesome! Gen’s — and my own — promiscuity isn’t because of her bisexuality. It’s another aspect of our personalities entirely.

I understand where they’re coming from, but to me, the goal isn’t to convince the straights (and gays) that you’re just like them. The goal is to open their minds to accepting all kinds of bisexuals — because we’re a vast community. Just like the gay or straight ones, we’re not a monolith. And there’s room for all kinds, and all kinds deserve respect.

For the other LGBTQ characters that I didn’t have direct experience with but also didn’t want to depict incorrectly (for instance, Gen’s newspaper rival Alex Cassidy, a trans man), we hired consultants — Mey Rude, Kip Reinsmith and Tiq Milan — who gave much-needed insight, corrections, and suggestions. I knew Gen backwards and forwards, but we needed members of the trans community to help realistically shape Alex. I wanted trans teenagers to see themselves represented in something other than a tearful coming out narrative, or someone mid-transition. Alex is a man. Full stop. And he’s a dogged journalist, a sweet, tumultuous love interest, and an opinionated, ambitious dude.

And I wanted the same for Gen. In I Hate Everyone But You, we depict an 18-year-old bisexual woman whose main problem isn’t her bisexuality. Gen enjoys, and remains firm in, her queerness. She likes sex of all kinds. She’s experimenting and discovering and getting it wrong all the time. When she discovers she is queer, she writes an email to her straight best friend, ecstatic about the news. I loved the idea of a queer young person throwing confetti for their own coming out and being excited to experience the sex and relationships now open to her. Being bi is Gen’s favorite thing about herself. It’s as freeing for her as it’s become for me. Gen is the kind of teenage girl I wanted to read about when I was one and I was so, so lucky to be able to create her.