5 Feelings I Had About Emojis In 2015

1.

I don’t understand emojis, but I think I like them. We just started using Slack, and everyone on the Autostraddle team uses them in such lighthearted and hilarious ways. Could I do that? Do I dare to emoji a peach? On the one hand, this is obviously a very low-stakes decision. But on the other hand, language mediates our entire perception of reality! Words matter. Emojis matter.

I think what I appreciate most about them is their extreme efficiency. “Parsimonious” is my favorite word (if not my actual communication style), and emojis are nothing if not that. A few choice character selections can communicate remarkably complex ideas. You can represent entire people, even! Like, Laneia: custom flaming sword emoji. Gabby: three lightning bolts. Me: …sparkle heart, maybe? Pizza slice? This needs further investigation.

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2.

Emojis are amazing. I’ve been emoji-ing everyone I know, and have been utterly delighted by the results. I’m just going to put it out there: women are way better at emojis than men. I believe this is because a) women are better than men at everything, and b) men are given a pass in our culture on such fundamental life skills as emotional awareness and interpersonal communication. Since emojis basically exist to communicate feelings on a more advanced level than straight up text, men tend not to be great at it.

I know it’s not their fault, so I try not to hold men’s emoji deficiencies against them. Some days I’m more successful than others.

One time a man sent me a non-sequitur snake and bug eyes, though? I don’t even know.

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3.

“I love emojis,” I babbled at an attractive friend as we walked. “They’re either very clever or entirely inscrutable. Which is how I’d like to be at all times.”

“Oh, that’s totally you! That could be the title of your memoir: The Emoji Woman,” she joked, and I found myself wanting to wrap myself up in her laugh like bedsheets. After I went home, we continued conversing over text. When she started sending me strings of silly emoji, I swooned so hard I almost died. Romance in 2015 is a funny thing.

Weeks later, I was having after-dinner drinks with a couple friends from A-camp. “I love flirty emoji combinations,” said one. “Oh, me too. Like beers clinking and the screw.” “Yep! Or like, the tongue and then the water droplet.”

“Wait, what does that mean?” I puzzled aloud. “I don’t get it.” They stared. I blushed. They waited while I racked my brain. Nothing. Finally, one reached out to pat me on the arm. “Just think about it,” she said pityingly. “You’ll figure it out.”

I did, to my embarrassment, about 10 minutes later. I think if someone sent me that combination of emojis for real, I’d probably melt into a puddle on the floor and stay that way for several weeks. I just couldn’t handle it. But I’m so glad other people can, you know? God bless lesbian emoji power users.

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4.

“Often I am permitted to return to a meadow,” he began and I pressed my cheek into his chest. At first I nestled in to feel the soft, low rumble of his baritone, but as the poem went on, I found myself holding the position to conceal the confusion on my face. What’s going on here? I wondered. And, uh, why? When I Googled the poem the following afternoon, the only thing I figured out for certain is that nobody really knows what that poet was going on about. Also: I’m not real crazy about having my vagina compared to a meadow. If that’s even what happened.

Reading someone poetry in bed is basically the same as speaking to them exclusively in emojis. If you’re trying to communicate ideas or hold any form of conversation, you really need to throw in some subjects and verbs. Punctuation! Simple sentences! There can be too much of a good thing, and you’ll know you’ve reached that tipping point when I begin interrupting perfectly good conversations about nachos to DTR or otherwise discuss feelings. Which is never the thing I want to be doing. I would always prefer to be talking about nachos.

I hate emoji blasting.

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5.

I love emoji blasting.

Do you know what ambiguous digital icons are great for? Being ambiguous! Responding without actually saying anything! Emotionally holding other people at arm’s length, which, as it turns out, is where I like to hold most people!

Emojis are a boss bitch move. Emojis assert dominance. She who emojis first sets the tone of the conversation. She who emojis best controls the course of the interaction that follows. Aggressive emoji use can put the other person on the defensive. A few sharply placed emojis can put the other person on the spot to step up and demonstrate their own skills. Or if you hit the sweet spot with ambiguous emojis, it can cause an immediate crisis of confidence wherein they call their friends in for backup help interpreting your texts.

These are not nice things to do, mind you. But who demands you be nice all the time? Agents of the patriarchy. Fuck that noise. Emojis forever.*

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*By which I mean: emojis 2015. Who knows how I’ll be feeling about emojis in two weeks.

Drawn to Comics: Meags Fitzgerald Explores Bisexuality, Celibacy and Make Believe in “Long Red Hair”

Long Red Hair by Meags Fitzgerald packs more emotional and educational punch in its less-than-a-hundred pages than many books three times its size. It jumps through time, telling the story of Fitzgerald’s growth and exploration of her own identity, sexuality and what it means for her to be a woman. I quickly fell in love with this book, even when it was destroying my emotions. I also feel like I learned more about vampire bats, real-life witch hunts and the history of celibacy than I ever could have expected I would from a graphic novel.

Although she now identifies as queer, when Fitzgerald was younger and realized that she was attracted to both boys and girls, she came out as bisexual, a process that takes up some substantial space in the book. Reading about how much she struggled to identify with the term bisexual is so devastating. She does a brilliantly excellent job at showing how society puts pressure on bisexual women to “pick a side” and either be gay or straight. Young Meags feels pressure from TV, her parents, lack of role models and even her own internalized sense of biphobia. When she comes out to her friend as a teen and tells her that she has crushes on girls, she tells her that she’s afraid of being bisexual because it means she won’t have a soulmate. That took all the air out of my lungs.

I also don’t think I’ve ever seen a comic that approaches the topic of celibacy like this one does. It’s a really interesting topic that barely ever gets talked about, and so to see Fitzgerald talk not only about the history of celibacy (she brings up the celibacy of Greek goddesses and Queen Elizabeth), but also her own personal choices about whether she wants to be in a sexual or romantic relationship or not. It’s really cool to see a woman talking so frankly about deciding to avoid traditional relationship models.

The third topic that Fitzgerald focuses on in Long Red Hair is imagination, make-believe and belief itself. Fitzgerald grew up in a family where Friday the 13th is a good luck day, where believing in angels is like believing in aliens (“they’re both kinda weird things that come from space,” she tells a friend) and where they spend quality family playing Dungeons and Dragons together. She talks about how, growing up, she loved playing dress up and games like Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board and Bloody Mary. This exploration of belief adds another dimension to her discovery of who she is and challenges the reader to question the way they look at the world around them.

I really love this subsection of graphic memoirs where queer women discuss the complicated feelings and thoughts they dealt with growing up, and I’m so thankful for it. The more books we have like this, and the more diverse they get, the more young girls will be able to find themselves on the pages and maybe they won’t feel as confused or alone or frightened as these authors did. Long Red Hair does an excellent job of adding to this genre with its nuanced discussion of queerness, girlhood and swearing off romance.

Long Red Hair is a deeply fascinating and moving book, and at a brisk 93 pages, so it makes for the perfect read if you’re looking for something you can finish in one sitting. The writing is just gorgeous, and the art is so packed with emotion and nostalgia that you you feel like you’re swimming through Fitzgerald’s memories. She’s able to draw expressions on faces that let you know exactly how the characters are feeling and what they’re thinking. Fitzgerald is able to masterfully combine the personal with the intellectual in a way that few authors are. You can buy Long Red Hair online from places like Fitzgerald’s personal site and other booksellers, as well as book stores.

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There was also a lot of other comic-related news recently that really got my attention, due in large part to the recent New York Comic Con. First of all, for all you comics podcast fans, there’s going to be a huge crossover event of nine of the biggest comics podcasts (including my favorite, Less than Live with Kate or Die) starting on October 29. For more information, you can check out the Secret Convergence on Infinite Podcasts tumblr. We’ve got some new, exciting information about the next volume of Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios’ terrifically brilliant series Pretty Deadly. According to DeConnick, the new issues will leap forward in time and feature a story where “the worlds of the mortals and the immortals are at odds.” Brittney Williams, the recently announced artist for the upcoming Patsy Walker AKA Hellcat series with writer Kate Leth, was also announced as the artist for the upcoming Legend of Korra comics, which will focus on Korra and Asami’s relationship! Williams is a terrific artist and I’m so excited to see her work on these books! This is great news!

In news that is the exact opposite of great, the Marvel Cinematic Universe doubled down on its commitment to showing its female fans that it really doesn’t care about them by pushing back the Captain Marvel movie for a second time, all the way to March of 2019. At the same time they proudly announced that the sequel to Ant-Man (yes, Ant-Man) will be coming out in July 2018 and will be called Ant-Man and The Wasp. Marvel is touting this film as their first named after a female hero. Seriously, Marvel pushed back its only planned female solo film to a date eleven years after it’s first film (2008’s Iron Man) and then gave The Wasp, a founding Avenger, second billing in the sequel to one of their worst movies and expected female fans to be happy about it. At least Captain Marvel is getting a Young Adult novel I guess.

New Releases (October 14)

Adventure Time #45 (Boom!)

Lumberjanes Beyond Bay Leaf #1 (Boom!)

Sleepy Hollow: Providence #3 (Boom!)

Diesel #2 (Boom!)

You are a Kitten! Pick-a-Plot Vol. 3 (Conundrum)

Angel and Faith Season 10: Vol. 3 United TP (Dark Horse)

Catwoman #45 (DC)

DC Bombshells #3 (DC)

Harley Quinn #21 (DC)

Sensation Comics Featuring Wonder Woman Vol. 2 TPB (DC)

Starfire #5 (DC)

Red Sonja/Conan #3 (Dynamite)

Swords of Sorrow #6 (Dynamite)

Vampirella/Army of Darkness #4 (Dynamite)

Jem and the Holograms #8 (IDW)

Sex Criminals #13 (Image)

The Wicked + The Divine #15 (Image)

A-Force #5 (Marvel)

Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens Shattered Empire #3 (Marvel)

Ms. Marvel #19 (Marvel)

New Avengers #1 (Marvel)

Spider-Gwen #1 (Marvel)

Black Widow: Forever Red (Marvel Press)

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

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

“Love Is Fluid” Announces Demi Lovato While Hugging An Inflatable Flamingo

“Cool For The Summer” chanteuse Demi Lovato has yet to directly confirm rumors of her bisexuality, though she has managed to provocatively skirt the issue for quite some time now and is “definitely not denying” that “Cool for the Summer” is about her own experimentations with her sexuality. In the latest issue of Complex magazine, she discusses her opinions about sexuality and love while topless and casually perching atop an inflatable banana, as one does.

Reportedly, Complex deigned to ask the star about the widely-spread rumor that Ms. Lovato had at one time canoodled with famed attractive person Ruby Rose. “Rumors are rumors,” Lovato stated, “and people are going to spread them. You can believe what you want, but no, I was not in a relationship with her.”

As anyone who reads this website knows by now, it is literally impossible for lesbians to engage in sexual activity of any kind without being in a serious committed relationship to one another. Thanks for clearing that up, Demi! However, while Lovato denied having dated Rose, she did have some opinions to express regarding sexuality in general.

“By the way, love is fluid. Whether there’s been rumours with one specific person or not, that’s all that matters. Humans are humans, and when you connect with somebody on a spiritual level it doesn’t matter.”

Lovato went on to wax poetic about her relationship with lesbian gateway boyfriend Wilmer Valderrama, an actor from a television show that ended nine years ago. It’s very sweet actually; she describes how Valderrama encouraged her to get sober and look after herself, which I cannot snark about no matter how much I’d like to.

Later, Demi shared images from the shoot on her Instagram, prompting many fans to point out the strangely vaginal motif of this giant flamingo’s eye:

This certainly wouldn’t be the first time Demi has expressed an interest in vaginal art; just a few months ago, she became embroiled in controversy after she replaced a provocative-looking tattoo of a lipstick print (that really didn’t look like a lipstick print) with a rose. As we all learned from the intrepid team at True Directions in But I’m A Cheerleader, interest in vulva-related art is one of the most telling signs of early-onset queerness.

Resident sexy celebrity expert Riese Bernard notes, “I remember when I used to tell people that ‘all women were sexually fluid,’ which it turns out is definitely not true — it’s definitely true for a lot of people but not for everyone, maybe not even for me! I now realize that it just was an easier way to justify why I wanted to kiss girls. OH EVERYBODY DOES! You guys: not everybody does. I look forward to further revelations and vulva-related art from Demi Lovato.”

It is at this point that I remind Ms. Bernard that Demi actually said that love is fluid, not that sexuality is fluid, but I digress. Perhaps she skimmed the article. Is love fluid? I can’t tell because I’m dead inside.

When pressed for comment, noted Demi Lovato scholar Mey Rude offered her opinion on the singer’s current goings-on: “I’ve been a huge Demi fan ever since I was a college student watching her star in Disney Channel Original Movies like Camp Rock and Princess Protection Program, and if you’re a Demi fan who can use Google, then you’ve definitely seen rumors that Demi’s relationship with Selena Gomez was more than just one between friends. Or at least that Demi wanted to be more than friends. But also on a more serious note, I do think that it’s important that a young, super famous Latina is openly sexually fluid. Demi’s long been an advocate for being true to yourself and not letting the pressure to conform get you down, and so being out is another way that she can help inspire Latinas to love themselves for who they are.”

Wilmer Valderrama agrees.

Y’All Need Help: Quick and Unprofessional Advice for Queers Who Need It

Welcome to Y’All Need Help, a weeklyish (maybe?) advice column in which I pluck out a handful of questions from the You Need Help inbox and answer them right here, round-up style! You can chime in with your own advice in the comments and before you know it, we’ll be on our way to a kinder, gentler world full of people we’ve helped.

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Here at Autostraddle we have a lovely and thorough advice series called You Need Help, where people just like you send in detailed, complicated and delicate questions, and various team members get to work writing full posts’ worth of advice for you. But recently I thought to myself, what of the shorter questions? The ones that just need some quick and dirty advice; things that maybe wouldn’t fill an entire post? And so Y’all Need Help got born!

Remember the early days of You Need Help and Formspring Friday? Well Y’all Need Help is kinda like those two things, except guess what? We obvs don’t use Formspring anymore and it’s not even called Formspring now, so get over it. If you want this column to be weeklyish, you’ll need to send your shortish/quick and dirty questions to youneedhelp@autostraddle.com. Otherwise it’ll just be published whenever I can accumulate a pile of quick and dirty questions to reply to. The future is in your hands, is what I’m saying. Oh and if y’all want to sign your questions with little situation-specific pseudonyms for yourself that would be so great! I love it when you do that.

Let’s get crackin’!

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I recently made a great group of lesbian friends who live pretty close to me. We go out almost every weekend and have a blast together. Two of the friends are engaged (let’s call them Shane and Carmen). I’ve had a huge crush on Shane since I met them, but I’ve kept my feelings to myself, hoping they would eventually pass. Fast forward a few months and Shane and I are making out in a bathroom stall after getting drunk at a concert after Carmen left early.

I felt guilty, and eventually told Shane I had feelings for her, hoping that would help me get over them and help hold us accountable for any future bad behavior. Well, she told me she has feelings for me, too, and the bad behavior continued. No more making out, but more touching, cuddling, and holding hands when her fiancé wasn’t present. I told her she needed to tell Carmen we kissed. I feel like a terrible friend for keeping it from her, but Shane insists that she’s “doing what’s best for her” by keeping it a secret. I disagree, and don’t know what I should do.

Carmen wonders why I haven’t wanted to hang out with them as much, my heart is aching over Shane, and I’m pissed that she’s trying to convince herself that covering her own ass is the best thing to do for Carmen’s sake. She doesn’t want to break up with Carmen, and I’m not expecting her to. I just don’t know where to go from here.

Do you have any wisdom you can impart about this sticky mess?

Sincerely,
Homewrecker

Oh damn, kitten. Mistakes were made. I believe you should get the entire fuck away from Shane as quickly as possible. Don’t even pause to look around at the rubble, don’t think whimsically about what could’ve been, don’t wonder if you should intervene and come clean to Carmen — just get away from this situation. Your top priority right now is making sure that nothing else happens between you and Shane, which should be very easy if you literally have nothing to do with her.

Unfortunately for Carmen, you’re not actually a home wrecker — Shane is. You definitely played an active role in it, but Shane probably would’ve done this with anyone (and perhaps already has with other people), because the home that Shane’s wrecking is one she doesn’t want to begin with. She isn’t completely happy with her life and instead of taking appropriate steps towards fixing anything, she’s making out with people in bathroom stalls. That’s sad for Shane, for Carmen, and for you!

Here is an excerpt from a conversation I had with Rachel and Riese about your life and the lives of your anonymous friends:

Riese: i hope, much like the l word’s shane and carmen
that shane and carmen do not get married
because carmen should not marry shane
that is a bad idea
very bad idea

Rachel: no
they should not
no one should touch shane with a ten foot pole, basically

Riese: nope
and also i mean like, if shane thinks that she can still marry carmen under these conditions then that is bad news
like if shane was like, look, i am not into carmen and i want to be with you, then i might give her like one more chance to do something good and prove herself, b/c that does happen, even though most people besides me would advise “run”
BUT if shane is like “no this is fine, and i’m still getting married”
then
nope

Riese and Rachel are right. Also, in general, it’s probably never a good idea to tell someone you have feelings for them in an effort to stop having feelings for them. I just don’t think the world works that way.

Today is when you stop having achy heart feelings for this person! Right now Shane is a shell of herself. She’s not living her best life and she’s not even trying to. You’re not having achy heart feelings for a whole real person — you’re having achy heart feelings for the idea of a person you’ve imagined up in your own head. Don’t do that! Think of Shane as a character in a book that you could write if you wanted to — you’ve probably done a great job with the details and some swoon-worthy traits. But even if you wrote a million books, that character would still be made-up, and you wouldn’t be any closer to dating them. Shane is not real.

Seek out and surround yourself with people who are whole and real and building happiness with their free time. Better yet, BE a person who is whole and real and building happiness for yourself. You deserve friends who would never ever make-out with you in a bathroom stall while their fiancées were home in bed.

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I identify as bisexual and have since I was 14. I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’m currently in a straight relationship (my longest ever, almost two years now) and I can’t help but think about women all the time. This is how it’s been in every relationship I’ve had. I always question it, and I’ve even talked to past boyfriends about how I think I’m really gay.

I fantasize about women while I’m having sex with my boyfriend. This has been going on for the last year (maybe longer). We live together and we have been making all these plans to stay together and settle down, but I can’t help question it. I am awake in the middle of the night crying right now. I really love him and want him in my life, I don’t want things to change, but I feel like I’m lying to myself.

I wanted to scream “I’m gay” during sex last night because that’s how much I just wasn’t feeling it. I could care less about my feelings and my happiness. It breaks my heart to think that I’ve done this to another man in my life. Maybe I am overthinking everything. I enjoy having sex with men, but something never feels right. I’ve never been able to orgasm during sex. I get that this shouldn’t be the goal of sex, but I want to be able to orgasm from sex because masturbation makes me come hard and I want to be able to experience that with another person. Maybe that’s selfish or asking for too much. I don’t know.

I just really need advice. I don’t have any friends to ask. I don’t have anyone to talk to about this. I don’t know what to do.

I’m going to write a song for you titled, “It Is OK To Break Up With This Person” and I’m gonna stand outside on your street at night and sing it over and over and over again. The chorus will be like, “It’s ok to break up with this person, dear heart! / You have the answers inside of yourself and wanting to be happy is reason enough!” It won’t rhyme because it’ll be a progrock experimental thing and I’ll make up for the lack of rhyming with laser sounds and cat noises.

Here’s a true thing about this life: you deserve to be excited about it. You deserve to come hard with another person. You deserve to care about your feelings and your happiness. When you think about the impact you’re making on another person’s life, you deserve an unbroken heart. You deserve your fantasies. You deserve your truth, whatever it is.

Maybe it seems easier to just keep dating men because that’s what you’ve been doing forever. But what you’re going through right now isn’t actually easy. Crying in the middle of the night, questioning your life, things never feeling quite right — that’s not easy at all, that’s torture. Just because you know how to live a lie doesn’t make the lie any easier to live. You can be practiced at a specific type of torture, you can even be very good at it, but that doesn’t mean you should have to keep doing it. Do something you might be terrible at: date a woman. Break up with this person who seems easy enough to settle down with and try on some other people who might not fit.

It might feel incredibly selfish to break up with someone who hasn’t really done anything ‘wrong,’ and in a way it is — you’ll be looking out primarily for yourself and your own well-being. Your well-being is a thing worth looking out for, though. Your life is a thing worth being excited about. Letting someone go when it’s not working for you is also beneficial for them, because they deserve to be with a person for whom it does work.

Here’s a playlist for you from an earlier post: It Was Time to Go.

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Is there a graceful way to live in the closet without losing your mind? I have it easier than many — I’m only closeted to my family. But how do I navigate familial relationships even while feeling they are completely built on a lie and might not exist if they knew the truth? I’m in my late 20s and it’s stupid that I’m even still in the closet with them but trust me, at this time, I just can’t. This is the south and things are different and I just can’t, I don’t want to lose them. I get pressure from the LGBTQ community to come out to them, advance the cause, shake up their heteronormativity etc. But I’m not trying to start a revolution, I’m just gay and want to keep my family. SO I am closeted. I’m not sure what I’m really even asking, I guess just affirmation that I will not lose my mind and that it’s okay with the queer community if I take this one step at a time and live in that grey area of lies and love. Gay South is not the regular gay. It’s more complicated than anyone not in the South could ever imagine. Thanks for any advice

Hello fellow southern person! I’m sorry that you can’t be completely honest with your family and that it feels like your relationships are built on lies. That is genuinely fucking terrible. They’re missing out on knowing who you really are, and you’re missing out on so much by having to close yourself off to them.

The South has a second language of weighted contradictions and deep secrets we’re expected to take to our graves, and you learn this language right alongside English and how to cross a street. We’re taught to be humble and to keep our private lives to ourselves — if people find out something about us, they’d rather hear it from a third party, and then they’d like to pretend they didn’t hear it at all. Coming out in the South isn’t just about bucking heterocentric norms and religious teachings, it’s about bucking the entire system of prudence and no, not everyone wants to do that. Plenty of people don’t. I know of several closeted queer people living in my hometown — young and old — who will very likely never come out. Nearly all of them have longtime partners that they live with, and most everyone knows about them being gay, but it’s just not discussed in broad daylight. There are definitely hellraisers in the South who don’t give a single fuck about norms and systems, but if your grandmother wasn’t a hellraiser and you want her to let you in the house on Sundays, you don’t do what hellraisers do. I get that.

I honestly don’t know how to tell you to navigate those relationships in a healthy way, but I do know that humans do this a lot, for different reasons and with varying degrees of success. We lie by omission and we guard ourselves against threats and we decide what’s best for us based on the information we have about a situation. You’ve appraised your situation and decided that coming out would be very detrimental to your family relationships at this time, and your queer peers will need to honor that. Having a closeted friend or partner can be frustrating, sure — and possibly even a dealbreaker for some, and you’ll have to respect that — but their frustration probably pales in comparison to what you think you’ll be faced with if you tell your family the truth. And since it’s your family and not theirs, you get to call the shots! It’s an imperfect situation with no real winners, unfortunately.

If you ever do decide to talk to your family, we have a whole collection of coming out stories, including this gem that I found last night. I can’t change your family and I can’t wave a magic wand to make the whole world a more accepting place, but I did make these inspirational posters for you using pictures from my Instagram feed!

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I wish you all the very very best! Do you have advice for these advice seekers? Drop your thoughts in the comments! Need some quick advice for yourself? Email youneedhelp@autostraddle.com!

We’ve Always Been Here: Honoring Bisexual History, Imagining Bisexual Futures

Feature Image by Efrain Gonzalez, Bi Activist and Photographer

Pick any major battle in contemporary U.S. queer history, from Stonewall to marriage equality to non-discrimination efforts, and bisexual people were on the front lines of the struggle.

You might have to dig to find the stories, though. Historical texts often subsume bisexual activists into the G in LGBT or ignore their contributions altogether. Recognizing the historical work of bisexual activists and movements is key to our continued struggle and survival, bi leaders say. Bisexuals experience markedly high rates of closetedness — LGBT MAP reports that only 28 percent of bi people are out to the most important people in their lives, compared to more than 70 percent of gay men and lesbians. That’s in part because they don’t have faith their experience will be seen as legitimate. That erasure leads to dangerous medical outcomes, like high rates of depression, alcohol abuse and suicide ideation. There are many ways to actively address those health disparities, but part of the solution is making it easier for bisexual people to see the validity of their experience.

So today, Bi Visibility Day aka Celebrate Bisexuality Day, let’s talk about bisexual history and why it matters.

“Almost every major LGBT organization either had bisexuals involved with the beginning of the organization, or it has a history of biphobia,” said BiNet USA president Faith Cheltenham. “You could say that the history of LGBT movement is a history of biphobia in part because of political concerns.”

For example, Brenda Howard, called the Mother of Pride for her key role in organizing the march in New York City on the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots, was also a prominent bisexual activist who established some of the oldest bi-specific programs in the country.

Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, two trans activists of color who were key actors in the Stonewall riots and following decades of activism, were also bi. However, even as bisexuals led the way for a visible and active LGBT rights movement, it was hard for them to have their specific concerns or even identities addressed by what was labeled internally and externally as a Gay movement.

“In the 70s we fought very hard to break the labels out,” said black bi elder ABilly Jones-Hennin. “I was part of the movement in the 70s, and we started to say that it is important for the public to recognize that there are lesbians, bisexuals and transgender folks.”

However, even then he hesitated to call himself bisexual because he was afraid of being excluded from activist movements.

“In the early 90s I got more insistent about identifying myself as bisexual because I became aware that identifying as gay was a form of bisexual erasure,” Jones-Hennin said.

And of course, non-monosexual people have been part of societies throughout recorded history. They experienced varying levels of social acceptance, and in some societies were even given privileged status. Many historical texts don’t call those people bisexual but instead invisibilize their behavior into homo- or heterosexuality, says psychologist and bi history enthusiast Estraven.

“History books were written by straight people so it was erased, and today even when they’re written by gay people it’s erased,” Estraven said. “If you read with a bisexual eye, it’s so clear. We have all been here, including trans people, since the dawn of time, and there were always words for it. The misinformation needs to stop.”

Mainstream history may not begin celebrating bisexual stories any time soon, but there are a growing number of resources available for those invested in learning more. BiNet USA has a great timeline of the last 40 years and The Bisexual Resource Center has a wealth of great information. Digging online reveals awesome historical work, like Cheltenham’s blog on the history of bisexual activists and HIV/AIDS work. Books on bisexuality like Bi Any Other Name, bi-inclusive history books like The Right Side Of History (reviewed on Autostraddle here), and books by bisexual writers like June Jordan’s triumphant Some Of Us Did Not Die are great resources for information and affirmation.

Jordan writes: “To insist upon the equal validity of all of the components of social/sexual complexity. This seems to me a unifying, 1990s mandate for revolutionary Americans planning to make it into the twenty-first century on the basis of the heart, on the basis of an honest human body, consecrated to every struggle for justice, every struggle for equality, every struggle for freedom.”

It’s a message that validates the bisexual struggle, one that is of course ongoing. Just this week, dozens of bi activists met at the white house to present policy priorities like improved healthcare, immigration policy and support for students.

It’s important for bisexuals who can do so safely to be vocal about their experiences — that too is activism, said Jones-Hennin.

“If we don’t tell our own stories, others will try to tell them for us and not get them right,” he said. “We should be writing them down, videos, audios, art, telling our stories however we can.”

Sharing and truly listening to bisexual stories are necessary components of liberating a community that is often ostracized by both straight and gay worlds. Understanding the legacy of bisexual activism can be a critical tool to demanding respect and support to help bisexuals survive and thrive.

“Without bisexual history, there is no bisexual future,” Cheltenham said. “We keep reinventing the wheel, but there is actually a decent car already.”

Daily Fix: Black Lives Matter Calls on Hillary to Stand with Black Trans Women and More News

Black Lives Matter

+ Black Lives Matter activists disrupted a Hillary campaign stop in Cleveland asking her to divest from private prisons and stand with black trans women. Clinton responded that she would be “happy to meet with you all another time.”

“We called on [Clinton] to actually have a conversation with black trans women and take their lead,” said Angela Peoples, one of the women who disrupted the event. Peoples leads the grassroots LGBTQ network at the civil rights group GetEQUAL.

…“Hillary Clinton must stand with Black people, especially Black trans women, by refusing to accept funds from or bundled by executives of or lobbyists for private prison companies—and investing the money she’s already accepted from those companies in the work toward Black trans liberation,” said Rian Brown, an organizer with GetEQUAL, in a statement sent to Fusion. “Until that happens, we cannot for a moment think that Hillary believes Black Lives Matter.”

+ A short piece on how Fox News is trying to manufacture the “story” of whether the Black Lives Matter movement should be classified as a hate group, a story which itself originates with Fox News in a sort of terrible news snake eating its own terrible news snake tail. If you’re thinking “that’s ridiculous, what kind of news station even is this,” you might want to read Heather’s excellent analysis of how Fox News’ rhetoric works!

+ The Democratic National Committee has endorsed the Black Lives Matter movement; the BLM network has repudiated the endorsement, explaining that their movement doesn’t function within the political party system.

A resolution signaling the Democratic National Committee’s endorsement that Black lives matter, in no way implies an endorsement of the DNC by the Black Lives Matter Network, nor was it done in consultation with us. We do not now, nor have we ever, endorsed or affiliated with the Democratic Party, or with any party. The Democratic Party, like the Republican and all political parties, have historically attempted to control or contain Black people’s efforts to liberate ourselves. True change requires real struggle, and that struggle will be in the streets and led by the people, not by a political party.

[…]
While the Black Lives Matter Network applauds political change towards making the world safer for Black life, our only endorsement goes to the protest movement we’ve built together with Black people nationwide—not the self-interested candidates, parties, or political machine seeking our vote.

Police/Prison/Violence

+ A Maryland judge has refused to drop the charges for the six officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and has confirmed that each of them will face a separate trial. The judge also dismissed “charges due to prosecutorial misconduct” levied at DA Marilyn Mosby, an attempt by the defense to take her off the case.

+ Black Lives Matter activists and the ACLU are speaking out against proposed new rules for attendance at the LAPD Board of Police commissioners; there’s concern that the proposed rules, which include “behaving in a civil manner” and ban “impertinent, personal or profane remarks” can be interpreted to restrict freedom of speech. Speaking of California and the LAPD, new data reveals major racial disparities in California’s policing; black people make up only 6% of Californians, but represent 17% of arrests and a full 25% of in-custody deaths. Also related, some LAPD will begin wearing body cameras, but also officers will be able to review their own body camera footage before making a report of any incident and the footage won’t be available to the public unless there’s a criminal case.

+ A settlement was reached in a federal class action suit concerning California prisons’ use of longterm solitary confinement, with some prisoners in SHU for longer than 10 years. The settlement introduces new guidelines, which could have a major impact for many incarcerated people.

• Offenders can only be sent to solitary confinement for serious rule violations.
• Offenders who are placed in SHU due to gang activity will be moved back to general population via a two-year, four-step process that restores their privileges as they go.
• The state will review the cases of those who are currently in SHU within a year to determine if they can be released from solitary.
• Offender representatives will regularly meet with prison officials to review settlement progress and monitor conditions.
• Virtually no offender can be held in isolation for more than 10 continuous years.
• The state will create a modified general population unit to house repeat offenders and those who have been in solitary more than 10 years and have also committed recent offenses. It will be high-security, but not an isolation environment.

Order in the Court

+ Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who just really, really does not want to give our marriage licenses to same-sex couples, is trying once more to get a judge to back her. Two other Kentucky county clerks, Casey Davis and Kay Schwartz, are also refusing to issue them. It does not seem likely that a judge will back Davis; it’s more probable that she’ll be held in contempt of court.

+ A 16-year-old girl and her 17-year-old boyfriend are both being charged with felonies for consensually exchanging nude photos in texts. Specifically, she was charged with being both the adult perpetrator and minor victim of sexual exploitation of a minor and having her own photo in her possession; her boyfriend was charged with five counts of sexual exploitation of a minor, some for possessing his girlfriend’s photos and some for making photos of himself. It doesn’t appear that the couple shared the photos with anyone except each other; they were discovered in the course of “an investigation of other explicit photos that were being shared among teens without the consent of the person or persons pictured.” The sexual exploitation charges were dropped against the girl in favor of the misdemeanor “disseminating harmful material to minors;” she has to “pay $200 in court costs, stay in school, take a class on how to make good decisions, refrain from using illegal drugs or alcohol, not possess a cellular phone for the duration of her probation and to do 30 hours of community service.” Her boyfriend, against whom the felony charges still seem to stand, faces prison time and the possibility of having to register as a sex offender if convicted.

Health

+ Northern Illinois University professor Wendy Bostwick has earned a a National Institutes of Health grant to study health and microaggressions for bisexual women. She’ll work with 125 women from the Chicago area, with a focus on women of color.

+ Along with higher risk of mental illness, poverty, domestic violence and sexual assault, research finds that bisexual and/or questioning women have higher rates of eating disorders than straight women or lesbians.

+ In the backlash after heavily edited videos were released surrounding Planned Parenthood’s participation in fetal tissue donation, fetal tissue donation has begun to decline, threatening the research it goes to. Reuters warns that “efforts to reduce an already-scarce supply could set back research on birth defects, spinal cord injuries, Parkinson’s disease, eye diseases, and vaccines and treatments for HIV/AIDS, to name a few.”

Grab Bag

+ A piece on Chouf, a Tunisian feminist group working for the safety and support of lesbian, bisexual and trans women.

“We founded Chouf [because of] an urgent need to create a safe space, free from lesbophobia and transphobia, where women’s voices find their place and their value,” said one of the organisation’s principal founders, who wished only to be identified as Salander. “Our goal is to work on the double oppression regarding women in our patriarchal and misogynist society and also to focus on bodily and sexual rights.

“Besides, at the beginning we were three people – a lesbian, a bisexual and a transsexual – who felt the need to find themselves in a space that believes in a redefinition of feminism and that gives voice to all Tunisian LGBT women. We also value our ‘Tunisianity’ and our north African, African and Arab origins.”

+ A piece on the situation for men seeking men on Ashley Madison in countries where same-sex relationships are illegal after the hack.

+ Karen Danczuk, a former Labour Councillor for the Kingsway Ward to Rochdale Borough Council, has come out as bisexual in response to what was apparently a former partner trying to extort her by threatening to out her.

I'm sick of people trying to make money off me so let me get it out now. Im bisexual…I admit it. So ex G friend your plan has failed 👊👊 KD

— Karen Danczuk (@KarenDanczuk) August 21, 2015

+ A new study finds that about about 30% of Israelis identify as neither heterosexual nor homosexual.

Daily Fix: Mansur Ball-Bey Killed by St. Louis PD on Anniversary of Kajieme Powell’s Death and More News

Black Lives Matter

+ This news fix, like almost every one we’ve published since we began doing news roundups in this way, contains stories about black Americans being killed by police officers over the past few days. In light of that fact, please take some time to read Gene Demby’s piece on How Black Reporters Report on Black Death at Code Switch, where he talks to a range of reporters to look at the effects the seemingly neverending phenomena of police brutality is having on black journalists who cover it.

“Today, a lot of us occupy desks in national newsrooms at a time when questions about policing and race have become arguably the biggest story in the country. At the same time, many of us are puzzling out what it means to be black reporters reporting on black death in an industry that’s traditionally operated like this: Some people tell the tough stories (white, upper middle class, mostly male), and other people have tough stories happen to them. It’s an industry that’s long boasted a nebulous ideal of “objectivity” without considering that the glaring homogeneity of its ranks helps make that claim believable.”

+ The mayor of Somerville, MA, Joe Curtatone, has hung a Black Lives Matter banner from City Hall. Curtatone has said that he hopes to equip Somerville police officers with body cameras within the next year, and is working with Black Lives Matter organizers to realize “intensive anti-racism training” for police officers and other staff.

Police/Violence

+ Detroit prosecutors announced that there will be no charges filed against officers in the death of Terrance Kellom, a 20-year-old who was killed by ICE officers inside his home. Prosecutors claim that Kellom attacked officers, and that blood spatter evidence proves that “Terrance Kellom continued to advance despite being shot already.” Kellom’s family says that he was unarmed, and was reaching out towards his father when he was shot.

+ Mansur Ball-Bey, an 18-year-old black man was killed by St. Louis police today, as a few miles away people gathered to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Kajieme Powell. Ball-Bey is reported by police to have run away, along with another unidentified man, as the police came to execute a search warrant for stolen guns; the two men are alleged to have fired at police as they ran. Ball-Bey had just graduated from high school a few months ago.

Protesters who were already gathered to mark the anniversary of Powell’s death arrived at the scene, along with Jerryl Christmas, the attorney for the family of VonDerrit Myers, also an 18-year-old black man shot by police in St. Louis.

“We need to focus on these areas that are deprived. I mean, look around,” Christmas said, pointing to vacant lots and abandoned buildings.

Some at the scene confronted police and questioned statements by Dotson. Robert Phillips, 30, was angry after hearing the police account that the dead man pointed a gun at officers.

“They always say that,” Phillips said.

Protests are reported to have “erupted” in St. Louis last night, with a reported 150 people gathering. Nine were arrested, and police are reported to have used tear gas, even in quiet residential areas.

+ Radazz Hearns, a Trenton 14-year-old who was shot seven times by police as he was running away, has been released from the hospital. He faces “extensive rehabilitation,” and is being charged with gun possession and assaulting officers. The handgun that officers say Hearns was in possession of wasn’t found until 12 hours after his arrest. His family had created a GoFundMe page to raise money for his medical expenses, but it was removed by GoFundMe after charges were filed against Hearns because “Campaigns in defense of formal charges of violent crimes are not allowed on GoFundMe.”

+ An Ohio police officer, Bryan Lee, was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison for forcing women to perform sex acts during traffic stops. He was also revealed to have posted on Craigslist using a false name advertising for “traffic stop sex” and trying to find someone whose fantasy was “a cop you must (expletives) to get out of being arrested.” A woman who was a passenger in a car that Lee pulled over also reported that he had later used Facebook to try to get in touch with her, telling her that he had seen her in public and described the outfit she had been wearing.

Presidential Race

+ Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, the two top-polling Republican candidates, both held Town Hall meetings this week. The timbre of both events seemed decidedly different, and so were their policies — Trump emphasized his interest in building another, better wall between the US and Mexico, while Bush emphasized Trump’s lack of credentials as a conservative and his own openness to the Latino community in contrast to Trump’s racist remarks.

But Mr. Trump’s freewheeling performance left some voters wanting, with many in the crowd still shopping for a candidate. One man, who told Mr. Trump that he went to his website and found the lack of policy descriptions unsatisfying, wanted more detail. He did not get much.

“Are you a member of the press?” Mr. Trump said jokingly.

“I actually think the press wants the policy, the so-called policy positions more than the people, if you want to know the truth,” he added, eliciting some groans from the crowd.

But he reassured the man that whatever his policy is, it will be a first-rate one.

“When it comes to policy, I’m going to give you wonderful policy positions,” Mr. Trump said.

+ Scott Walker, in what appears to be a last-ditch effort to be taken seriously outside of Wisconsin, seems to be giving himself and his campaign an attempted Trump makeover.

Mr. Walker offered as Exhibit A an exchange he had had with a heckler just hours earlier at the Iowa State Fair: “I’m not intimidated by you, sir, or anyone else out there,” he had shouted, before turning to the crowd and saying: “You want someone who’s tested? I’m right here.”

Mr. Walker’s team was so pleased with the tussle, which may wind up in a television ad, that a top campaign aide joked that he would have paid the heckler to show up.

+ In an ongoing investigation into emails related to her office and their levels of secrecy and security, Hillary Clinton says that emails and other data on her computer were wiped clean before the device was given to federal authorities.

Order in the Courts

+ Chelsea Manning, who was charged with possessing contraband like an expired tube of toothpaste, has been found guilty of the charges. She will not be placed on indefinite solitary confinement, a potential sentence for the charges, but will be given 21 days of recreational restrictions. The conviction occurred in a closed-door hearing without legal representation for Manning, and will be a factor in any future hearings for parole or clemency, potentially adding years and/or heightened security to her sentence.

+ From a press release, we learned that Denicia Macklin, an African-American lesbian, has filed a workplace harassment suit against Dunkin’ Donuts. The suit claims that at both the Union Square and East 14th locations of Dunkin’ Donuts, Macklin was subject to unwanted sexual touching, denied payment of wages, and experienced comments about her appearance being “masculine.”

+ As the conclusion to a long legal battle that brought up questions of when language is offensive and to whom, all-Asian-American band the Slants has won the legal right to trademark their own band name.

Who is making the decisions about the name? Is it a group of people or what?
It’s been the same examining attorney every time. His name is Michael Shriner — a random white attorney. So for the first five years they did not speak to a single Asian about the issue. In fact, we had a governor-appointed board of Asian-American leaders here in Oregon say, “How come you’re not talking to representatives from our community?” They wrote back and said they were committed to diversity and had Asian-Americans who worked at the Trademark Office. That was their response—that they had Asians in the building, not that any of them worked on the case. And the big irony of it can be really prominent when you think about the actual court system itself. When we had the oral hearing first time around in the federal circuit, the courtroom consisted of the attorneys, who are all white, and if I were to go there I wouldn’t be allowed to talk. It would be a bunch of white people debating what’s offensive to Asians. That’s our legal system.

+ In Kentucky, a legal battle continues to rage as Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis continues to deny same-sex couples marriage licenses because of her religious beliefs. In a confusing decision, US District Judge David Bunning denied Davis’s request to delay a ruling ordering her to issue marriage licenses, but agreed to delay his own decision about the delay. Until this is resolved definitively, “no new wedding can be legally recognized in Rowan County unless the couple obtain a marriage license somewhere else.”

+ A 25-year-old gay man is filing a lawsuit against the NYPD, claiming that he was beaten and had slurs yelled at him during Pride 2014.

According to the suit, Jacob Alejandro, a health educator from Brooklyn, was leaving the parade with a group of friends around 7:30 p.m. last June 29th, when a police officer “forcefully pushed” him to the ground near the corner of Christopher Street and Weehawken Street. While Alejandro lay on the ground bleeding, one police officer allegedly yelled, “Get the fuck up you faggot.” Multiple officers then allegedly “violently piled on top” of Alejandro and proceeded to arrest him, ignoring his requests for medical attention.

+ A Missouri court of appeals has ruled that a Kansas City lesbian can seek custody and visitation of her twins despite not being the gestational parent.

“Today’s ruling is a great victory for Missouri’s children,” Cathy Sakimura, family law director at the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said in a written statement. “Every family deserves legal protection and respect. The court recognized that the law should support families, not destroy them, and that children benefit when they can receive love and support from both parents.”

Law of the Land

+ The death penalty has been ruled unconstitutional in Connecticut, effectively pardoning the 11 people on death row there.

+ California is now the first state in the US where grand juries will no longer be used to decide issues of police violence, due to the fact that they “tend to be secretive, aren’t subject to oversight and rarely indict officers.” Instead, it will be up to prosecutors to pursue charges against police officers accused of excessive force. On the one hand, prosecutors are elected by the public, which in theory means they are more accountable; on the other, 79% of US prosecutors are white men and only 5% are people of color, so.

+ The Missouri House of Representatives tentatively floated an idea that they should have their interns adopt a dress code to keep them from being sexually harassed (as opposed to, you know, having House staffers not sexually harass them). Unsurprisingly, this idea has not been popular, and House Speaker Todd Richardson has 86’d it.

Grab Bag

+ Many of us are more familiar than we’d like to be with highly sexualized advertising, very violent advertising, or as a jackpot, advertising that’s both. A new study claims that this kind of advertising is terrible at actually selling things.

The Ohio State University-based researchers knew that sexual and violent emotional cues demanded more cognitive resources than less generally arousing cues, meaning that there was less brain space to process what the ad was selling.

“It never helps to have violence and sex in commercials,” said co-author Brad Bushman, a professor of communication and psychology at OSU in an interview with Bloomberg. “It either hurts or has no effect at all.”

+ A man has been arrested in Kansas after carrying a small explosive device into a women’s health clinic.

+ A trial investigating a potential rape at the prestigious St. Paul’s School has spotlighted the school’s many generations-old traditions, many of which seem to revolve around the sexuality of young female students. Owen Labrie, a high school senior already accepted at Harvard, sought out a sexual encounter with a 15-year-old as a “senior salute,” a St. Paul tradition; the female student says that when she wasn’t interested in having sex, Labrie raped her. Labrie had also told police that he was “trying to be No. 1 in the sexual scoring at St. Paul’s School.”

+ The White House has hired its first openly transgender staffer in Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, who will serve as Outreach and Recruitment Director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. Freedman-Gurspan was formerly working at the National Center for Transgender Equality.

+ The NYT looks at the situation for US envoys abroad with same-sex partners, who face complicated international legal situations regarding their spouses and families if they need to live abroad for their jobs.

+ Madame Tussauds has said it will redesign its wax figure of Nicki Minaj after visitors to the museum have posted photos online of themselves posing inappropriately with the figure.

“It is unfortunate that this visitor decided to behave so inappropriately and we apologise for any offence this has caused,” the museum said. “We do have staff monitoring guest behaviour in the attraction and do our utmost to ensure our wax figures are treated respectfully, but on this occasion clearly one of of our hosts was not present.”

+ The new mayor of Venice, Italy has attempted to ban 49 children’s books that he thinks “risk confusing children,” including books about same-sex families. After an outcry, he reduced the list to two books, which both feature same-sex families.

+ Mavis Amponsah, a 41-year-old Ghanian woman, attempted to file for asylum in Israel as soon as she arrived there on a tourist visa on the basis that she was unsafe in her home country due to her longterm relationship with a woman. However, her application was rejected, apparently on the basis that the committee found “contradictions” in her statements, including a previous relationship with a man (although Amponsah says she’s been with her female partner for more than 20 years).

Committee chair Avi Himi noted that Amponsah hadn’t attempted to meet any women or “act on her alleged preference” since arriving in Israel, and that this is “contrary to what might be expected of someone fleeing persecution for a sexual preference,” according to Haaretz.

+ We already know bisexual people are more likely to struggle with poverty, poor mental health, and substance abuse, and that bisexual women are at disproportionately high risk of intimate partner violence and sexual assault. Now a new study from the London School of Economics and the University of Melbourne — the same study that finds that more young people than ever are identifying as not straight — says that bisexuals have “lower life satisfaction”.

+ The European Film Industry has adopted a declaration calling for greater gender equity in the film industry, addressing the fact that “women are considerably underrepresented in key job roles in the film industry.”

More Brits Than Ever Are In Between on the Kinsey Scale, New Survey Shows

feature image via shutterstock

In poll results published Sunday by YouGov, a full 49% of 18-24 year olds identified as something other than exclusively heterosexual. The online poll asked 1632 adults in Great Britain to identify themselves on the seven-point Kinsey scale. Among respondents of all ages, 72% identified as a 0 (heterosexual), 4% identified as a 6 (homosexual), and 23% identified somewhere in between. Breaking the data down by age group, however, shows a very interesting trend.

According to the report:

With each generation, people see their sexuality as less fixed in stone. The results for 18-24 year-olds are particularly striking, as 43% place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5 and 52% place themselves at one end or the other. … People of all generations now accept the idea that sexual orientation exists along a continuum rather than a binary choice – overall 60% of heterosexuals support this idea, and 73% of homosexuals. 28% of heterosexuals believe that ‘there is no middle ground – you are either heterosexual or you are not’.

This report is largely in line with existing research, including the 2013 British Social Attitudes survey showing growing acceptance of same-sex relationships in the UK, and the 2014 HRC report showing that 40% of US LGBT youth are non-monosexual.

Interestingly, when asked to label their sexuality, only 2% of all respondents self-identified as bisexual. This remained relatively steady across all age groups, increasing to 4% identification for those 25-39, and down to 1% for those 60+. Comparatively, 89% identified as heterosexual, 6% gay or lesbian, 3% prefer not to say, and 1% other. Even accounting for those listing themselves as “other” and “prefer not to say,” this leaves ~15% of respondents who presumably call themselves straight yet experience some level of same-sex attraction. And in even further proof that straight chicks want to make out with you, a surprising 35% of hetero-identified people responded with a “definitely,” “maybe,” or “very unlikely, but not impossible” when directly asked “If the right person came along at the right time, do you think it is conceivable that you could have a sexual experience with a person of the same sex?”

While collecting solid data about LGBT populations is always a difficult task, it seems telling to me that there’s such a large divide between the number of apparent bisexuals (the 23% plotting themselves as Kinsey 1-5’s) versus the number of people actively laying claim to the label (again, a mere 2%). Kinsey himself never used the word “bisexual” in relation to his work, because he felt it “implied a biological origin of bisexuality rather than a psychic one.” I doubt this is the motivating factor for many survey respondents in 2015.

One possible reason for the disparity is that people experiencing attraction to multiple genders don’t feel comfortable using the label until they’ve had sexual encounters with both same and different sex partners. However, 17% of respondents (20% of females and 14% of males) reported a sexual experience with a person of the same sex. Different-sex experiences were not reported on, but whatever the number, it still leaves a sizeable gap. Are the 1’s and 5’s not counting themselves because they don’t feel bisexual enough? The 2’s and 4’s? Unfortunately we don’t have enough data to say.

Certainly, coming out as bisexual poses unique challenges, and if someone feels more comfortable with an alternate label, they should have the individual agency to do what’s right for them. I personally use different labels in different contexts, as do many others. But there’s power in naming things as they are, and sometimes I wonder what impact avoidance of the term “bisexual” has. For example, would bisexual women have better mental health if more people identified as bi and there was a larger, more visible community? Would the allotment of resources change if all those Kinsey 2-5’s were counted up? What happens if we don’t do anything? I don’t have the answers, but apparently, there are more us than ever. I hope we figure some of it out soon.

Melancholia In The Sunshine

feature image via shutterstock.com

I’m trying to build a metaphor around a patch of dirt I like to call a backyard. My boyfriend has this little area behind his house. After two years of watching the neighborhood use it for an illegal dumping ground, we decided to make something out of it. We emptied some left-behind planters of sulfuric sludge, cleared away cinderblocks and an insulating layer of cigarette butts and started to make something green from something grey. We dragged some trash out, dragged some back in (like two grills that lean precariously on a leg and a wheel). We set out a card table, turned over some leftover lumber onto some leftover paint buckets to make benches — y’know, really classed the joint up.

We’re trying to plant wildflowers amongst the weeds, but this soil is rubble.

I’m sitting here with a nice cold cider and my laptop. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. I should be happy — ecstatic even — but there is a distinct sense of melancholia that shrouds me. This happens every summer, and what makes it worse is that I can never identify from whence it comes.

I am, for all intents and purposes, a very happy person. I enjoy all manner of privileges and good things, some of which I worked very hard to achieve, and many others I happened upon by chance. I have two jobs I love very much, and which allow me to express myself creatively without much censorship. I do not suffer from clinical depression as far as I know, though it does run in the family. What I’m saying is, I guess, I got life.

It didn’t seem so hard when we first started, but tending to damaged roots is a slow and delicate process they want us to handle with care.

Don’t you ever want to take a sledgehammer to the whole damn place? Douse it in kerosene and watch it fucking burn? I like to think a tree might rise from those ashes; it probably isn’t a risk worth taking.

I like to blame my morose tendencies on the weather. In the winter, it is easy to say you’re just not feeling well because it’s fucking frigid and who can be happy under those conditions? But that kind of sadness has a name: seasonal depression. You’re sad because it sucks out. You’re sad because you can’t see the people you love as often because it sucks out. You’re sad because you can’t go running around in your skivvies because it sucks out. You’re sad because you haven’t seen a tree that doesn’t look like it wants to commit suicide since September. It isn’t until the summer, when the frost melts and the icee man comes calling and the pool is open and the yard (however ridden with stubborn weeds) starts to incubate natural life, that you realize the source of your woes isn’t dependent on the weather. It’s you. Or it’s me. I don’t mean to project.

So we excavate this rubble that cannot and will not give life. You find a dead rat while you’re raking the yard and you pretend to throw it at me. I yell at you because that is so incredibly disgusting. And you look at me like you didn’t know I would get so upset about something so small. But I am, and here we are, in this yard full of weeds.

I’ve been in a relationship with a man for over three years now, which is at least three years longer than any other relationship with any other person, male, female or otherwise that I have ever sustained. This is the Big One. I have always been the reason something goes wrong. I become restless, or anxious, or needy, or just batshit crazy. And it always seems to happen about right now, when the weeds start to show green in his little patch of dirt.

Last summer, I told him I wanted to see other people. Specifically, that I wanted to start seeing women, that this was a huge part of who I am, and that maybe non-monogamy was equally a part of who I am. So, we took a little break. I will be the first to admit that it was a selfish albeit necessary move for the both of us.

Past relationships have always been a product of convenience, emotionally or geographically or both. They ran their course and didn’t need much help because once they were over there was no question as to whether they would ever return. But, because it seems plausible that this boy might be the person with whom I spend the rest of my life, I have to start counting my blessings; I have to start planting seeds, the kind that will grow back next year and the year after that. Our little break was one kind of seed. Our open relationship is another. I’m hoping that that the way I manifest happiness in my life is by creating new things with my friends, lovers, and family.

We’ll have to take it slow I guess. Pull some weeds. Lay some soil. In the meantime we’ve got this tomato plant we’re growing in a big fat plastic pot, painted the color of terra cotta, that we found beneath some cinderblocks that smelled like piss. And for now we’re gonna stick it right in the sun. Already the leaves smell spicy and green. There is a little promise of something plump and red. I’ll try to nurture something that tastes and smells and looks as fine as you do.

A garden needs constant tending. It needs biodiversity. Those things can be hard to find in a city like New York. It seems as though everything you try to grow is vulnerable to elements out of your control: flash floods, vermin, alley cats. The summer heat brings every threat to the surface. So you trim and weed and build trellises and cages. And still one day you wake up, and a rat has burrowed a hole in your basil plants.

Much like a garden, a relationship needs tending, especially one vulnerable to predators. So when you show up at your boyfriend’s house at 4 am because you can’t sleep, creep through the 1×1 hole in the basement wall, hoping to tuck yourself under him arms so that he will wake up wrapped up in you, only to find that he has spent the night in Taylor’s bed, it’s important to remind yourself that you are not despairing because you are unloved, just temporarily lonely. True love manifest itself in tinier, more complex ways — like the look on his face when he comes home later that day, and sees you’ve been waiting for him, naked and drooling on the pillow and he assures you that you are his number one priority and he should have told you he wouldn’t be home last night. There is a feeling when you learn a new thing about yourself and the person you love; the feeling that you have built something solid. This is what staves off the sadness.

I had this dream we woke up at dawn, and the morning glories had wound themselves around the whole yard. They spun around barbed wire fence toppers and made a bed of themselves down the whole block, creeped through the doorways of the Louis Armstrong Projects and made everything smell so… crisp. They circled the elbows of your other lover’s freckled arms. They pulled at the orange red tendrils of my own. And nobody was awake to see it but you, me and the sparrows.

Building a relationship does not preclude exploring others. Learning what you love and hate about the bodies and behaviors of other people writes an encyclopedia of human nature that helps you understand how you can manage to love the sum of one human’s parts more than any individual part of any other person you have ever known. There’s no formula for this. Feelings will be hurt. Mysterious tiny animals will eat your tomatoes. It will feel like a crazy, impossible, futile thing to do. But, when September rolls around and you know you both put in good, hard work instead of letting the melancholia creep its way inside of you you, the impending task of staying warm in the winter doesn’t seem so daunting.

This is the first summer of my adult life that I have not tried to leave a relationship; the first time I feel like I have the tools to tend a garden.

We See You: An Open Thread for Bisexual Women Dating Men

Hello and welcome to this feelings atrium open thread situation, which today is dedicated bi or otherwise multi-gender attracted women. Sit down and have some lemon water or perhaps a muffin!

We get a lot of feedback and questions from bi women who date men and/or who are in long-term relationships with men; while there’s bucketfuls of information out in the world about dating men, it’s aimed at straight people and doesn’t touch upon a lot of what comes up in different-gender relationships for bisexual people, and queer women’s spaces tend not to discuss the issue in much depth. Many of our bi staff and writers who date men have the same issues and questions. So many women feel like there isn’t a space to talk about their experiences in this area. So! That brings us here; we’ve tried to make the space we want to see in the world in the form of this open thread. Obviously one open thread is not the be-all and end-all of discourse about bi women’s relationships with men, but it’s a start. We have some amazing bisexual staff members and contributors who will be here throughout the day to chat and commiserate and share experiences! We’ll be here probably until about 8 pm EST/5 pm PST, although maybe people will be able to hang out longer! Who knows!

A few things before we begin:

+ This hopefully goes without saying, but this is a space created primarily for bi and multi-gender attracted women! If that does not describe you, you are welcome to be here, but please don’t make the space about you; you’re here to listen and learn and possibly support, but not necessarily to weigh in. Thank you! If you are a non-bisexual person and your comments are deemed detrimental to the thread, they may be deleted, and you won’t be owed an explanation about why.

+ All that anyone here, both readers and staff, can really talk about with authority are their own experiences — it’s not possible to make sweeping objective statements about things as broad as identity or relationships, so please don’t a) try to make them yourself or b) assume others are trying to do so without good reason! Let’s all walk into this with the best faith in each other possible! Yeah!

+ Unfortunately, it seems like essentially a foregone conclusion that someone will at some point say something deliberately hurtful, instigatory and/or trollish, because this is the internet and a bisexual tree can’t fall in a forest without someone popping up to say “Well my bisexual ex-girlfriend….” When these comments inevitably arise, please don’t engage with them if they don’t seem in good faith, and instead report the comment to us so we can just delete it. To do so, just use Autostraddle Social messaging to contact me, Rachel, or email rachel [at] autostraddle [dot] com with a link to the comment in question!

OKAY THEN let’s go! What’s on your mind? How do you stay involved with queer community, especially when involved in relationships with men? How do these romantic relationships support and affirm you, and in what ways are they challenging? What have you been dying to talk about with other bi women? Tell us everything!

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A reminder: this space is primarily for bisexual women. If you’re a non-bisexual person and your comment is deemed unproductive to the conversation for any reason, it may be deleted. Keep this in mind and please be respectful!

Cara Delevingne’s Bisexuality “Isn’t A Phase” No Matter What That Dude at Vogue Wrote About It

Remember a few weeks ago, when Vogue ran an obnoxious profile of model/actress/eyebrows Cara Delevingne? In it, a smarmy gentleman suggested – through context clues that only he could see – that Cara’s bisexuality was temporary, caused more by a crisis of confidence than actual human desire. It was so ridiculous that outraged readers even started a petition demanding that Vogue apologize; as of this writing, said petition had over 21,000 signatures (Have Vogue ever apologized for anything??).

In a new profile by The New York Times, Cara says she found “nothing malicious” in the writer’s words, although she appreciated the sentiment of those who were offended. “My sexuality is not a phase,” she clarifies. “I am who I am.” Later, she gushes that being in love (with girlfriend Annie Clark) has helped hone her acting skills.

Like most gushing celebrity profiles, The New York Times can’t help but describe Cara in a ridiculous way (“a confident tangle of lanky limbs and messy hair, tattoos and ripped black jeans,” as opposed to Vogue’s “grinning and conspiratorial, all kinetic limbs and generous laughter, possessed of a demeanor that suggests that she has both seen it all and seen nothing at all”). Cara’s limbs are very striking to journalists. She’s very excited about taking over Hollywood and hopes to emulate the career of Charlize Theron, also a former model.

Explaining a private collection of videos of her wild, jet-setting lifestyle to Times reporter Logan Hill, Delevingne muses, “When I get older, I’m going to go through that footage and have the best time, because I probably won’t remember much of it.” Examples include “watching Lars Ulrich play a Metallica show from behind the drum kit! Or doing tequila shots with Whitney Houston just before she died!” – wait, WHAT?!  Cara Delevingne has truly been living her best life. The reporter breezes right by this brilliant statement like it doesn’t even matter, but now it’s all I can think about. Forever.

Listen, we’re trying to teach the media to report respectfully about bisexuality, but clearly we’ve got a long road ahead of us. Instead of focusing on the hidden context of Cara’s smiles or what her limbs are doing, we here at Autostraddle would at least appreciate a journalist extensively covering Cara and Whitney’s tequila-fueled adventures of yore. The people have spoken.

Daily Fix: All the New Research You Can Shake A Stick At and More News

feature image via the Movement Advancement Project

Data, Report to the Holodeck

+ The Movement Advancement Project has released a new report on LGBT equality across America; it examines laws affecting LGBT people state by state, gives individual states ratings on the environment they offer LGBT people ranging from “high” equality to “negative” equality, and discusses the possible impacts of the SCOTUS ruling on marriage equality this summer. The laws being looked at to form these ratings include those that deal with marriage and family recognition, adoption and parenting laws, non-discrimination laws, safe school laws, health and safety laws, and the degree of ability transgender people have when it comes to changing gender markers on official documentation. The results are… not entirely heartening. Fully 28 states fall under the categories of either “low equality” or “negative equality,” with those states’ populations comprising 52% of the US’s LGBT population. Only 12 states rated “high equality” overall, and several of the high/medium equality states overall still didn’t rate very well when it came to equality regarding gender identity/trans status. Helpfully, the report does show how these policies would be forced to change state by state if the SCOTUS rules in favor of marriage equality this summer.

+ A new report from the UK surveys 513 respondents within the bisexual community about their experiences and ideas for improving services. Respondents indicated that bisexual-specific services generally did not receive mainstream support or funding, and the majority of respondents said that they only felt “a little” or “not at all” part of either the LGBT or straight communities. In terms of accessing health services, 66% of respondents said that they felt they had to pass as straight and 42% said they felt they had to pass as gay or lesbian when accessing them; only 33% of respondents felt comfortable sharing their authentic sexual orientation with their general practitioner. 48% had experienced biphobic comments, and 38% unwanted sexual comments, because of their bisexuality when accessing services.

+ A research team at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana has released a new report based on the experiences of 4,800 students of color at the university. The findings are clear that students of color are experiencing racist microaggressions in the classroom, and that they’re impacting their educational experience. 51% of respondents reported experiencing stereotyping in the classroom, and 25% reported that they felt they weren’t taken seriously in class because of their race. Colorlines draws attention to the specific finding that “For all the questions, Black students reported the highest percentages of racial microaggressions among the racial and ethnic groups.”

+ Some data on LGBT Americans and religions! The majority of LGBT people in the US are religiously affiliated in some way, but are less likely to be Christian than straight people, and more likely than straight people to be unaffiliated with a religion.

Republicans!

+ A quick rundown! Let’s see if we can do this all in one breath. Scott Walker said something breathtakingly dumb when he defended Wisconsin’s forced ultrasounds by saying they were “just a cool thing that’s out there,” Mike Huckabee and other Republicans suggested trying to trump the courts on same-sex marriage and other issues by just making new laws that contradict them ideally at the federal level, fairly universally mocked Rick Santorum is trying to run for president AGAIN, and Marco Rubio claims to be concerned that gay activists are going to convince the nation that all Christian scripture is hate speech. Phew!

Laws of the Land

+ A proposed Alabama law wants to ban abortion clinics from operating within 2000 feet of a public school.

+ A new California law requires an incredibly basic level of integrity and honesty from crisis pregnancy centers. Crisis pregnancy centers, which market themselves as resources for pregnant people who don’t want to carry the baby to term, are pretty much entirely devoted to making sure pregnant people don’t terminate their pregnancies, and are willing to shame and lie to pregnant people about how pregnancy and abortion work if they have to, while at the same time not actually providing any care to the pregnant person. The new law doesn’t require crisis pregnancy centers to do or say anything about abortions; it just requires them to divulge the truth that they do not provide licensed medical care. As Jezebel puts it, “It seems fairly basic that non-medical facilities should have to disclose that they’re not medical facilities,” but apparently it’s not!

+ Oregon is on a roll; the state recently banned conversion therapy practiced on minors, and is now attempting to ban nonconsensual upskirt photos, which we can file in with the crisis pregnancy center law as “seems like in an ideal world we wouldn’t need a law for this.”

Marginally Good News

Or more accurately “somewhat heartening responses to bad news,” which is what we have to make do with sometimes.

+ A fraternity at Penn State has been suspended for three years following the revelation that members were passing around nude photos of unconscious women. It shouldn’t be good news that there are actual consequences for sexual violence against women, but with so much sexual violence on campuses and of them being met with institutional and community indifference, sometimes it does feel like good news.

+ On Tuesday, the City of Cleveland and Department of Justice released a document that commits to sweeping changes in police practices in Cleveland, where 12-year-old Tamir Rice was killed by a police officer while playing with a toy gun in a park and 37-year-old Tanisha Anderson died in police custody.

As outlined by Colorlines, the consent decree promises that the police department will take on the following improvements:

• Review and changes to standards related to the use of force including upholstering and firing weapons
• Police officers must provide emergency aid to suspects they injure
• The creation of a Mental Health Advisory Committee to train police
  on how to deal with crisis situations
• Trainings on recognizing and avoiding implicit bias
• Data collection and analysis of all stops and seizures
• Appointment of an inspector general and civilian oversight into internal affairs
• Institution of a Community Policing Commission to provide input

It remains to be seen whether the proposed changes will actually occur — it’s telling that there still seems to be no real progress on the investigation into Tamir Rice’s death — but I guess it’s better than nothing!

You Need Help: What’s My Label?

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

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Q:

I am a 27-year-old bisexual in an 8 year opposite-sex relationship. I’ve felt sure of my label until this past year. After reconciling some issues regarding my rape, dealing with an ill parent and returning to school (all girls!), my personal life has left me feeling like I’ve gone 12 rounds and I’m barely standing.

Enter HER. This little butch girl was an instant KO to my heart. I never gave any credence to those stories of men who claimed they saw a woman and immediately wanted to marry her, until I met this girl. I can’t get her out of my mind and I function like a laptop tossed into a pool when I’m around her. Not very charming, I know. The biggest problem though, is that while I may be able to dismiss a raging crush for what it is (a mixture of stress, chemistry, and the 8 year itch), I can’t dismiss the doubt that these feelings have cast onto the hetero side of my nature.

Honestly, there are about 16 different reasons (boyfriend withstanding) why I can’t pursue this woman, so that’s resolved for the most part. But how can I put to rest the confusion I’m having over my sexuality? Am I a repressed lesbian, or just a bored (and exhausted) bisexual? I can’t seem to find any guidance on how to determine this for myself.

A:

I think if I could make an app where you could just insert all the facts of a person’s life into it, like pictures of everybody you’ve ever wanted to fuck and a list from your middle school diary of all your best best girlfriends and a portfolio of every celebrity you ever google image searched and a gender analysis of every person who’s ever charmed you and then the app would print out a sexual orientation label for you, I would be a billionaire and we could all live on a big queer commune together. I’m sure you agree, Penelope. Can I call you Penelope? Okay, good, ’cause I’m going to.

The thing is, Penelope, that often the conversation about labels is just a distraction from the actual meat of the thing, from how your heart actually feels and what your body actually wants. Like we want the label to tell us who to like, when really, the only thing that can tell us who we like is who we like. I can’t tell you how to “put to rest” the confusion you have over your sexuality, unfortunately. For so many human beings, their label is something they know and feel in their bones, something they are so absolutely sure of. For other human beings, it’s not that clear. Neither way is better than the other!

I certainly can relate, Penelope. I wrote about this extensively, in fact. So now I’m gonna do that thing where I talk about myself a lot in hopes that it helps you, and paraphrase/repeat, for some minutes, what I said in that essay I linked to. I spent so many years fumbling around for my label, Penelope. I was scared that in some unpredictable future I’d pick the wrong gender to settle down with and then flee my husband/wife for another man/woman, leaving everybody broken-hearted while I cried on my bathroom floor, wailing GOD, “QUEER” WAS SUCH A COPOUT!

As Michel Foucault observed, “We demand that sex speak the truth […] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves which we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.” It’s been so long since I transcribed that quote onto a sticky note on my desktop that I’m not sure if I’m even using it in the right context anymore, but that spoke to me, as a person who once wrote in her diary, “we want sexuality to be biological because we want sexuality to be instinctual and natural and out of our control, because choice isn’t nearly as romantic as surrender. Love is about the absence of choice — the irresistible pull of another body. We don’t have faith in the rest of it because we doubt the permanence of anything we are capable of changing with our minds.”

We want these labels to tell us who we are and what we want because figuring out who we are and what we want in a big expansive lawless space is HARD. Not for everybody, of course, like I said above. The majority of society knows who they are and what they want (in bed) in an absolute way. You’re just not part of that majority, unfortunately.

Penelope, let me tell you something about myself: I am not entirely certain of my actual sexual orientation, and I don’t think I’ll ever be. But it doesn’t really matter. I want to live a lesbian life and that’s the life I’m living. I’m in love with this girl, nobody’s ever made me this happy, we plan on spending our lives together, my entire life is about queer culture, I’m a raging misandrist, and I have zero desire to live a heterosexual life.

However, I used to date men. A lot of men, actually. I slept with a lot of guys, too, and felt genuine attraction towards them and, often, real romantic love. I’ve also had some borderline traumatic experiences with men and I know that has contributed to how I feel about men now. (But I’ve also had traumatic experiences with women that didn’t impact how I feel about women! WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, PENELOPE??!! WAS I A REPRESSED LESBIAN ALL THIS TIME?) I also had some serious self-esteem issues that tempt me to write off that whole heterosexual phase as a result of my insecurity and desire to prove my self-worth through being desired by men. WHO KNOWS? At this point, I cannot be myself and also be with a man. Is that a choice I’ve made after living the life I’ve lived? Or is it a reflection of an innate absolute biological preference of women over men? I’ll never know, I guess, but I think that’s fine.

I want to be clear that I’m not saying that all sexuality is fluid and you should break free of boxes and not stress out about it because labels are for jelly! Sexuality is fluid… for some people. (Maybe you! Maybe not!) Being label-free is ideal… for some people. (Maybe you! Maybe not!) But not for everybody, and no way is better than the other. Your sexuality might be fluid because your sexuality might be fluid, not everybody’s. I usually say I’m queer, but I also love the word “lesbian,” and I cling to it ever harder every time a fellow LGBTQ treats it like an offensive term that isn’t nearly as “evolved” as more expansive identities. I feel a connection to lesbian history and feel a strong obligation towards keeping that word and that culture alive with a new generation. For me, “lesbian” is what I am but “bisexual” honors who I was, too — it wasn’t just a filling station from there to here, it was another highway altogether. I didn’t evolve, I changed. So “queer” works, but people can call me whatever they want, I don’t care, it doesn’t change who I am. The nice thing about “queer” is that it’s used by women who only date women but also by women who also date men and/or non-binary folks, so it can pretty much describe whatever you want it to. So, Penelope, if having a label is important to you then I suggest that one.

There’s a Gandhi quote I’m probably using out of its accurate context (yes, this is a pattern for me), but it really speaks to me, in which he said, “My aim is not to be consistent with my previous statements on a given question, but to be consistent with the truth as it may present itself to me at a given moment.” I just looked that quote up to tell you about it, which has lead me to believe I’ve been remembering it wrong this whole time, ’cause in my head, it was always “I want to remain consistent with the truth as it reveals itself to me.” Either way, that’s what I would tell you to do.

You might be bisexual. You might have been a repressed lesbian all this time!!! Those things are both possible, but right now, it sounds like you lack a significant pile of evidence one way or the other. Falling for this girl might just mean that you like this girl better than any boy you’ve ever met, and it might mean that you like girls, period, better than any boy you’ll ever meet.

The fact that you mention feeling bored and exhausted by your relationship, though, leads me to wonder if maybe it’s just easier to frame a problem with your relationship as one of sexual orientation? If you feel exhausted and bored with your boyfriend, then maybe the relationship has run its course regardless of which gender you date next. As the great Rachel Kincaid once said, “I think that’s one of the hardest/easiest/weirdest things about being bi, is if you put enough effort into it you can make any issue involving attraction to anyone ultimately a quorum on your sexual orientation.”

Remain consistent with the truth as it reveals itself to you, Penelope. Would be my advice.

xoxo

Riese

A Million Red Flags: My Polyamory Failure

This post is accessible to A+ Silver and Gold Members.

feature image via Shutterstock

The first time it happened, Andy and Julia had come to New York for the weekend and I was trying desperately to look like a fun, outgoing person who did cool things in the city. Honestly, that time in my life wasn’t very cool. I’d gone on tour with a rock band immediately after graduating college instead of seeking out a practical career, which had been awesome at the time, but when that dried up I moved back in with my parents and picked up a dead-end job at a local bookstore chain in suburban New Jersey. None of my friends lived in the town I grew up in anymore and I felt directionless, really lonely and vulnerable. I was just sort of floating in space, waiting for my real adult life to pick up. I realize when I tell this story that I sound like the kind of person who might get recruited for a religious cult.

Andy and Julia were a cool young couple who lived upstate. I’d met them at a concert I’d gone to by myself, and I’d liked both of them immediately. As we got to know each other better, I learned that we liked a lot of the same music and shared a twisted sense of humor. I didn’t have a lot of friends at the time, and I’d put a lot of pressure on myself to make our night out as amazing as possible.

We were out at MisShapes, a weekly hipster dance party that took place at a club called Don Hills. The music was always amazing, the people at the party were always infinitely better-looking than anywhere else, and there were usually party photographers on hand to document everyone’s outfits (never mine). We’d had a few drinks by the time we got there, and things were already fuzzy — the only music I can remember the DJ playing was “I Believe In A Thing Called Love” by the Darkness. The three of us were dancing together and having a perfectly lovely time. Julia left to get us another round of rum and cokes, and at that moment I felt the mood on the dance floor abruptly shift. The energy between me and Andy had somehow gone from playful to downright flirtatious, and we were both quite drunk. When he kissed me, I pushed him away and stared, deer in headlights.

“Hey, what’s going on?! Your fiancée’s right over there!”

“It’s totally fine.” I looked up and saw Julia watching us, smiling broadly as if she were watching her two kids winning a soccer game. This was something that they allowed in their relationship, although historically it had usually been Julia casually making out with various girls. Her reaction was more amused than anything. She crossed the room, handed us our drinks, and that’s when things got blurry. Next thing I knew, I had Julia pressed up against the sound booth, and she and I were making out with an almost ferocious intensity. I’d never kissed a girl before, and I was struck by how soft her mouth was, how different the curves of her body felt. I had no idea how this had happened, but was told later that I’d been the instigator. I remember slurring some strange justification, probably a line from Trainspotting that I’ve always loved — “It’s all about aesthetics, and fuck all to do with morality.” The three of us continued making a drunken spectacle of ourselves all over the dance floor at Don Hills, on the street, in a cab, on the PATH train.

The next morning, we laughed it off — we’d had such a crazy night! I didn’t read into what had happened too deeply. A few weeks later, I came upstate for Julia’s birthday party, and halfway through the night the three of us found ourselves sneaking off to some dark corner to make out again. We certainly hadn’t intended for there to be a repeat performance, but after a couple of sly shared glances and a tequila or three, we found ourselves clumsily pawing at each other once again. At one point Julia’s lip ring got caught in one of my earrings and my studded belt left dull scrape marks along the wall. The next morning, it happened again. We began to accept that this was a thing that was happening — we didn’t know exactly why, but knew we felt drawn to it. Against our better judgement we’d fallen into an awfully volatile situation.

At the beginning, it was confusing for a few reasons — I’d never been with a girl before, and I was terrified of what that meant for me. I was 22 years old and equal parts overwhelmed and frightened by the prospect of confronting my sexuality in a whole new way. I had no queer identity or poly community or anyone to really bounce my fears off of; I felt like the only person this had ever happened to, and I had to deal with it on my own. I justified my attraction to Julia by telling myself that the situation was Julia-specific, and that she was the only girl I’d ever feel anything for. The situation was doubly terrifying because Julia and Andy had been together for over a decade and were engaged to be married. I knew that our dalliances had to remain merely that, and that nothing that transpired between the three of us could interfere with their exclusive relationship.

Of course, none of my concerns did anything to stop the whole thing from being just… really hot. There was something delicious about receiving all this attention from two people who also loved each other, and in some ways we all got off on the taboo aspect of this arrangement. We were all well aware that the situation could be dangerous, but we just couldn’t stop ourselves.

Friends who knew what we were up to regarded us with bemused skepticism. By this time, I’d moved into my first real apartment in Brooklyn. My two straight dude roommates never so much as raised an eyebrow when Andy and Julia would visit for the weekend, never questioned our obvious affection for each other, our sleeping arrangements or any noises that may or may not have emanated from my tiny bedroom. Whenever possible, I’d take the Amtrak upstate and spend a few blissful days at their little house in the country, reveling in the privacy and the pleasure of their company. Julia’s mom was a wholesome lady who played the organ in the church choir, and apparently never noticed the angry purple hickeys her daughter and I would often sport when we stopped by.

For Julia, our situation gave her an opportunity to step outside the traditional heteronormative world her relationship with Andy had afforded her. She wanted to hold hands in public, relished the opportunity to flip the bird at passing drivers who yelled “DYKE!” out their windows. We were both pretty big fans of t.A.T.u. and had many Meaningful Moments singing along to their melodramatic lesbian love songs, preferably in the original Russian (which we didn’t understand, but felt deeply). All of this was brand new to me, and a little overwhelming. I certainly hadn’t come to terms with what all of this meant for my own sexuality, and I was uncomfortable with how strange our relationship must have looked from the outside. I once refused to put my arm around her in Grand Central Station, citing that my mom went to Grand Central Station sometimes, and I was terrified of anybody knowing what we were up to. We weren’t even really sure ourselves — we talked about it sometimes, and decided that our friendship was of utmost importance. The three of us had become incredibly close, and Julia and I talked online or through text almost all day every day. We refused to describe what we were doing as a Relationship with a capital R, and I was never ever referred to as their Girlfriend. We looked at the future through rose-colored glasses, figuring that over time, the physical aspect of our relationship would dwindle as we got to know each other better. We imagined we’d be left with a very close friendship, filled to the brim with trust and mutual respect. We failed to notice the basic reality that relationships just don’t work that way. The more we hooked up, the more intense things became, and the emotional stakes became even higher.

And then something happened that I wasn’t prepared for: I started falling in love with Julia.

I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but one day I found myself short of breath whenever she smiled, shuddering internally when she held my hand, falling apart entirely when she kissed me. I was horrified to realize that all my previous infatuations had been merely that, and that this impossible mess of a thing was the real deal. I’d never considered falling in love with a woman before — I mean, I knew it was something people did, but suddenly it had happened to me, and I was completely lost. This was a problem, confounded entirely by the very obvious truth that Andy was starting to develop some sort of real feelings for me.

I had no idea what to do with Andy’s affection. As far as I was concerned, he and I worked best as friends, and our physical relationship was merely incidental. None of us had intended to shake up the dynamics of Andy and Julia’s relationship, but this had become a very dangerous situation, and it became obvious that none of us had a particularly realistic endgame in mind. I can’t say what went on behind closed doors because I was not privy to Andy and Julia’s discussions regarding the rules of their relationship with me, but suffice it to say this new exchange of feelings made Julia extremely insecure and paranoid about her relationship with Andy, her primary partner. As she pulled away from me to focus on Andy, I became desperate and terrified of losing Julia. As my focus shifted almost entirely onto Julia, Andy worried about losing my attention, which alienated Julia further. The entire scenario had become toxic and uncomfortable, and absolutely nobody was getting what they wanted.

As I struggled to understand how I fit into our complicated relationship, I assigned myself a lower level of importance than everyone else involved. I didn’t really feel comfortable asking about the conversations Andy and Julia had about me, and they rarely volunteered information. I knew they’d discussed rules regarding which physical acts they considered off-limits with me, but they never included me in these discussions and I was too afraid of screwing things up to insist. In retrospect, we all violated a cardinal rule of non-monogamy, and I know that I should have been privy to all discussions related to the rules I was intended to follow, but I was young and dumb and thought I was being good-natured and respectful. When Andy inevitably tried to do something to me that wasn’t in the rulebook, I had no idea why Julia stopped him and burst into tears. She bottled up whatever awful things she was feeling and saved her meltdown for a time when I would be well out of earshot.

It was around this time that Andy and Julia had decided officially that they were going to move to Brooklyn, and I offered to help in any way I possibly could. As it happened, the company Andy worked for was able to transfer him to a location in Queens very quickly, while Julia was having a lot of trouble finding the right gig. We realized that the easiest solution was for Andy to come live with me for a while — we could look for apartments together while he settled in, and Julia could start packing up their house and hunt for jobs. In the midst of all this confusion, such a profound change in our relationship dynamic was probably the worst thing we could have done. Andy moved in with me in late July, under the condition that he and I were not to be physical with each other at all without Julia present.

In mid-August, we gathered with some mutual friends at Andy’s parents’ shore house in Cape May for his birthday. Andy and Julia had arrived early get the house ready, and I took the bus down there as soon as I got off work, goofy birthday present in hand, nervous knots in the pit of my stomach.

We threw a small birthday party on the screened-in porch, complete with rum cocktails and a homemade chocolate cake. We went for a group walk along the shore at sunset and took adorable photos of the whole gang jumping in the surf. It should have been a perfect weekend, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was just horribly wrong. Julia wouldn’t hold my hand or kiss me, would barely look me in the eye. When I asked her what was up, she threw out lame excuses — primarily that she didn’t want Andy’s neighbours to see us, in case they told his family. Later, while Andy and our other friends chatted animatedly, I lay catatonic on the couch with my knees pulled up to my chest, trying to work out why everything felt so different. When the three of us finally retired to the bedroom after an otherwise charming evening, Julia and Andy passed out, half-drunk and blissed out. I lay there with my left hand looped through the hip of Julia’s underwear, staring aghast at the back of her neck.

It wasn’t until I’d gotten home that Julia worked up the nerve to tell me that she and Andy had decided (or rather, she had decided) to end our physical relationship altogether, “for the good of our friendship.” She hadn’t told me all weekend because she didn’t want to make things weird or ruin the birthday party. Of course, she’d done both of these things, but I already felt too powerless to feel any sort of angry. Instead, I was wracked with self-loathing and blamed myself for having added unnecessary stress to their relationship. I assumed all the blame for the entire disaster, and the weight of my guilt absolutely crushed me. I listened to “Exit Wound” by Human Waste Project on repeat for hours and cried until tears streaming down my face felt as natural as breathing. Through all of this, I kept repeating to myself Julia’s promise that this decision would help preserve our friendship, and prayed that eventually I’d come to believe her.

Of course, Andy was still living with me, a fact that made Julia horribly uncomfortable. He was no longer allowed to sleep in my bed, and Julia had taken to texting both of us constantly, demanding continuous updates, begging us not to have any fun of any kind without her. Left to our own devices, we perused restaurants we knew Julia would have hated, drank vodka lemonades on my roof and had really beautiful, honest conversations about the state of our friendship. I was still navigating my heartbreak and was something of a fragile mess, but Andy was dedicated to being a supportive friend. He helped me hold things together, and he made me laugh.

On the weekends, Julia would come down to visit, and I found it difficult to be in the same room as or even look at her. We’d go out dancing together and I’d always end up alone, feeling like an awkward third wheel. She’d spend most of her visit trying to steal Andy away so they could be alone together, and I’d let the two of them sleep in my bed while I slept across the room, pining miserably. I began to experience frequent panic attacks. I agonized over Julia’s perception of me, worried about being avoided, and even though I knew it was ridiculous, I started to resent Andy for commanding so much of her attention.

It’s important to know that at this time, I was living in a pretty big loft apartment in Bushwick with a couple of charmingly oblivious straight guys. The building was an old converted factory, and although our common area was gigantic, the individual rooms were actually quite small. My bedroom was lofted, which meant that upstairs, I had 5’ high ceilings — a grownup treehouse. I kept a wardrobe on the ground level, but in my actual sleeping space I only had room for a small dresser and a mattress on the floor. When Andy first came to live with me, we shared my bed, but after our triad situation came to an end, he good-naturedly built himself a little blanket nest on the other side of the room. When Julia stayed over for the weekend, I slept in the nest. It was terribly uncomfortable. I have no idea how he even made it through a single night. One night as we were getting ready for bed, I thought fuck it, why should he suffer? I told Andy he could sleep in my bed with me. We were friends, right? Everything would be fine.

Everything was fine, until the very early morning, when it wasn’t.

Nothing really happened — we didn’t get very far before I burst into tears. We stopped ourselves and sat up, guiltily staring at the ceiling, the walls, anywhere but at each other. Obviously someone had to tell Julia; I couldn’t keep this from her. She was my best friend, and he was her life partner. We were devastated by what we’d done , but we knew we had to be honest. After much deliberation, we decided we would tell her together.

I made it about an hour before I caved and told her everything myself.

I slept on the floor in the living room for a couple of days. After that, Andy transferred back to his old job upstate, packed up his things and left my apartment forever. I mailed him a couple of shirts he’d left behind, wrote Julia a few desperate and miserable letters (and even sent a cringe-inducing mix CD), but I never heard back. I spent the next couple of months crying alone in my little loft, listening to Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” ad nauseam. I couldn’t stop shaking, and I could barely keep food down. I could not begin to imagine a time when I might feel better, and I found that feeling better wasn’t something I was particularly interested in. All I wanted to do was punish myself. When I finally left the house, I was a drunk, sobbing mess. None of my friends understood what I’d been through. They wondered how I could have grown so attached to two people who were very clearly never going to end up with me. They told me they’d known this was all a horrible idea right from the get-go; what was I thinking? I had no answers.

Seven years later, I met Julia for coffee at a tiny coffee shop off Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia. We’d chosen Philadelphia as a neutral halfway point between our two respective cities. I arrived early and trembled nervously over my Americano, nearly spilling it all over myself when she walked in. In the years since we’d seen each other, she and Andy had gotten married and lived in four different cities. New York City was not among them. I’d moved twice myself, changed jobs several times, dated my way through a series of disasters of various genders and ended up writing about music and sexuality for a queer website. I was twenty-nine years old and they were in their thirties.

She told me that she and Andy had never repeated the experience of sharing a girlfriend. I told her about how I’d dabbled in poly situations, but had learned through unfortunate trial and error that I just didn’t have the emotional constitution to withstand them. I’d also learned that we had done poly all wrong, and that better communication and clearer boundaries would probably have changed a lot of things, but it didn’t change the way my gut clenched when I imagined sharing a partner or being shared ever again. It took us seven years to have that talk, or to even reach a place in our lives where we could be in the same room.

Later, on the Chinatown bus back to New York, I stared out the window and wondered what I’d expected to get out of our encounter. I’d always imagined that burying the hatchet would feel like some huge revelation, that a weight would be lifted from my shoulders. Turns out, I didn’t feel much — only the same sort of peaceful satisfaction that comes from organizing a long-neglected drawer or untying a complicated knot. From seven years’ vantage point, the emotional wreckage seemed much less daunting, and the closure I’d been so desperate to grant myself no longer felt urgent or even necessary. Some things don’t end neatly or well, and by the time you’re ready to face them, it turns out you already have.

Rebel Girls: Bessie Smith Was a Queer Pioneer, and We’re Finally Gonna Get to Talk About It

Bessie Smith was an out, proud, loud, and prolific jazz singer credited with popularizing the blues in America. She recorded over 200 songs before her untimely death in a car crash at 43 in 1937, by which time she’d made her way from Tennessee to big stardom — redefining gender expectations, challenging a deeply homophobic culture, and destroying all of her obstacles on the way.

Bessie Smith didn’t back down, and she didn’t keep quiet, either. She defied convention and social norms with explicit lyrical content about her attractions to women, and in true Carmen Rios fashion once told one of her lovers, “I got 12 women on this show, and I can have one every night if I want it.”

All of this makes it fitting that when HBO’s Bessie premieres May 16 to bring the Empress of Jazz back to life, nobody will be skirting the issue of Bessie Smith’s bisexuality. It’s been confirmed that the film, starring Queen Latifah as Bessie Smith and Mo’Nique as her friend, mentor, and rumored lover Ma Rainey, won’t skim over Bessie’s love affairs with men and women. With Director Dee Rees at the helm (who brought Pariah to your world, thus shaking it to the ground), it’s hard not to assume that it’ll do it right.

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Bessie Smith was born on April 15, 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Her father, mother, and brother died shortly after she was born, leaving her sister Viola at the head of the house and landing Bessie and her brother on street corners, performing for money. When her oldest brother joined a traveling troupe and left home, she was just a child; when he came back years later, he squeezed in an audition for his little sister and she took on a role as a dancer. She was 17.

This was where she would meet then-unknown singer Ma Rainey, who would later become her mentor as a performing artist and provide Bessie with a direct connection to the queer underground jazz scene. Although not all of their counterparts would ever come to be as open or out as them, Ma and Bessie were by no means alone. There were lots of queer women singing the blues in the 1920’s and 30’s, and especially coming out of the Vaudeville universe, including Billie Holiday and Lucille Bogan.

Despite her marriage to Jack Gee in 1923 and a later common-law marriage to Richard Morgan that lasted until her death, Bessie was known for her many affairs with both men and women. Rumors flew about her relationship with Ma Rainey, and it was relatively well-known that she was involved for some time with chorus dancer Lillian Simpson. In fact, it was being caught with a woman which ultimately dissolved her first marriage. As Chris Albertson tells it:

Bessie knew, of course, what she was singing about when she recorded [Foolish Man Blues] in 1927. Most urban blacks — whether they indulged or not —accepted homosexuality as a fact of life. Jack probably did, too, but not when it was so close to home. Not that he was totally straitlaced — he did indulge in heterosexual promiscuity. He may have suspected Bessie’s sexual interest in women before the incident with Marie, but that appears to have been his first actual confrontation with his wife’s bisexuality. Clearly it was more than he was prepared to take.

…Jack charged into the crowded dressing room and knocked Bessie to the floor. “I’m not going to do any more to you now,” he said, looking down at her, “but wait until the show is done tonight — you ain’t a man, but you better be like one because we’re gonna have it out.” He would be waiting at the hotel, he said, and walked out.

Bessie wasn’t ready to face Jack. “I’m in real trouble now,” she told Ruby after clearing her room of performers and guests, “and I ain’t about to mess with Jack as mad as he is. Fix my feathers, baby, and let’s get this show over with and get out of town.”

In many ways, Bessie embodied the bawdiness and hedonism of the jazz age, and in those ways she also bucked respectability politics and gender norms. Known as a heavy drinker and a big eater, Bessie sang about getting rid of “no-good men,” subverting the masculine and feminine in her relationships, and her own desire for sexual and bodily autonomy.

Oh, right, and she sang frankly about sex, queerness, and also her own declared self-love in the midst of so much societal hate, baggage, and pressure.

In “The Boy in the Boat,”

When you see two women walking hand in hand,
Just look ‘em over and try to understand:
They’ll go to those parties
Have the lights down low
Only those parties where women can go

In “Young Woman’s Blues,”

No time to marry
No time to settle down
I’m a young woman
and I ain’t done runnin’ around

In “Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do,”

There ain’t nothing I can do or nothing I can say
That folks don’t criticize me
But I’m going to do just as I want to anyway
And don’t care if they all despise me

And  best of all — in “It’s Dirty But Good.”

I know women that don’t like men
It’s dirty but good, oh, yes, it’s dirty but good
There ain’t much difference, it’s just dirty but good

This is stuff that’s revolutionary, even today — so to do so then seems almost unthinkable. But Bessie thought it, said it out loud, and then repeated herself when people didn’t hear her.

All of this, of course, makes her meteoric rise to fame even more ironic and delicious. Bessie Smith, publicly queer, made the blues big. Her wide appeal brought the blues subculture into the mainstream and forced venues to desegregate, despite how flagrantly her own music and experiences flew in the face of America’s white-bread values. Even in an age where women could sip moonshine with the rest of them, Bessie was larger than life and braver than the rest of them.

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It’s been almost 80 years since Bessie Smith died in a car crash, and in that time various writers and historians have explored the trajectories of both her career and her turbulent personal life. Too often, however, these perspectives bring an added layer of invisibility, shame, or straight-up erasure of the heart of her story: her fiery queer heart, and how it surely empowered her to speak out, live loudly and proudly, and defy convention.

Surely, we’d remember Bessie as a badass and a boundary-breaker even if she wasn’t queer, but that she so proudly and unabashedly was – even in the face of social stigma, a pervasively homophobic industry and culture, and the imminent threat of her husband’s anger – is a testament to the strength that let her move mountains and create waves. That piece of the puzzle matters now, too, in the face of a society that not only tries to erase women, but also their sexualities.

For Bessie Smith to be so boldly queer as a celebrity and especially a woman of color in the early 20th century was powerful. To celebrate her for everything she was now – every last drop of her boisterous, promiscuous, defiant person – could still change everything.

Stories like these need to be told in full, queer and all. And Bessie could be a damn good shot at making it happen.

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Recommended for This Unit

• Queer Music Heritage’s Obscure Queer Blues broadcasts
• Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, by Angela Fucking Davis
• The Complete Recordings, Bessie Smith

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Rebel Girls is a column about women’s studies, the feminist movement, and the historical intersections of both of them. It’s kind of like taking a class, but better – because you don’t have to wear pants. To contact your professor privately, email carmen at autostraddle dot com. Ask questions about the lesson in the comments!

“The 100” Gives Canon Bisexual Representation and A Queer Girl Ship, and It Taketh Away

SPOILERS ABOUND.

At the close of its second season, the CW’s The 100 is making waves — the brutal postapocalyptic world liberally peppered with the deaths of young teens didn’t turn too many heads after season one, but the revelation of the canon bisexuality of its protagonist, Clarke Griffin, sure has.

Clarke spent the last, oh, season and a half or so embroiled in one way or another with Finn, a (male) troublemaker with a heart of gold, sort of. After they have sex one time, Clarke refuses to get into a real relationship with Finn or return his declarations of affection, although he’s clearly still important to her. After Finn’s death in Season Two, Clarke isn’t super concerned with getting back on the horse as far as dating goes; she’s pretty busy trying to save her entire community from grisly death, a task that can only be accomplished via a fragile alliance with the community of people who have been native to the earth for the last 100 years instead of living in a climate-controlled spaceship. The good news is that Clarke has a lot in common with their commander, named Lexa; they’re both about 17 going on 45, total badasses, and young women who have proven themselves so thoroughly that grown-ass men with weapons will follow them into battle (although it’s notable that there appears to be pretty good gender equity in this particular dystopian hellscape). They’re even both dealing with the heartbreak of a romantic interest killed in war; Clarke is mourning Finn and Lexa a girl named Costia. All of their shared experiences seem to be surely paving the road to gal pal bffdom forever — right up until Lexa kisses Clarke, and Clarke kisses back. Here, look, you can see it.

When we look at the standards by which we often discuss bisexual representation on TV, The 100 is kind of a mixed bag. My initial takeaway was, honestly, disappointment — Clarke and Lexa’s kiss, the first indication that their relationship isn’t platonic, doesn’t come until very late in the second season. When it does come, it’s a very brief moment — Clarke FOR SURE kisses back, but she also stops kissing about three seconds later, and tells Lexa “I can’t.” The implication is at least that Clarke means “I can’t right now because my last love interest died about five minutes ago and also I’m responsible for keeping hundreds of people alive even though I’m only 17,” not “I can’t because we’re both girls.” Still, though, I was hoping for a little more than the few seconds of blissful bi reciprocal feelings we saw. I had heard so much about this show, and so much of it enthusiastic, that I was prepared for a full-on relationship. What we actually got ultimately amounts to a demonstration that our protagonist is bi, but the scene doesn’t last long enough to do much more than that. What’s more, Lexa and Clarke don’t exactly end the season on an amicable note. While I’m cautiously optimistic about their reconciliation, the fact remains that if I had blinked several times, like if I had particularly dry eyes on the day I finished the show, I could plausibly have missed this entirely.

However! There are still several things about this arc, miniature as it is, that are worth celebrating. The bisexual character is indeed the protagonist, which is a rare bird; usually we’re relegated to side characters if we exist at all. I’m also thrilled to see a bisexual character who isn’t stuck with a love triangle between characters of different genders. I think the show does sort of ask us to compare Finn and Lexa in our head, but not in a way that feels specifically about gender — more like the same way that we were tempted to compare Rory Gilmore’s boyfriends. And of course, it’s always great to see any LGBT character whose storyline doesn’t center around coming out, or function as a Very Special Episode. In this arc, Clarke’s bisexuality isn’t the focus of attention; Lexa is. Their interactions are allowed to be just that, interactions between characters we care about, not a device meant to serve an identity plot.

Some fans and writers have found this in particular worth celebrating — the ‘normalcy’ of Clarke and Lexa, the fact that it’s not made a big deal of. I’m less inclined to be impressed by this, given the context of the world of The 100. So far in this show we’ve seen someone use their own teeth to chew a tracking device out of their arm, a twelve-year-old girl with PTSD stab someone to death, and somebody climb inside a warhead to use it as a spaceship because a hallucination of their dead kid encouraged them to. No one is fucking around here. If it isn’t about survival, it doesn’t rate very high as a priority. Even the rivalry between Raven and Clarke, something which many other shows would have (and have, in fact) drawn out into a primary conflict that lasted the show’s whole run, couldn’t last longer than a couple episodes, because Clarke and Raven’s reliance upon each other for survival is just too important. In this world, I would find it more surprising if bisexuality was a big deal.

We haven’t seen any other relationships get much explicit discussion, either; Finn and Clarke never had a conversation to define their relationship, and other characters rolled with the Clarke/Finn situation without much comment. I mean, it makes sense: ten minutes spent dealing with specificity of sexual orientation or labels is ten minutes that could be spent sharpening sticks into spears or trying to engineer antibiotics out of rocks. This isn’t new; there’s a reason why we have often more success with representation of marginalized groups in scifi/fantasy/dystopian universes, because show creators know that viewers are more likely to accept it not being “a big deal” in a world different than ours, where the characters have concerns that are different than ours. This doesn’t mean points should be subtracted from The 100, just that this doesn’t seem to me like the most interesting takeaway from this show in particular.

For similar reasons, I’m not personally bothered by another common trope of bisexual representation: the absence of the word “bisexual.” Usually it grates on me, as it does on many other bi viewers, when otherwise articulate characters who are well-educated on issues of sexual orientation (Piper of OINTB, Sarah of Transparent, etc) seem fundamentally incapable of calling themselves or anyone else bisexual. Often they opt to either avoid the subject entirely or say they “don’t like labels,” which is a perfectly acceptable way to self-identify, but is frustrating when it’s used to characterize almost every character on TV attracted to more than one gender. But this is less irritating to me when the show isn’t set in our real world, a world where these terms are in fact in common usage. In The 100, there’s no indication that we live in a culture where there’s any particular vocabulary around relationships or orientation, at least not one that seems all that important. For instance, Lexa isn’t referred to as a lesbian, even though as far as we know she only has relationships with women.

Ultimately, what I’m most interested in about what Clarke means as a bisexual character isn’t how she stacks up against others, or how well The 100 as a show fills out checklists of ideal representation (although I think both of those can be valid lines of inquiry). I’m interested in the dynamic between Clarke and Lexa, because even though it got jarringly little screen time, it resonated with me in a way that even I was surprised by.

My first memory of seeing a bisexual in a relationship with a girl on TV was The OC‘s Marissa; she dated Alex for a very short arc before returning to her tumultuous on-and-off again relationship with Ryan, as all viewers knew she would. I was glued to the screen during the Alex storyline, but it was clear even to me that this relationship wasn’t really going to be Marissa’s story. She wasn’t really choosing Alex, she wouldn’t end up choosing Alex; she was choosing not-Ryan, she was choosing to try something new and different and daring just to see what would happen. Alex wasn’t who she wanted; Alex was just another fifth of vodka for Marissa to sneak into her purse. But that was what there was, and that was fine.

We’ve come a fairly long way since then, and there are multiple other bisexual women on TV — Bo in Lost Girl, Callie from Grey’s, Brittany from Glee, Delphine from Orphan Black, and more — who we see in real relationships with other women, relationships that aren’t portrayed as a phase even if they don’t end up lasting forever. It’s pretty cool in and of itself that The 100 isn’t the boat that all of our bisexual representation hopes are riding in together. But Clarke is a unique kind of protagonist in that her choices have consistently been shown to be rigidly controlled; every decision she makes on the show is ratified by strict standards of rational necessity, moral righteousness, or both. In fact, at some points it seems almost like a flaw in her character development — does Clarke ever even have subjective human wants and needs? Does she ever not do The Right Thing? (She definitely does not do the right thing, as far as I’m concerned, when she ultimately stands by and tries to help Finn after he straight up mass murders a bunch of people that his community has already invaded and colonized because of his own psychological issues, but I’m not sure that the show itself agrees with me. The totally skewed moral compass of this show when it comes to colonialism/imperialism and why so many characters seem willing to forgive Finn for something unforgivable is also really worth talking about with this show, arguably moreso than its representation of bisexuality. But anyways it’s not clear to me that the show’s internal ethics judge Clarke as being in the wrong here, even though I think she was).

We’ve actually never seen Clarke choose to enter into a real relationship on the show; she clearly has emotional ties with Finn, but at every point where a real reciprocal relationship is offered, she explicitly turns it down. She cares about Finn, but there are too many obstacles: his past with Raven, his horrifying crimes at the village of Tondc, the general conflict of interest she feels about loving one of her soldiers. When offered a choice, she chooses not to be with Finn, not really. In fact, Clarke chooses almost nothing for herself, ever.

Which is why it’s such a powerful moment to see her kiss Lexa back. Clarke virtually never acts on what she wants, at least not if there’s any real reason not to — she only slept with Finn when there seemed to be no complications, and as soon as they emerged, she backed off. Her self-control is astounding, especially for a teenager. But Clarke does (temporarily) allow her feelings to overwhelm her sense of obligation when it comes to Lexa. Clarke never chooses anything unless she can feel totally confident that it’s the right decision — and she chooses Lexa. For a few seconds, that is.

Clarke’s choices are consistently depicted by the show as being good ones; she has to make difficult or debatable calls sometimes, but she’s not portrayed as being Wrong in the same way that Finn or early Murphy was. This feels important to me because in many ways, I was used to seeing bisexual women in relationships with women portrayed as lapsing, aberrating, or as somehow acting out of character; giving in to some deviant part of themselves. If they were with another woman, it was because they were taking a break from their “real” selves, which was assumed to want a stable relationship with a man; they were “misbehaving.” But Clarke doesn’t misbehave; Clarke doesn’t have lapses. Clarke isn’t interested in Lexa as an alternative to something or someone else; being attracted to Lexa doesn’t require a change in her character. In fact, being into Lexa makes much more sense for Clarke’s character than being into Finn did. Lexa and Clarke share experiences, values, have both been through things that no one else understands. I’m grateful for seeing this on TV because it depicts a (young!) woman for whom being with another woman is a reasonable choice, one that makes sense for her at least as much as a different-sex relationship would.

Both Clarke and Lexa spend much of the show struggling with whether they can allow themselves to feel human emotions and still have the strength to survive; the context for their kiss is that Clarke has just wondered out loud whether maybe both of them might deserve more than just survival. It’s never a bad thing to see a depiction of intimacy between women that’s worth surviving for. But I do wish I could have seen more than a few seconds of that possibility and not have it called almost immediately into question. I wish Clarke could have chosen Lexa in a way that was at least as emotionally committed as her connection with Finn, and I wish the show had chosen to give Clarke and Lexa’s relationship as much screen time and depth as, say, Jasper and Maya’s, or Raven and Wick’s (much as I want good things to happen for Raven).

Ultimately, I’m not sure that The 100 gives us quite the vanguard of bisexual representation that I had hoped for. It doesn’t mess up in the particular ways that I am used to watching pop culture representation of my community mess up, which is refreshing, but it’s also hard to mess up that badly when your representation is so brief and limited. (Not that it hasn’t been done!) In a universe largely defined by tragedy, violence, and terrible sacrifice, the moments of real human connection and the risks taken to protect it are what really make The 100 special — hopefully in Season 3 we’ll see a same-sex couple get to have that in a real way.

Here’s To Your Health: 5 Ways Bisexual Women Can Pursue Better Health & Wellness

Feature image via Shutterstock

The numbers are clear: bisexual women are at high risk for poor mental and physical health, are more likely to experience poverty, addiction and violence, and often experience discrimination within the health care system. But we don’t have to accept poor health or substandard care. Fortunately, the bi community is rallying around this issue to increase education and expand health care access.

Last March, the Bisexual Resource Center organized the first ever Bisexual Health Awareness Month. Today they’re wrapping up the second annual BHAM campaign, which focused on spreading awareness of bi health. They mobilized Facebook, Twitter and their own website (which has a ton of awesome links about all manner of bi health topics).

“It’s really important for our community to see health as an important issue for us,” said Ellyn Ruthstrom, a BRC board member and the organization’s former president.

Different women in the bi community face different levels of risk. Bi women who are trans, for example, face many more challenges in acquiring good insurance and are more likely to experience poverty. Bi women who are trying to get pregnant with a partner’s sperm have different needs than those using artificial insemination. There is essentially no specific research or information available about or for people who are bisexual and genderqueer or non-binary. Old age, poverty, race and geography can all affect risk and health care status. There is no one-size-fits all solution, but there are some general guidelines that bi women generally can benefit from when it comes to their health.

Compiled from the wisdom of numerous reports, online resources and experts, here are five ways that you can take care of your own health in the face of high risks, economic pressures and often incompetent care providers. Please share your own challenges, victories and ideas in the comments. Together, we can work to get our community healthy!

1. Know yourself, know your risks

Repeated studies have shown bisexual women are at high risk for numerous negative health outcomes. Bi women are more likely to smoke and experience addiction. We are more likely to experience depression and consider or attempt suicide compared to other groups. Bi women also have higher cancer risk than lesbian or straight women, and they are less likely to get proper screenings. Appendix A of Bisexual Health: An Introduction, a book by the LGBTQ Task Force, the Fenway Institute and BiNet USA offers an excellent and thorough primer on the particular health risks of bisexuals. Two studies from LGBT Movement Advancement Project — Understanding Issues Facing Bisexual Americans and Paying An Unfair Price: The Financial Penalty For LGBT Women In America — also have excellent statistics that explore different contexts for negative health outcomes for bi women. This report from the UK provides additional insight into the specific mental health challenges bi women experience — and it echoes similar reports from the U.S. and elsewhere.

Bi erasure and stigma against bisexuality is one of the most serious causes behind all these negative health outcomes, not just the mental health factors

“Research shows that bisexuals experience more discrimination, violence, and stigma than gays and lesbians,” said Amy André, a co-author of Bisexual Health: An Introduction. “I believe that the discrimination, violence, and stigma is directly linked to the fact that we have the worst health.”

The point of reminding y’all of all this isn’t to scare you. In fact, there is great power in knowing our risks. Just like I need to be aware of the genetic diseases that have affected my family, like colon cancer, diabetes and Alzheimers,  it helps me protect myself if I know what my risks are as a member of the bisexual community.

“Individual bisexual people may feel they’re having individual experiences, but those are part of a larger shared experience,” said Dr. Magda Houlberg, the chief clinical officer at Howard Brown, an LGBTQ health center in Chicago.

Better understanding that shared experience reduces our individual risk and helps us advocate for ourselves and our community. The truth is, many medical providers may not be competent to address your needs as a bi woman, so if you are aware of your risk factors, you can be prepared to identify your needs to a doctor and also take preventative steps to keep yourself healthy. There’s a dearth of information about bi women’s health risks. However, leveraging the information that does exist will help you be prepared to take charge of your own health.

For example, many doctors will tell lesbian and bi women that they don’t need pap smears or shouldn’t learn about their options for birth control. However, numerous doctors and advocates insist this is false and are trying to correct the misconception. There’s also a huge lapse in research about safer sex for women who have sex with women and other people with vulvas, said Vanessa Schick, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Public Health. When lesbians and bisexual women ask for recommendations about how to have safer sex, doctors often don’t know what to tell them, she said, due to a lack of reliable information more than the failure of an individual doctor.

“There’s this perception that women aren’t at a risk for [sexual health problems] so we don’t need to fund research on it,” Schick said. “You need funding to demonstrate that there is in fact a risk. That’s a cycle that is really hard to break.”

Despite a lack of reliable data on many areas of bi health, one thing is clear: bi women should protect themselves against STIs, to get proper cancer screenings and to be treated with the same dignity as any woman patient seeking health care.

2. Find a competent health care provider and other trusted resources

In an ideal world, every doctor and nurse would be fully competent to address the unique challenges, risks and health outcomes of LGBT patients. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. In most urban settings, it shouldn’t be too hard to find an LGBT competent doctor — but even some of those may fail to be inclusive of the B in LGBT and instead lump bi patients in with lesbians or straight women or lecture bi women about promiscuity regardless of their sexual history. The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association has a directory of practitioners, and the Bisexuality-Aware Professionals Directory includes medical and mental health specialists. You can also get referrals from local LGBT resource and community centers. But not everyone has the privilege of a wide pool of doctors to choose from, either because their insurance is limited or because they are in a rural area and/or have limited ability to travel.

However, you have the right to a doctor who treats you with respect and who is compassionate toward your specific needs as a bisexual person. André put it this way:

Your provider works for you and is your employee. When you hire someone to work for you, you interview that person first. If that person doesn’t meet your standards, they don’t get the job. But if you are limited in being able to choose a provider, then you may be in a situation where you have to educate someone. In that case, try to find the person who seems like they will be the most compassionate and a good listener. Then, go from there. Direct your provider to read a book like Bisexual Health: An Introduction.

Most doctors and nurses don’t receive training in areas like LGBT cultural competency in medical school, but organizations like the BRC are working to get more doctors and health organizations the training they need to offer competent care to bi women and the community as a whole. And things are starting to improve. Ruthstrom of the BRC had a positive experience when she went to a new doctor.

The last time I went to a gynecologist, I was so happy because I didn’t have to do anything, because she asked me the proper questions. She was asking me the open ended and non-gender specific questions that a lot of providers should be asking. I commended her, because she  asked me the right things to allow me to tell her what my identity was, what my current sexual behavior was. It’s not just about ‘this is how you address bisexual people’ it’s how you should address all people so all people can feel comfortable with responding in a supportive way.

There are also online resources, including many linked throughout this piece, that can help you care for yourself. These kinds of resources are not a substitute for diagnosis and treatment, but they can help you learn to develop a healthy lifestyle, identify your risks, ask the right questions and stand up for your health care rights.

3. Advocate for yourself

I’ll say it once more for the bleacher section: You have the right to good care! But, the system isn’t set up to ensure you get it. Bi women face challenges in accessing care from all angles, and acknowledging that is the first step toward tackling it.

“There are larger social constructs that keep women and specifically bi women from accessing care because they don’t know if it’s going to be safe and competent care,” said Shena Willbrandt, the manager of women’s health services at Howard Brown. “It is difficult to ask people to navigate a system that doesn’t really work for them.”

But there are ways to make the system work for us — it’s just a matter of being armed with information and insisting on the best care possible.

“Once you’ve found a provider you feel comfortable talking to, you’re going to get the best care possible if you’re open and honest, and that can feel scary,” Schick said. “For bi women there is stigma coming from all over. But it’s about as best you can trying to move past that fear and be your own advocate. No one can do that for you as well as you can do that yourself.”

If your doctor asks questions that pigeonhole you into a sexuality you don’t identify with, answer broadly to make sure you are giving clear information about your sexuality and past and current partners. Doctors should ask open ended questions, like “tell me about your sexual partners” and “tell me about your sexual identity,” said Houlberg, rather than specific questions about partners of only one sex. If they fail at this, you can still give more information to correct their assumptions.

Here’s a great guide to talking to your doctor about your needs as an LGBT patient from The Fenway Institute. But for some women, you may not be able to come out to your doctor — especially if you’re in a small community with only one general practitioner or OBGYN who also treats your family, your neighbors and your coworkers. There’s no catchall solution; instead it’s “about pushing yourself as far as you feel comfortable and advocating for your own health,” Schick said.

Whether you’re out to your health provider or not, you can still ask for information and screening for high risk areas such as depression and certain cancers — that goes back to the importance of knowing your risks.

4. Take advantage of opportunities to navigate financial barriers to health care

Health care is expensive. The bi community is at very high risk for poverty. That’s a dangerous combination. According to LGBT MAP’s Unfair Price study, bisexual women are more than twice as likely to live in poverty than the general population, and 29% of LGBT women struggle to afford health care, compared to 19% of heterosexual women. Organizations like Howard Brown provide low cost care to the LGBT community, but such programs don’t exist in every city, and rural queers have almost no access to such care.

Many medical providers and institutions don’t factor in economic security when considering a patient’s health and their access to care, and that’s dangerous, said Willbrandt.

“Economic security and the lack of that is something that isn’t recognized,” she said. “We talk a lot about our location and how if someone lives on the southside, will they be able to get to our services on the north side? How can we serve someone who needs childcare? So many factors affect both economic security and health.”

In Houston, Texas, Liz James and the Lesbian Health Initiative (which, she explains, serves the whole LGBTQ community, not just lesbians) are working to provide care to people in the state with the highest rate of un-insurance in the country. The Affordable Care Act provides a breakthrough for health care by insuring people who couldn’t get insurance previously and by directing billions of dollars to Federally Qualified Health Centers, which provide low- and no-cost care to poor people.

“We believe health care is a human right, and the Affordable Care Act is the biggest opportunity we’ve had to recognize that,” James said. “The president made it a priority for LGBT people to have access. Federal laws that say you can’t be discriminated against for your sexual orientation and gender identity.”

LHI works to reach low-income LGBT individuals through health care fairs where they can get comprehensive screenings, by connecting them with health centers for care if necessary, and by educating them on their rights. Expanding the data available on the risk factors that LGBT Texans (and Americans) face is one of the most important steps to increase access, she said. Increasing visibility in the data and increasing visibility in society will dramatically improve bisexual health outcomes, she said.

“We’ve got to help people get health literate,” James said. “Lesbians and bi women are more obese, so we need to understand how to eat right. We’re at higher risk for breast cancer so we need regular mammograms. We also need to understand how to get health insurance. We need processes and infrastructure to be training health professionals.” There are many factors that have limited bi women’s access to care, including cost and a lack of proper information.

Whether it’s a periodic free clinic in your community, an LGBT community center with strong health partners, a visit to Planned Parenthood, or a trip to a general practitioner covered by your insurance, it is critical to find affordable ways to access health care. The ACA is slowly but surely increasing access for LGBT people and many other marginalized communities. Find resources in your community that will help you learn about your eligibility and the process for getting signed up for insurance, or research the nearest free or low cost screening options.

5. Create community and get the word out

You aren’t alone in your quest for good health care. Find a community of people who you are invested in, and who are invested in you. Having a network of support — not just for health care, but for your whole self, will seriously improve your health.

“Research shows that women, even those who have the ACA, are not accessing services even when insurance covers it,” Willbrandt said. “Word of mouth, whether it’s about a specific provider and people saying go to this particular amazing provider, make sure you get your pap, that’s how people learn about the health care needs that they have and the resources available.”

And once you’ve gotten health care access, found out what kinds of care you need and how to get it, found a queer-competent, compassionate provider or identified a userful resource, spread the word to others. Set a good example by taking care of your health and encouraging your friends, partners, family members and community to do the same.

“We don’t have anybody else doing this for us, this is our responsibility,” James said. “We have to get our appointments. We have to be responsible. We can’t abdicate our responsibility to our own health. We need to encourage that and support it in our communities.”

No matter how bleak the statistics or how unaware the medical community when it comes to bisexual health, it is possible to get good health care. With education efforts like those of the BRC, experts like Schick dedicating research to our community’s needs, and community organizations around the country fighting to provide good care to bisexual women, the situation is on the up and up. It’s up to each of us to ensure we’re taking advantage of the resources available and fighting to spread access for all bi women.

“Appropriate Behavior” Is Fresh, Authentic, Features a Bisexual Persian Character

One fine day, Robin, Hannah, Alley, and KaeLyn got together via our laptops, across multiple timezones, to dish about Appropriate Behavior, Desiree Akhavan‘s 2014 breakout feature film. You know, that movie everyone is talking about — including us. In lieu of a more official movie review, here are our uncensored (mildly edited for typos and brevity) thoughts on the movie everyone in the queer lady-loving community and indie film universe is buzzing about.

It’s off of the film fest circuit finally but may be screened at an indie theatre near you. It’s also available to stream on iTunes and Amazon instant video.

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Robin: Here! Just ordered an iced tea and a giant slab of banana bread from this kinky cafe and I’m READY.

KaeLyn: What is a kinky cafe?

Robin: It’s a cafe that is also kink friendly!

KaeLyn: Like you can practice kink while you have a latte?

Robin: Yup.

KaeLyn: It is like a cat cafe but with kink?

Robin: Yuuuup.

Alley: Wow, we don’t even have that in Portland…

KaeLyn: I feel like the kink cafe would be in Appropriate Behavior.

Robin: It TOTALLY WOULD
You have the option of taking your (or your sub’s) coffee in a dog bowl. It’s that kind of place that I think Appropriate Behavior would have featured.

KaeLyn: Are you drinking out of a doggie bowl?
I’m so distracted by your kink cafe.
I wish we were all at the kink cafe.

Alley: Sounds like the right place to discuss Appropriate Behavior.

KaeLyn: So let’s start with this: Describe your overall reaction to Appropriate Behavior in one sentence.

Hannah: “Charming.”

Alley: “I wanted it to be as brilliant as the preview.”

Hannah: Oh, one sentence.
Haha I thought you said one word.

KaeLyn: Haha I guess that can be a sentence, but you’re welcome to change your answer.

Hannah: So I gave like one of those theatrical preview pullout quotes, “CHARMING.”

Robin: “It feels true to a queer scene that I would never be a part of, but in an endearing way.”

KaeLyn: “I felt like I was watching a slightly better and queer version of Girls.”

KaeLyn: OK, fantastic. LOL.
What were your favorite parts? What did you react to?

I was really pleased to see a narrative with a bisexual WOC character front and center. I feel like there are so few movies for queer audiences with bi leads. We’re always the sidekick character. Or the “will she or won’t she date the guy/woman” character.

Alley: Yeah I thought Shirin was a very likeable and nuanced character. Much more so than anyone on Girls.

Robin: Yeah I really liked how casually the film treated Shirin’s experiences.

KaeLyn: Yes, and Shirin was just like, “I’m bi. That’s it.” There was no need to discuss her sexuality deeply or for it to evolve or whatever the typical tropes for bi characters are. It was more about her as a three-dimensional person… with all her flaws.

Robin: Oh yeah, I really really liked how a lot of the development isn’t like, Shirin figuring her sexuality or identity out, it’s about her flaws in trying to communicate/connect with/unhook from people. Like that’s what I got from it.

KaeLyn: On what Alley said about her being a nuanced character, I actually found her kind of annoying. Sweet, but annoying. Which is very real. I feel like that about a lot of people IRL. I’m a little older than Shirin and the other characters, so I found some of her plight a little hard to relate to, but I enjoyed it anyway. If that makes sense.

Alley: Yeah she was occasionally annoying but in a way I can relate with so it made her a little less so. Although I am also older…

Other favorite parts were really specific quotes like:

“You’re ruining my birthday.”

“You’re ruining my 20’s.”

KaeLyn: Haha, Alley. Yes! The writing was so good throughout.

Alley: But this one was my real fav:

CRYSTAL: No, you know, there are people in this world who go on first dates that are perfectly great, and then they wait a while before they engage in sexual contact.

SHIRIN: That’s disgusting.

CRYSTAL: I know. I think it all happens outside of New York.

Robin: What was the line she said when she & Maxine were at her family thing?

“I’m your exotic experience!”

KaeLyn: I saw it in a theatre and I often felt like I was the only one laughing. Like the humor was so dry, but it was so good.

Hannah: Can we talk about the rubber outfit guy? What was that about?

Robin: He had empty eyes.

Alley: He was oddly sweet?

Robin: Ahahaha!

Hannah: Oh, he kind of gave me the creeps.

Robin: Oh, he was kind of sweet and I definitely felt for him. But also, empty eyes.

Alley: Ugh, I didn’t have a chance to rewatch and I watched it initially in January so I am having trouble remembering specifically.

Hannah: She was totally an asshole to him though.

Robin: Yeah!

Hannah: In a way I related to.

Alley: But the girlfriend was the mean one, is what I’m remembering.

Hannah: Well he did kick her out after her failed attempt to kiss him. It was sort of mutual assholery all around.

Alley: Worst threesome ever
Well not ever but…

Hannah: Yeah, I was gonna say. I’ve had worse.

Alley: Me too…
Unfortunately

KaeLyn: Hahahaha
I have only had good experiences, I guess

Alley: Like the opposite of Stef’s amazing musical story, which is officially my favorite threesome story ever.

KaeLyn: I loved that scene because they told so much through body language. There was very little talking.

Hannah: Yes!

KaeLyn: But you knew exactly what they were all thinking.

Robin: Yes!

Hannah: I love that.

KaeLyn: And that’s so true to sex IRL. Like, we should talk about what we want and what we’re doing. Oh god, we should do that, but so many people just fumble through it.

Hannah: It just says so much about the actors and the directors and the editors all working so well together.

Alley: Agreed. It was a very well done scene even if it was uncomfortable. I mean that was on purpose and clearly came through.

KaeLyn: It was SO uncomfortable.

Hannah: Ugh when she kisses him on the shoulder!
I wanted to become a puddle

KaeLyn: I thought a lot of Shirin’s narrative was about drifting, feeling surrounded by people, but always alone. And this was such a great example of that.

Alley: That’s an interesting point and kind of reflects the timeline.

Hannah: I really like that.

KaeLyn: Like she is just so hungry for connection.

Alley: Which I wasn’t sure I liked because it seemed so opposite of what I expected from the trailer, but hearing your thoughts kind of makes me think it worked.

Hannah: I don’t think it directly relates to the bisexual narrative, but it does reflect a sense of outsiderness.

KaeLyn: And after losing Maxine, she doesn’t know how to plug in but she keeps grasping at it.

Robin: Mmmn, I agree. But also can we talk about Maxine?

KaeLyn: I think it does directly relate to the bisexual narrative.

Hannah: Or I guess that it could stand alone? But also strengthens the bisexual narrative? Sorry my head is full of mucous.

KaeLyn: There are usually those stereotypical narratives about bisexuals we chatted about earlier. So there is no “bisexual path” to follow. So how does a real life bisexual navigate the world? Shirin is mired in a world of “otherness.” She’s got her Persian family and her white ex-girlfriend and being stuck in her mid-20’s somewhere between that lawyer she goes on a date with and the idiots she also tries to date that are beneath her. That’s the whole movie, right? Like where can she fit in?

Hannah: Yeah, we’re agreeing, right KaeLyn?

KaeLyn: Yes, we’re totally agreeing. I’m just writing too much. LOL
Sorry, Robin! Yes, let’s talk about Maxine!

Robin: Y’all, I am gonna be real. Shirin & Maxine’s entire relationship didn’t resonate with me. I can’t tell if that’s the intent.

KaeLyn: I felt the same. Say more. What about it for you?

Robin: The thing that comes most strongly to mind is when they get high together and they say their “I love you’s.” But it felt… unearned? Like a shortcut to an emotional payoff.

KaeLyn: OMG Refresh my memory. I watched it in October and I’m blanking on this scene.

Robin: I think it was a flashback that starts with Shirin waiting at the window while Maxine picks up weed

Alley: Yeah, I think that was one of the scenes that started my “backwards” feeling of the narrative.

Robin: And then they smoke and Shirin’s like, “We’re the same kind of stoned person,” and that becomes a moment.

Hannah: Ahahaha

KaeLyn: YES. I remember now.

Alley: Agreed, it was kind of unearned.

Robin: And I couldn’t tell if it was meant to show how… specious their relationship was? Or I was just being an Old Person and thinking “You’re STONED, do you even KNOW WHAT LOVE IS?!”

Hannah: Okay, so maybe this is just because I don’t remember how the scene hit me in the moment, but I feel like it was deliberate. Sort of a commentary on the selective memory we have about our relationships? Like maybe she was even looking back on that moment and thinking, “I was stoned. I don’t even know what love is”?

KaeLyn: That’s an interesting way to think about it, Hannah.

Robin: I dunno, for something that ostensibly kickstarts the narrative of the movie, the relationship felt thin to me.

Alley: Yeah, I can’t say I ever really liked Maxine.

KaeLyn: Here’s a question: did you think the movie was about the relationship with Maxine? I didn’t.

Hannah: No, not at all. Though I did have empathy for Maxine at points.

Alley: Not sure what exactly it was trying to say beyond being funny that they first met/commiserated over hating everything — like hating things is such the cool hipster thing to do…that they hate.

KaeLyn: Yeah, Maxine was just as immature as Shirin. She was more patronizing, though. I felt like Maxine felt Shirin was beneath her intellectually and socially.

Robin: Agree.

Alley: KaeLyn, no, you’re right. It wasn’t just about that relationship for sure. It was about Shirin finding her way in the world. Which she sort of does by the end and sort of doesn’t, which is pretty true to real life. So I appreciated that.

KaeLyn: Yes, I think the audience I was watching it with was expecting a hipster romantic comedy.

Alley: Yeah, it was better than that for sure. Not that a hipster romantic comedy wouldn’t be fun to watch, but it went deeper.

KaeLyn: Can we talk about what we didn’t like or what didn’t work?

Hannah: I don’t think I took many issues with it. Other than the aforementioned thin relationship, it wasn’t trying to be anything more than what it was.

A little slice of life, of a person just trying to live the life they are meant to live. There was no moral, or high drama. It was just pretty and it felt honest to me.

Robin: I do wish there had been more with her family, but like, that gets into the territory of “I’d have done it differently.”

KaeLyn: I feel like it took a queer filmmaker, writer, actor to pull off that level of authenticity. It felt fresh to me. But I have to say I don’t love it as much as other people seem to. I enjoyed it very much. Does that make sense?

Hannah: Yeah.

Robin: I think I’m with you, KaeLyn.

KaeLyn: Like some people are over the moon about it and I’m like, “That was a really well written, directed, and acted movie with high production value and it felt really authentic and the narrative thread was strong. And it wasn’t my favorite.” And I can’t put my finger on why I’m not more ecstatic about it.

Alley: Me too KaeLyn.

KaeLyn: I can’t even say what I wish was different.

Alley: Like, I can’t pinpoint what could have been better but, like, the trailer was SOOOO good I was a tad disappointed.

KaeLyn: I guess that the one way it is cliche is it’s another story about a queer person with lots of class privilege interacting almost exclusively with other people with high levels of social and economic status. And maybe that made me feel less snuggly about it.

Alley: The class aspect is a good point.

KaeLyn: It’s what I don’t like about Girls. SO “white feminist” framework.

Alley: I was about to say that but didn’t want to keep bringing that up :wink:

KaeLyn: Haha.

Alley: That show just reminds me of all the women I went to college with that I loathed.

KaeLyn: Yeah, I think that’s what kept me at an emotional distance from Appropriate Behavior. Everyone was so privileged and really only had that worldview. And I kind of wanted them all to get over themselves.

Alley: It’s that balance of the film making fun of their own privilege but also getting a little mired in it. Tough balance.

KaeLyn: But lawd, there are hundreds of similar movies and books and musicals about “finding yourself” that feature young white men.

Alley: Totally.

KaeLyn: And even if there are problems with that “journey to the self” trope, I’m just so grateful there was a bisexual Persian woman at the center of it this time.

Alley: “Appropriate Behavior: Way less annoying than Igby Goes Down.”

KaeLyn: HAHAHAHA

Robin: HAAAAA

Hannah: Hehehe

KaeLyn: OK, so wrap up question: Would you recommend it?
And why?

Hannah: Yeah sure.

Robin: I would!

Alley: Absolutely, even if there are some formulaic portions even taking a “quintessential” or supposedly “universal” story and giving it to a bisexual woman of color is worth it and there are some damn funny lines.

KaeLyn: On a scale of 1 (the worst) to 10 (the best), I’m giving it a 10 as a film and a 7.75 on a personal level.

Robin: Yeah, like I wouldn’t be mad if my queer ladies film club wanted to watch it again.

Alley: I fully expect, also, that Desiree Akhavan’s next film will be even better.

KaeLyn: I would watch again.

Alley: I loved The Slope.

KaeLyn: I can’t wait to see what she comes out with next. Appropriate Behavior is definitely putting her on the map.

Hannah: Also you guys know that Desiree Akhavan was actually on Girls for real, right?
I meant to say that earlier, when you were complaining about Girls.

KaeLyn: Yeah recently right? But I haven’t seen those episodes. I mean, I’ve only seen a few.

Hannah: Yeah it’s brief. She plays pretty much the same person.

KaeLyn: She plays a writer?

Hannah: Yes, she does.

KaeLyn: I have no idea because I don’t watch Girls. Except that one time when I gave it the ol’ three-episode try and it failed.

Hannah: Yeah, I only saw the first couple episodes this season. I could go on about why Marnie is the entire reason the show is terrible but I’d be talking to a wall.

KaeLyn: Haha. Any final thoughts on Appropriate Behavior?

Alley: I would probably give it a similar rating, KaeLyn, but to keep it simple I’ll just give it an 8.

KaeLyn: Hahaha

Robin: I would give it a 7. No, amend: 8.

Robin: Just remember the “I’m your exotic experience” line which is the REALEST MOST AWKWARD THING. I cannot find the exact wording but it really stuck with me.

KaeLyn: That was the best! Ok, I’m bumping it up to an 8.

Alley: Hahaha, I like how we are all groupthink convincing each other to up the rating by 1.

KaeLyn: When I mini-reviewed it on Autostraddle in my film fest recap in October, I gave it this: “Rating: Ten sammies from that new Vegan Pork-Dumpling Grilled Cheese food truck with the hot server.” I stand by that. No, I amend it to include the kinky coffee shop that Robin is at.

Robin: Oh, KaeLyn, here’s the link: Wicked Grounds Kink Cafe & Boutique

Alley: I was just in SF working from coffeeshops. Wish I would have gone there!

KaeLyn: It is so cute and unassuming from the outside. Well, if you don’t know what the leather flag looks like… Ooh, they have pizza bagels!!!

Robin: It’s really like your average coffeeshop until you start looking at the art on the walls.

KaeLyn: Oh, so no one is doing kinky things around you IRL? I really feel like would be the best.

Robin: Eh, not yet. And the lil knickknacks for sale. It’s only 3 PM here.

KaeLyn: OK, fine. That’s acceptable. I’m assuming you can only play, right? You can’t actually fuck? That seems unsanitary.

Robin: I mean the bathroom is spacious and there’s only one key…

Alley: Hahahaha

KaeLyn: Ooooh

Robin: Attached to a heavy chain.

KaeLyn: Well that’s fine. I just don’t want lube too close to my coffee.

Alley: Would that be like a Bulletproof Coffee spinoff?

Robin: Yesssss

KaeLyn: Alley!!!

Robin: Oh my god. What would the spinoff be called?

KaeLyn: Frictionproof Coffee? Bullet Coffee and it is served with a bullet vibrator?
I dunno. We need Lizz or Ali on this…

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What do ya’ll think? Will you be seeing it? Have you already seen it? How would you rate it and what are your smart and insightful thoughts?

Get to your nearest kink cafe and tell us everything.

Daily Fix: Alabama Wants You to Think of the Children and More News Stories

Laws of the Land

+ In confusing news, the UK’s NHS will soon consider people with vaginal piercings to have experienced female genital mutilation, FGM. This would expand existing legislation, which says that “any action to cut or otherwise damage a female’s genitals is illegal unless there is a genuine medical or psychological reason to justify the procedure,” to include cosmetic surgery including piercings and labia reductions. Well!

+ New York state has been trying valiantly for years now to pass the Women’s Equality Act, a bill which would strengthen the rights of women in the state across the board. The hurdle has been a provision that protects late-term abortion rights, and this week New York legislators decided fuck it, let’s just can that one. Anti-trafficking provisions also had to be separated out into their own bill, although that separate bill was quickly passed. Mostly it’s just good to know that in a blue state in 2015, women still need to pinky-promise that they won’t have the Wrong Kind of Abortion in order to secure other rights.

+ Remember when Oregon elected its historic out bisexual governor, Kate Brown? Well Kate Brown has now seen Oregon become the first state that automatically registers its citizens to vote, instead of putting the onus on them to do so. Amid Republican hand-wringing about “voter fraud” (which research shows is very rare and about as valid a fear as your aunt’s concern about being struck by lightning while driving in the rain) and an overall climate of vote suppression and disenfranchisement, it’s refreshing. As professor of political science at U of Wisconsin-Madison was quoted as saying, “It just changes expectations for who’s responsible for making elections work.”

+ Dispatches from the War Against Religious Everything: Indiana is close to passing a “license to discriminate” bill which would specifically okay private business owners to turn away anyone who offends their religious beliefs. Indiana does not currently have a ban on discrimination in its books, which makes it even more notable that lawmakers there wish to intentionally protect it. Laws like this have been introduced in several states, and one was vetoed fairly recently in Arizona; the only successful one to date exists in Mississippi.

Movin’ On Up

+ The Birth Justice Project has helped incarcerated pregnant women in San Francisco County Jail give birth with the support of doula services, and in 2014 was expanded to Santa Rita jail.

“Until 2012, pregnant inmates were shackled and could have no one with them during labor except the medical staff and deputies,” says Monica McLemore, assistant adjunct professor in UCSF’s Department of Family Health Care Nursing. “Our volunteer doulas offer services that many pregnant women take for granted.”

+ St. Patrick’s Day parades across the nation included historic amounts of gay representation this year, with LGBT organizations making their place proudly beside the green rivers and day-drunk twenty-two-year-olds. It’s worth noting, however, that this is far from a total victory:

John Francis Mulligan, a member of Irish Queers, a leading advocacy group for gay and lesbian Irish-Americans, said his organization was not satisfied with the inclusion of just one group in the parade.

“This is only significant in that it’s a back-room deal between NBC and the parade’s organizers,” Mr. Mulligan said.

The selection process, he added, has been cloaked in secrecy: “There’s no transparency about how this decision was made, no one ever responded to our application to march, and Out@NBCUniversal isn’t even an Irish group.”

So ultimately, the people holding the moral high ground here probably still aren’t any St. Patrick’s parade organizers, but still that one bar in Boston that banned the singing of Danny Boy.

+ In a somewhat unorthodox move regarding the upcoming Supreme Court arguments regarding same-sex marriage this summer, lawyers for several same-sex couples wrote the court asking that each state’s representative be given 15 minutes at the lectern when the case goes to court. It would be more traditional for one or two attorneys to represent the side, but hey, why not. As someone who followed the Prop 8 trials virtually second by second and is well aware of how much the tenor of a trial can be changed by an individual lawyer, I am THRILLED about this development let’s get it on the books.

+ Now we go to our Presbyterian Church correspondent, Audrey White, for this developing story:

The Presbyterian Church USA now officially defines marriage as “between two people” rather than necessarily between a man and a woman. Since June, when the general governing body approved an amendment to change the constitution to affirm marriage equality, local bodies called Presbyteries have gathered to vote on an amendment. On Tuesday, Presbytery of the Palisades became the 86th presbytery to vote in favor, pushing the approval percentage over 50 percent.

“I’m holding in my heart so many people who have worked for this for decades, prayed for this for decades. Some of them didn’t see it happen,” said Alex McNeill, the Executive Director of More Light Presbyterians. “I’m also holding in my heart all the folks in churches right now who haven’t gotten the message that God loves them just as they are.”

Presbyteries will continue to vote until June (Presbyterians take Democracy very seriously). So far, 41 Presbyteries have voted against the change.The PCUSA is one of the largest mainline Protestant denominations, with more than 1.8 million members in the U.S. Now, PCUSA clergy can perform marriages, and LGBT Presbyterians can formalize their partnerships in the churches they call home.

+ Oh hey GetEQUAL has created this very comprehensive bill of LGBTQ rights that you can sign. You can just go sign it for free on the internet! The same one that you’re on right now! Thomas Jefferson would be astounded, and also would probably have no idea what scissoring is, I’m just guessing here.

Ugh Are You Serious Right Now

+ In Staten Island, a lesbian couple is fighting sexual harassment in the workplace, filing suit against a coworker who made comments like “I had a dream about you two. I was making out with Nicole and you were watching,” and the boss who didn’t take appropriate action against him. May this suit and every one like it be victorious, because we still live in a world where being gay means you’re subject to homophobia/lesbophobia and ALSO the harassment that men subject straight women to.

+ Joke’s on the University of Alabama, because Elliott Mitchell and Clark West were going to pass on their multimillion dollar estate to the school before the school just INSISTED on being a stalwart stronghold of homophobia. The couple had wanted to create a community outreach center partly (just partly!) for LGBT students, and the university didn’t respond with enthusiasm; when they wrote a letter letting the university know that this decision meant losing between 15 and 18 MILLION dollars, the school didn’t even respond. I’m sure the students will be fascinated by this anecdote and what it says about the university’s values when they’re paying for their own printing in the campus center, working two jobs in addition to their full class load, and scrambling for financial aid.

+ Bisexual activist Marcia Diehl was killed this week as she was struck by a truck while biking home. Diehl had co-founded the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network, enjoyed recognition as a singer-songwriter, and volunteered at a local LGBT theater company.

+ As battles over same-sex marriage and rights in general continue in Alabama — see above — one particularly notable development is an amicus, or “friend of the court,” brief submitted by the state that says we can’t let same-sex couples marry because children. Specifically, the brief argues that “marriage is a natural reality and that same-sex marriage destroys the ‘rights of children to be connected to their biological parents.'” That passage from the Song of Solomon is coming back to me now: “O, how fortunate that we are joined together in this rigidly logistical natural reality, that I may drink of our marital bliss as though from a goblet of wine.” Seriously though anyone who thinks that’s gonna be meaningful to the Supreme Court should be required to read the Prop 8 trial transcripts until their eyeballs fall out.

+ HEY so you know how for some cis people, the absolute worst thing they can imagine is a trans person getting to use the bathroom that matches their gender? Missouri is trying a RADICAL NEW STRATEGY to accomplish that aim, which is to try to abolish gender-neutral bathrooms. There are actually two separate bills — HB 1338 would require that any bathroom that isn’t intended for use by one person at a time be divided by gender, and HB 1339 would prohibit the use of state revenue to create gender-neutral bathrooms “unless required by a federal or state court order.” This is neat because it’s so upfront about its intentions: it’s like commissioning a banner that says “We’d like to make sure that people who aren’t cis have the most challenging, dangerous possible environment to pee in, and we’re willing to use a whole bunch of legislative dollars and time to make sure of it.” So that’s where we’re at! That’s the world we live in.

+ Just yesterday UVA student Martese Johnson was brutally beaten by Alcohol and Beverage Control agents as he attempted to enter a local establishment with what was allegedly a fake ID. He sustained a head injury requiring 10 stitches in addition to numerous other physical injuries, injuries which stand in sharp contrast to the notable absence of injury I’ve ever seen a white person sustain when trying to use a fake ID (which I feel comfortable saying I’ve seen fairly often). The charges were that Johnson was “arrested on charges of resisting arrest, obstructing justice without threats of force, and profane swearing or intoxication in public.” UVA President Teresa Sullivan issued a vague statement about the incident, saying “We have not yet clarified all of the details surrounding this event, but we are seeking to do so as quickly as possible.” UVA students have rallied and marched in their community. A separate statement from Marcus L. Martin, the Vice President of Equity & Diversity, and Maurice Apprey, the Dean of African-American Affairs, read “This was wrong and should not have occurred. In the many years of our medical, professional and leadership roles at the University, we view the nature of this assault as highly unusual and appalling based on the information we have received.”

What's happening at UVA right now, w/ students demanding #JusticeForMartese, is the echo of Ferguson reverberating. pic.twitter.com/K0zb9kKl9f

— David Harris-Gershon (@David_EHG) March 19, 2015

“Boy Meets Girl” Is Heartwarming, Groundbreaking, Has Cute Queer Kissing

feature image via Boy Meets Girl

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Though trans people are enjoying a significant rise in visibility in many spheres, finding any movie with a trans actress playing a trans woman feels like cause for celebration. When it happens to be the lead role in a romantic comedy, it become a ground-breaking moment for trans media representation. Add some beautiful queer chemistry, a little heartbreak, and a happy ending, and you’ve got Boy Meets Girl, a new indie film from writer/director Eric Schaeffer that I recently had the opportunity to screen.

The film centers around Ricky (played by newcomer Michelle Hendley), a gorgeous and whip-smart 20-something trans woman, and her straight-guy best friend Robby (played by Michael Welch of Twilight fame). Ricky is frustrated by the lack of acceptable men to date, and dreams of a life as a fashion designer in NY. She develops an attraction to her new friend Francesca (played by Alexandra Turshen), a 20-something cis girl from an influential local family who is engaged to her Marine boyfriend serving in Afghanistan. As Ricky and Francesca’s friendship blooms, her fiancé grows increasingly hostile and hateful towards Ricky. As the two young women spend more and more time together, Francesca eventually admits her own attraction to Ricky, which eventually lands them in bed together. Their budding relationship forces Francesca to deal with her fiancé’s bigoted views, and Robby to deal with his long-hidden feelings for Ricky. As emotions run high, secrets are revealed and all the characters must decide how best to move forward, and which relationships to hold on to.

Boy Meets Girl certainly isn’t perfect, but it would do the film a tremendous disservice to focus on the missteps when there are so many things to love about this movie. As I said, simply having a lead trans character who is portrayed by a trans person is really reason enough to be excited. But, perhaps even more importantly, Ricky is portrayed as both attractive and desirable without being fetishized or exploited. Ricky is sweet and smart and quirky and cute, and I dare you all not to have a crush on her by the end of the film. She’s also a whole person, with feelings and dreams and heartbreaks and desires all her own that don’t necessarily have anything to do with being trans. While she is feminine, she’s far the hyper-femme stereotypes, with a definite tomboy spirit. She’s perhaps one of the most nuanced, least stereotypical trans characters that has ever been portrayed in film. Schaeffer also completely avoids one of the most obnoxious of trans tropes: focusing on the transition/transformation aspect. We never hear her dead-name, there are no discussions about when she decided to transition, and even the flashbacks show Ricky as a girl. It’s a script that consistently validates her female identity, and portrays her the with same care and respect that’s given to cis characters. If only that weren’t such a revolutionary act.

While Schaeffer’s writing sets a great tone, it’s absolutely the acting that pushes Boy Meets Girl to the next level. Michelle Hendley absolutely shines in this film. She’s charming and instantly likable when the film opens on Ricky working her barista job, bantering first with Robby and then Francesca. Hendley perfectly portrays the strength of a long-out trans girl enduring transphobia and a backwards hometown, but also the vulnerability of someone in love for the first time. If there’s any justice in the film world, she will be the break-out star of the next few years. Alexandra Turshen also deserves mention for her outstanding performance. It would be easy for a rich debutante to come off as irritating, entitled or ignorant, but Turshen manages to make Francesca simply kind, friendly, and a little naive. Even in her momentary fuck-ups, you still can’t help but root for her to end up with Ricky. Hendley and Turshen also have fantastic chemistry with one another, and from early in the film, the sexual tension between them is palpable. When that tension is finally broken, the result is both rather steamy, and wonderfully heartwarming, with probably the best cis/trans queer lady sex scene that’s made it to film outside of porn.

The film isn’t totally without flaws, but they don’t take away significantly from its enjoyability. Perhaps the biggest issue has to do with how the film handles sex. While no actual sex is directly portrayed (it’s not porn, after all), the dialogue very heavily hints that Ricky is a top (that is, she penetrates people with her girl parts). While top trans girls do exist, they’re not exactly super common. And, given that Ricky was supposed to have started hormones as a teenager, it’s not super likely she’d be able to do that. Also, the horrific transmisogyny (along with some racism) spouted by Francesca’s Marine fiancé is difficult to stomach against the backdrop of a film with such a sweet nature. It’s a very jarring change in tone, could be triggery for some trans viewers. That, in turn, also makes his later change of heart somewhat difficult to believe, and it comes off a little hollow. Lastly, Ricky is the only trans character in the film. In the real world, trans folks very rarely exist in complete isolation, but that’s functionally the only way we’re portrayed in film and TV. Ricky being from a small town makes this somewhat forgivable, though. Again, these are relatively small flaws, and even all together, they do not detract from the movie. But, if Schaeffer had engaged a few trans people when he wrote the script, they might have been avoided all together.

In a year where cis people are still frequently cast in trans roles, Boy Meets Girl is an amazing of example of the transformational power of a trans woman as a lead actress. While the film certainly deals has some queer and trans themes, the story and characters should be approachable for a mainstream straight, cisgender audience, potentially providing a much needed portrayal of trans women as worthy of attraction, affection, and love. It’s a romantic comedy that’s actually both genuinely romantic, and genuinely funny. Michelle Hendley’s outstanding performance should catapult her into the spotlight, and hopefully we’ll be seeing a lot more of her in the future.

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Boy Meets Girl continues to screen in limited release, and will be release to DVD and streaming services on April 28th. In the meantime, you can watch the full-length trailer.