As a bisexual woman of a certain age — and one who went to high school in Buffalo, no less — I have something of a loyalty to Ani DiFranco. Yes, I know she’s problematic, yes, I know about the plantation, and I make no excuses for any of her bad decisions (or lackluster apologies). But there is still a part of me that cannot quit her all the same.
As a teenager, I spent Friday nights downtown at the queer youth group just a few blocks away from the offices of Righteous Babe Records*. In a city known mostly for chicken wings and Super Bowl losses, Ani was a genuine celebrity, one of the most famous people to call Buffalo her home**. And she was openly bisexual. It’s hard to overstate just how much that meant to young me, just how important, not just her music, but her very existence was.
And then, as you probably know, Ani fell from grace.
Long before the missteps that people will now cite as proof that she is, and clearly always has been, a bad person, Ani earned the traitor label for the crime of, well, being a bi woman who partnered with a man. Who married a man, specifically, which I guess felt like a slightly worse offense at a time when marriage equality wasn’t even a glimmer in a legislator’s eye. I don’t know, the whole thing always felt weird to me, just yet another example of a supposedly accepting, love is love! community turning its back on one of its own when they don’t love the “right” way.
And I have always wondered what it must feel like to be pilloried on such a massive scale over something so personal, to have fans reject you, accuse you of betrayal, because you chose to spend your life with someone you love — someone you always told them you were capable of loving. To be honest, it doesn’t shock me that Ani has shied away from being Publicly Queer™️ in the subsequent decades; it doesn’t shock me that in 2019 she told Jezebel that she’s “pretty fuckin’ hetero,” noting that her emotional connections with women are outstripped by her love of the dick (I’m paraphrasing). When you’re told again and again that you don’t love women enough, that you don’t love women the “right” way, that your affection for dick taints you — I mean, it’s easy to double down on that, because fighting it isn’t about to make your life easier.
We could, of course, jump into a discussion here of how bi is bi enough to count as bi, of what it means for Ani to identify as both “pretty fuckin’ hetero” while also owning that she’s queer, of who all, exactly, gets to sit under that B+ umbrella. But I want to switch gears for a second and talk about another 1990s alt rock celebrity whose journey with bisexual serves as an interesting counterpoint to Ani’s.
Did you know that Billie Joe Armstrong is bi? I myself did not until just a few months ago, when I read Niko Stratis’s delightful essay about the inherent queerness of Green Day, which points out that Billie Joe’s queerness was evident (if largely ignored) the whole time he was in the spotlight. But, like Ani, Billie Joe eventually found his way into a monogamous, hetero partnership (he’s been married 28 years!), leading his connection to queerness to feel, perhaps, more tenuous. Stratis points to a 2010 Out profile that nods to this tension. As writer Shana Naomi Krochmal puts it, “After almost 16 years of monogamous marriage to the same woman — a minor rock n roll miracle itself — he says he’s not sure if he’d still call himself bisexual. ‘But I’d never say that I’m not,’ he quickly adds. ‘I don’t really classify myself as anything.’”
It seems fitting, I think, that DiFranco and Armstrong were both prominent in the 1990s, an era when the aggressive homophobia of the 1980s was cautiously giving way to a flirtation with queer acceptance. To be out as bisexual, to sing about spending “The Whole Night” with another woman even as you have a boyfriend, to call yourself a part of the “faggot America” (as Armstrong does in 2004’s “American Idiot”), was a way to flag yourself as aligned with queerness while still remaining anchored to the safe harbor of heterosexuality. Decades later, when queerness has become more acceptable, more mainstream, something straights play with for attention rather than avoiding at all costs, these once boundary pushing provocations now feel like, well, queerbaiting I guess.
And yet it feels odd to me to act like queerness is some kind of public service corps that one can be discharged from after a few years, to act as though DiFranco and Armstrong — who’ve likely been the same amount of queer the whole time — could somehow cede a claim to bisexuality simply because they’re now middle-aged married folks in monogamous relationships with straight people rather than angry young alt rockers singing about casual sex. It seems odd to me that a person who so eloquently captured the feelings that defined my adolescence could be reduced to a “fake queer” who was just pretending, rather than being seen as someone with a complicated, ever evolving relationship to their own sexual and romantic attractions.
But that’s the ultimate thing with bisexuality, isn’t it. It always feels like someone is about to give you a test to “accurately measure” your degree of bisexuality, to figure out where to situate you on the Kinsey Scale*** and whether that degree of queerness “counts.” It feels like it’s easy to slip from radical queer icon to “formerly bisexual” depending on who is doing the assessment, who is judging what you are and which box you belong in.
And for me — I mean, I’ve spoken before about my lack of enthusiasm for this kind of labeling and assessment, about how I’m not bi as in equally attracted to every gender but bi as in leave me the fuck alone. And reflecting on DiFranco and Armstrong, on Ani D and Billie Joe, largely serves to reinforce that few. These people took a real risk back at the height of their popularity, opened up about their tender queer feelings and offered young queers a chance to see themselves reflected in their art, and we have the audacity to make them feel like they are no longer enough? We have the audacity to consign them to some bin of “formerly bi,” for doing something as mundane as falling in love? It just does not work for me. It’s not my style. If that’s how we’re going to handle bi representation, bi public figures, then count me out.
* This is less coincidental than it sounds; downtown Buffalo is tiny.
** Other Buffalo celebrities I knew of in the 1990s included: Jesse L. Martin, Doug Flutie, The Goo Goo Dolls, and, uh, Buffalo Bob (the Howdy Doody guy), who actually went to the same high school as me? Sort of. He went to the high school that had been in the same building as my high school before it became Buffalo’s preeminent smart kid magnet school. But what is a high school but a building, right?
*** Which BTW is oversimplified and not great, historically important as it once was.
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