When I was 17, and newly arrived in New York City, I went to Meow Mix — also known as the dyke bar that briefly appears in Chasing Amy, and regrettably, a bar that no longer exists — with a friend, I think for some 18+ femme night (yes, I had a fake ID). In the lead up to the event I was excited. I’m not sure what, exactly, I was expecting; probably the kind of magical “Dorothy enters Oz” type moment that people are always pitching their inaugural queer bar excursions as.
(Okay technically this wasn’t my first trip to a queer bar: when I was 14, back in Buffalo, my sister and I ran a scam a couple times where I’d pretend to be an 18-year-old who’d left her ID at home at talk the bouncers at Club Marcella into Xing my hands and letting me in so I could see the drag show. But this was my first dyke barexperience.)
It will probably not surprise you to learn that my trip to Meow Mix was, well, underwhelming. There were no magical makeouts in an alley a la But I’m A Cheerleader; I don’t even think I saw anyone I thought was cute. I was just 17, in a tiny bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, surrounded by people I didn’t really want to talk to. Maybe it would have been different if I hadn’t grown up with queer people, maybe it would have been different if I hadn’t had access to a queer youth group while I was in high school, maybe it would have been different if being queer had felt more impossible to me than it did. Or maybe I was destined to always feel the way I did: slightly disappointed, slightly out of step, unable to access the feeling of relief, of belonging, that so many others had told me about.
This is not an unusual experience for me. So often I find myself feeling the most out of step when surrounded by folks who are the most demographically like me: it is when I am with, say, other queer New York Jews, that I find myself feeling the most like an out-of-focus photograph; the most aware of all the ways that I am not quite as expected. So I don’t mean to say that this is some Universal Bisexual Experience™️ — certainly, there are plenty of bisexuals who would have walked into Meow Mix that night and felt something utterly different than I did. There are plenty of bisexuals who thrive in spaces where I feel unmoored; not everyone is a fucking weirdo the way I am.
But this feeling of dislocation nevertheless informs my bisexual politics. Because if my queerness is not connected to the feeling of being situated within a specific community, then what do my politics look like? If it is not about building a barricade to protect one discrete group — and I mean, maybe it is, but bisexuals are so far flung that it’s hard to see how that would be possible — then what is it about? And the answer I keep coming back to, again and again in this newsletter, is that it’s fundamentally about restructuring society so that it doesn’t matter if I do or don’t belong in a queer space, so that I’m not required to “fit in” somewhere in order to access the resources I need for my safety.
Some of that does, I think, go hand in hand with general leftist politics: there’s no need to worry about elevated poverty rates in bisexuals if no one lives in poverty, for instance. But some of it is its own bi-specific quest: what good is free therapy if your therapist hasn’t been trained in the nuances of bisexual mental health? I am trying, these days, to map out a specific plan. And finding people who are aligned with that mission? That, I think, is what gives me that walking into Oz feeling I never really got in my youth.
Leave a Reply