A few months ago, while I was hanging out with my brother’s teenage kids, one of them asked me if I thought the 1980s were the best era. (This is, or at least was, apparently a conviction that was popular with their peer group.)
“Absolutely not,” I replied, because, lol. The 1980s. Are you fucking kidding me.
I went on to talk about how I don’t really believe in any “best” eras — with rare exception, it seems like things are always getting better in some ways and worse in others at the exact same time, and nostalgia frequently makes the past out to be much rosier than it actually was — and then explained that, whatever might be shitty about the current moment, being queer is dramatically, almost inexplicably, easier than it had been when I was coming out and coming of age.
Because, my god, is it ever. If you are too young to remember the 1990s, or even the 2000s, I don’t even know if I can explain to you how wildly different things used to be. I mean I can tell you that I remember when Ellen DeGeneres coming out was a major deal, when it was exciting that there was a gay sitcom lead, even if the character never really got to, you know, do gay stuff on camera. There are jokes from shows that aired in the 2000s that feel impossibly offensive to me now but which I remember feeling excited by twenty years ago, because even if they were depicting gayness in the most stereotypical fashion, they were still depicting it, you know? (I feel like the first run of Arrested Development is a good example of this; as is 30 Rock.) And that’s just the media landscape — I don’t even know how to explain what it was like to exist in a world where marriage equality felt like a fantasy, where the anti-discrimination laws many of us take for granted now* were impossible to imagine acquiring.
Peeps, sodomy laws were declared unconstitutional when I was twenty. The decision dropped a full month after I graduated college. Think about that: the entire time I was in college there were American states where gay sex was technically illegal (even if the laws were basically never enforced).
And now… now it is not like that. Are things perfect? Of course not. But the cultural shifts that have occurred re: queerness over the past thirty years are almost stunning in scope.
I mean, unless you’re bisexual.
This is what’s so weird to me, I must admit. The way queerness, broadly, is discussed these days is so radically different from how it was talked about in my youth. If you pulled an ancient issue of The Advocate out from the archives, I’m willing to bet that its age would be immediately apparent (and not just because of its yellowed and crumbling pages). The fights people were talking about, the cultural concerns — none of them would feel relevant to the modern era. And I doubt that the writing from then would sound very much like the writing from now.
In contrast, pull up an issue of the 1990s/2000s bi zine Anything That Moves, and it’s likely that you won’t face that same problem. I’m not saying that nothing about these zines feels dated, but so much of what’s discussed — the way biphobia manifests, the struggles bisexuals are grappling with — it’s basically unchanged. What was striking to me when I first read the bi essay anthology Bi Any Other Name was how modern so much of it felt, despite the fact that it had been published in 1991, a full thirty years before I read it. I have a hard time imagining that being the case with other queer writing and media from that same era.
And so a part of me wonders just… why? Why are we so stuck? Why am I still seeing pieces that act as though it is groundbreaking to point out that a bi person isn’t suddenly straight or gay depending on the gender of their partner, why are we still fighting the most basic fights for recognition?
I do think it is at least partially a strategy issue — certainly all that Bi Myth Busting™️ seems mostly to have reinforced the idea that these myths are things people should be thinking about in the first place — but I also wonder if it’s because there just hasn’t been the same broad cultural buy in for bi folks as for queerness generally. If bisexuality just feels too niche, too much of an also ran, too indistinct from queerness broadly to warrant its own space. And if that’s the case (and it probably is)… I mean how can we fix that? Because it’s definitely possible.
It’s gotta be. Like I said, sodomy laws were still on the books when I was in college. I know radical change is a real possibility.
* Rookie mistake
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