If you spend enough time in queer spaces (and sometimes not just queer ones), you become aware of an archetype I like to think of as “the bad bisexual.”
She — because the bad bisexual is always a woman — is cisgender. She is feminine, though not in the exaggerated way of the high femme who can claim her femininity is a stylized and thus queer performance. She’s just, you know, feminine in the way of a woman who grew up in a culture where women are encouraged to be feminine and had no strong desire not to be feminine. She’s attracted to multiple genders, but one of the genders she is attracted to is cis men, and specifically cis straight men, and many of those cis straight men have been her romantic partners. And the women she’s attracted to? They’re feminine like she is, the kind of sapphic pairing most likely to be written off as the sort of porny fantasy created for straight men rather than real queer women.
Friends, that bad bisexual? She is me.
I mean, look, I can give you all kinds of qualifications and defenses here: I’m attracted to and have dated non-binary people! I do the freaky sex things! My politics are very radical!
But at the end of the day I know the truth: I am a casually femme cis lady who’s got an occasionally self-destructive fascination with hetero male sexuality* and who loves girly girls. I can’t tell you that I am attracted to people, not gender because I am extremely attracted to gender. And the gender configurations I’m attracted to are the wrong ones, the ones that position me as a toy of the patriarchy, a sex object playing into the male gaze, and so on and so forth.
When I was (much) younger I tried to monetize this truth about myself; when I got slightly older, I learned to feel ashamed of it. So many of the convos I heard happening around me made clear that I was not a real person, but instead some blow up doll created in a straight male porn factory; if I was a real person, I could not be a good one. No good bisexual would want the things that I wanted, would have the desires that I have.
But I am, you know. I am real.
And I am also at an age where I am just too tired to feel defensive about the small pleasures that I have in life. I am too tired to feel guilty about the fact that a straight man might get a boner because he thinks it’s hot that I’m femme for femme — I am not “courting the straight male gaze” simply by existing, simply by pursuing sex that I enjoy. And I am also too tired to feel guilty about being “too straight” — not least because decades of dating men made it clear to me that there is something off about my desires, my way of being, that tends to alienate and exhaust most straight men.
I say this a lot, but I think it bears repeating: my desire to be accepted as a bisexual isn’t exactly about wanting to be accepted for being attracted to multiple genders (although obviously that’s a part of it). I want to be accepted for being as I am: a “bad bisexual,” perhaps, but also a person who is just living her life. A person whose sexuality may spark fetishization and revulsion and frustration and all manner of other responses from overly nosey people. But a person who, at the end of the day, simply deserves to exist.
* Albeit a very specific type of hetero male sexuality, though that, too, feels like a qualification from a lady who doth protest too much
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