As you may have heard, the youngs are very bisexual: with every generation, it seems like more and more people are openly bi. Add to this the fact that with age tends to come monogamous marriage — not always, but that is a general trend — and with it the baggage of the dreaded bisexual erasure, and I suppose it makes sense that the people most often turned to for commentary on bisexual issues are, well, young.
Certainly it makes sense that bisexual college students — often newly out and overflowing with the drive and ambition of youth — would feel compelled to write about bisexuality. I mean, I get it, I was young once. And while I don’t want to be too hard on people who weren’t even born when I was in college, I think the problem with ceding all authority on bisexuality to the youngs is that… I mean they haven’t necessarily had the time to fully develop their ideas.
This is all just a roundabout way of me saying that I came across an essay about bisexuality from what I believe is the Emory University student paper, and while the general vibe is fine and the points are roughly something I’d agree with, it all just feels like a rehash of these very basic, not particularly groundbreaking arguments that I wish we could leave behind.
I think, in particular, it just depresses me to read a headline that screams “Bisexuality is not a fad,” because the very framing of bisexuality as a fad feels so retro that it’s depressing to feel like we’re still there. Didn’t we abandon the very idea of “bisexual chic” in the 2010s? (Of course we didn’t.) But when you’ve been around long enough to live through several cycles of “bisexual chic,” I think the charge that your identity is a fad just feels too hollow to even be reckoned with.
Or rather: it doesn’t even feel worth it to me to contest the idea that bisexuality is a “fad,” because if it is, it is simply one that I have chosen to stick with, like an aging raver whose been wearing JNCOs since the 1990s, unfussed by whether or not they’ve come back into or out of style. I think — I hope — that with age comes a certain confidence in oneself that makes so many of these “debates” over bisexuality feel foolish: the strongest stance regarding bisexuality’s viability, bisexuality’s “realness” isn’t data points or information about animals being queer.
It is simply continuing to exist and be.
Leave a Reply