It feels strange to say this, but it was only five years ago that America had a historic number of openly bisexual members of Congress. Yes, that historic number was two, and yes, they were both blond cis women who’d mostly been romantically linked to men. It was an imperfect win, but it felt like a win nonetheless: we had an out bisexual in the House and an out bisexual in the Senate, and they were going to save America. Or something.
And then, well, you know what happened, don’t you? Katie Hill resigned from the House after less than a year, her promising political career derailed by a “sex scandal” seemingly fomented by her abusive ex-husband. (I have many thoughts on this and you can read them here.) And Kyrsten Sinema — once hailed as a promising progressive, the bisexual atheist Ms. Frizzle here to upend everyone’s ideas of what a senator could or should be — did a thumbs down during a Senate vote and it all went downhill from there.
Sinema’s fall from grace has been so through and so extreme that it’s hard to remember a time when she wasn’t seen as a blister on the sole of democracy but, well, there was. But in short order she went from bicon to bi stereotype — an uncommitted, unreliable fencesitter seemingly in it for little more than personal glorification and money.
The parallels between Sinema’s political career and the nastiest bi stereotypes you can imagine are so self-evident that, well — I’ll let this Reductress joke make my point.
“Just a phase,” of course, because this week, Kyrsten Sinema announced that she will not be running for reelection. On the one hand, it’s good because she sucks and I hate her. But on the other hand, there is something bittersweet about returning to the status quo of zero open bisexuals in Congress. We almost had it, and then we blew it.
Granted, the problem with that line of thinking is that a system in which it is historic for two blond cis women with male partners to be in office at the same time simply because they’re both bisexual is a system that is designed to achieve this end. The bisexuals who are allowed to succeed are the bisexuals most guaranteed to disappoint us. One could easily argue that everything we hate about Kyrsten Sinema was exactly what allowed her to become the highest ranking bisexual in the nation. An honest bisexual, a committed progressive bisexual, let alone a trans bisexual or bisexual of color would never have had a chance.
[NB: I feel I should note here that Katie Hill feels like the inverse of this; not the bisexual who succeeds because of their detestable qualities, but instead a bisexual who is punished for her success. Say what you will about the abuse of power that Hill was accused of — an abuse I suspect many of her straight male colleagues are guilty of — it seems clear that what took her down was less that she had slept with a staffer and more that she had a sex life and sexual experiences that are not uncommon for bisexual women. I don’t think Katie Hill was punished for her lapse in ethics. I think she was punished for reminding her peers that in this very meaningful way, she was not “just like them.”]
But. This is politics we’re talking about, and politics are hardly linear. The end of the era of Sinema — or, if you prefer, Sinema and Hill — is not the end of the era of bisexuals in higher office. If we want to be optimistic — and in this moment I truly do — we can argue that even in their failures, Sinema and Hill have still shaped a path. There is no more “first openly bisexual member of Congress” (though there is “first openly bisexual male member of Congress,” “first openly bisexual trans member of Congress,” “first openly bisexual POC member of Congress,” and so on and so forth). We can only hope that future bisexuals in Congress will be able to take the legacy of 2019 and build on it, to get further — to do better — than Hill and Sinema were able to.
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