When I started this newsletter at the end of September 2022 — literally on a whim, literally because I was irritated that Bi Awareness Week had gone by with barely any coverage from the media — I made the bold choice to make it a daily newsletter. Not shockingly, one of the most common questions I got was, “What happens if you run out of material?” Because, like, how much is there to say about bisexuality, right?
Well, over six months later, I still feel like the answer is “a lot.”
I mean, yes, there are some days when it’s harder to come up with an essay topic (and some days when I fail to do so entirely). And I do feel like I covered some of the bigger, more philosophical topics early on (though who knows, there’s always a chance I will have more big thinky thoughts in the future). But at the same time — even as the general message largely remains the same (“date and sleep with whomever you want, your happiness is bigger than labels and identities”), there are endless entry points for the conversation, endless ways to frame and reframe and engage and reengage.
That said: when you look at how mainstream coverage interacts with the question of bi identity and biphobia, well. You can understand why people might think there isn’t much to talk about.
Because what you see, mostly, is just discussions of celebrities coming out and personal essays (usually from white cis women) and … not much else, really. Occasionally a compelling research paper — like some of the ones that highlight the fact that bi people have worse health and higher rates of poverty — will break through and get a headline or two, but those tend to be quickly buried by a churn of more of the same. And it’s interesting, because, well — there seems to be endless interest in the doings of straightness, or the doings of monosexual queerness, but bisexuality? Bisexuality is just automatically assumed to have a more limited palette with which to paint.
It feels, I have to say, a bit like those sneering comments that people will make along the lines of, “Why do you need bi-only spaces? So you can have orgies?” This automatic assumption that bisexuality is about one thing (sex, or possibly cis white women’s tears), and then a creation of a narrative that adheres to and never questions that. I probably don’t have to tell you that this is biphobia in action: the bi experience defined in limited and derogatory terms, and never allowed to expand beyond that.
Anyway. I have not run out of things to write about yet. Maybe that will change one day. But somehow I doubt it — and hey, I can always just endlessly write about celebrities coming out, right?
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