So to begin with, I should start by admitting that I didn’t really care very much about Katie Hill when she was first elected. It was fall 2018, which means I was still deeply mired in my own internalized biphobia. But that was only part of it. There was also the fact that Hill — a blond white cis woman married to a white cis straight man — felt, in some ways, like more of the same. Yes, it was significant that she was only the secondopenly bi person to get elected to Congress*, but at the same time: how excited could I get about one more white cis lady with a husband, you know?
But in her downfall… oh, in her downfall, Katie Hill became incredibly interesting — dare I say, even relatable? — to me, albeit in a painful, uncomfortable way. If you’re not familiar with the story of what happened to Katie Hill, the broad strokes are basically this: in October 2019, a right wing blog accused Hill of having an affair with a male legislative staffer, which she quickly denied, dismissing the charge as little more than nasty gossip being spread by her soon-to-be-ex-husband, whom she claimed had been abusive.
Unfortunately for Hill, that accusation was only the beginning. Not long after, it was revealed that — while both Hill and her staffer denied any romantic entanglement — there was another subordinate whom Hill had been sexually involved with: a twenty-two year-old campaign staffer, who’d reportedly been in a threeway relationship with both Hill and her now estranged husband. Explicit photos of Hill and her campaign staffer were leaked to the media, an ethics investigation was launched, and on October 27 — less than a month after the first rumors began to circulate — Hill announced her resignation from Congress.
As Hill’s short-lived Congressional career came to an abrupt end, many people (including Hill herself) pointed to the episode as an example of the deeply rooted misogyny still enmeshed in our media and political system, while others used it to highlight the horrific threat that revenge porn posed to women in the public eye. Very few people talked about the specifically bisexual nature of what happened to Katie Hill, which — well I’ve always found that so odd, because to me her bisexuality is honestly the crux of it all.
There are a couple of ways to read Hill’s story as a bisexual — and specifically bi woman’s — experience. The most obvious one to me is that Hill’s bisexuality allowed the public to position her as both victim and victimizer; to gleefully consume her as a pornographic object while insisting it was what she had coming as someone who’d taken advantage of a young staffer herself.
To wit: try to imagine, for a second, how the story might have unfolded if Hill had been straight. What if it had been the male legislative staffer who had been her paramour, what if the campaign staffer had been a twenty-two year-old man who got involved with Hill and her then-husband for some hotwifing action? Without the specter of the young female staffer who’d been drawn into a den of sin, it’s harder for me to imagine as many, “Well yes, it’s bad that she was revenge porned, but she violated Congressional ethics” takes. A straight Katie Hill might have retained an air of innocence, of victimhood. It might have people easier for people to see her, not as an evil temptress exploiting a young female staffer and corrupting her morals, but as the victim of a too horny husband who’d used her to lure a young male staffer into an ill-advised hotwifing scene.
Which brings me to the crux of why it is that I am so fascinated with Katie Hill these days, why I think so much about what happened to her. I need to stress at this point that everything I am about to say is pure speculation, that none of it has been stated on the record by Hill herself, that it’s entirely me projecting my own relationship history onto Katie Hill. Nevertheless, I think it is something worth mentioning.
There is a type of abuser who will, if not directly target bisexuals, then at least attempt to use a bi partner’s sexuality as both a tool of abuse, and a tool for their own gain. I am very familiar with one version of this abuser — the man who targets women — because I lived with one for over three years in my late teens and early twenties, because the mindset of this kind of man was what the backbone of my first serious (and thus most formative) relationship. He’s the kind of man who projects his own abusive desires onto his partner, assuming that because she shares his sexual interest in women she must also share his taste for exploitation. He’s the kind of man who uses his girlfriend as bait to lure in other women for threesomes, potentially with her enthusiastic consent but often… not really. He’s the kind of man who sees the woman he dates as an extension of himself, a puppet to manipulate in the service of his own whims. And — given that Hill has publicly accused her ex-husband of abuse — I find myself wondering, at times, whether Katie Hill’s ex-husband was (and possibly still is) that kind of man.
It’s just not hard for me to imagine a late night at Hill’s campaign office, one where her husband encouraged her to invite the lone staffer working late over to their place for a nightcap. It’s not hard for me to imagine him whispering in her ear after a cocktail or two, telling her she should touch the staffer, that she should kiss the staffer, that of course this woman wants it because why else would she have come back to their home for a drink, why else would she be sitting their, on their couch right now, if not out of a desire for a threeway with both her boss and the boss’s husband? And it’s not hard for me to imagine Katie Hill going along with all of this, possibly against her better judgment, because when you are a bi woman in an abusive relationship and your partner is nudging you to have group sex, it is often harder than we’d like to admit to say no.
It’s not hard for me to imagine this scenario because I, myself, have lived it: not as a Congressional candidate, of course, and not with a work subordinate, but close enough all the same. I know what it’s like when the person who claims to love you aggressively pressures you into doing something you know is likely to lead to a bad outcome, and I know how hard it is to say no to that person when they’ve begun their campaign of persuasion (though I can remember at least one instance when I did, which I remain proud of to this day). I know that bi women, in particular, are vulnerable to this kind of manipulation, that our attraction to women (which many of us feel some degree of insecurity about) can be weaponized against us in service of an abuser’s aims. And I know that few of us feel confident enough to openly discuss what it feels like to be in this sort of situation — that our bisexuality feels like a form of complicity, a kind of proof that while we may have been victims, we were also victimizers, that our hands can never truly be clean.
I feel like I should note here that I don’t share this speculation to let Hill off the hook or claim that she (potentially) did nothing wrong. Even if I’m right, even if this actually was how it all unfolded, ethics violations are ethics violations, and the wrongs we commit under the influence of an abuser are, nevertheless, wrongs that we committed. Hill presumably understands her own role in whatever it was that happened as one that left her vulnerable to charges of exploitation — she did, after all, opt to resign her position in the end. But I think that this scenario is worth thinking about beyond some binary moral framework of who is right and who is wrong. The harm we cause under the influence of an abuser is different than the harm we cause of our own volition; it is simply a different situation to be coerced into exploiting another person than to do it willingly, it tells a different story about our inner moral compass (even if we must ultimately be held accountable all the same).
But to be honest, as much as I say that I think about Katie Hill, I don’t bring up my theory to relitigate what happened to the former Congressmember. For me, this story is simply a jumping off point to kickstart a conversation that extends far beyond the scope of what happened to Katie Hill.
There are things that bi women live with, experiences that are not shared with our lesbian and straight peers, even when our relationships look outwardly straight or gay. They are things that we don’t talk about — things that we may not even be consciously aware of. I couldn’t fully process what had happened to me until I saw it reflected in Katie Hill’s story, projecting my own experience of abuse onto another bi woman’s life story helped me understand the nuances with which bisexuality can alter how we move through the world, how we are treated, how our partners interact with us. (An experience I am sure is shared by bisexuals of other genders, even as the details of what we go through differ.) I may have been lukewarm on Hill during her ascendancy, but the minute she became a target of harassment, I could see clearly that her story was a fundamentally bisexual story — one that highlighted the crucial differences between how bi women and straight women movie through the world, even if we are both primarily partnering with men. And yet, so much of the coverage continued to cover her as though she were functionally indistinguishable from a straight woman. And reading that coverage made it even more clear to me how poorly understood the lives, the experiences, the unique oppressions endured by bi people truly are.
* The first, sigh, Kyrsten, sigh, Sinema, became the first openly bisexual senator that same election cycle (she was elected to Congress in 2012, which… I honestly had no idea about at the time, which speaks volumes about bi visibility). If you find yourself wondering how we got to the 2010s without a bisexual in office please note that “openly bisexual” is doing a lot of work here. We have no idea how many closeted bis lurk on Capitol Hill, though we do know of at least two Republican men — Stewart McKinney, who was posthumously outed after dying of AIDS, and Michael Huffington (yes the former Mr. Arianna Huffington), who came out a few years after leaving office and was never elected again. There are a handful of other bisexuals who’ve been elected to non-Congress offices (Oregon’s Kate Brown is America’s first openly bi governor, for instance), but the pickings are slim.
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