Category: Uncategorized
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Do we want to be weird?
The other day, while I was aimlessly scrolling Twitter — or maybe it was Bluesky? They let me on Bluesky finally — I saw a post from a colleague (it doesn’t matter who) that attempted to sum up The Queer Condition™️. There are two types of queers, the post posited: the ones who are labeled…
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Why do they hate us?
When you are a member of a marginalized group, it is understandable to wonder why, exactly, you’ve been targeted for other people’s aggression. For sexual minorities in particular it can be especially baffling: why do people hate us for our sex lives, something that literally does not effect them in any way? A popular response…
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It’s fine to disagree with me.
So I had a feeling that yesterday’s essay, which proposed that cramming all sexually marginalized folks — be they L, G, B, T, Q, A, I, K, P, or some other letter entirely — all under one umbrella is maybe less helpful for progress than some might think, might strike a nerve, and indeed it did.…
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We’re going to need a bigger bucket.
We are more than halfway through May, which means we are almost in June, which means that Pride is quickly approaching, and Pride discourse has already started. Whew! There’s gonna be a lot of garbage takes in the coming weeks, some of which I’m sure I will wind up dissecting here, but I want to…
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It is hard to see outside yourself.
About twenty years ago, I went on a few dates with another bi woman who I met on Nerve Personals. Nothing really came of it, aside from her “lending” me a corset that eventually just became mine when we drifted apart, but there is one conversation that we had that has always stuck with me.…
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False boundaries.
So here’s the thing, friends: when I am typing out this newsletter, I’m sitting alone at home with my cat, just shooting my thoughts into the void. Of course I know that this is being created for an audience — but also, do I really? It’s only when I start to see comments and likes…
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The myth of the enthusiastic ally.
In the mid-1990s, when I was a young adolescent, I was very very into queer culture. While my peers were obsessing over Ross kissing Rachel on Friends, I was devouring Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, learning lingo like “butch” and “nelly” and getting an education about the logistics of public sex. If you had asked young…
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Insider finally ran a good bi essay
Regular readers of this newsletter are likely aware that at this point, Insider essays about bisexuality are basically a running joke for me. The site runs a fair number of them, and they’re usually bad: almost always cis white women with male partners whose gaze is so firmly affixed to their own navels that it’s a wonder…
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The bi identity
Maybe a year and a half ago, back when I was working on a proposal for a book about bisexual womanhood, a book proposal that ultimately did not sell but did eventually inspire me to launch this email, there was a question that I kept getting asked, one that frustrated me to no end. My book was…
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If EmRata can’t get a girlfriend, then what hope is there for the rest of us?
If you are the kind of person who religiously tracks which celebrities are coming out as bi (and for your own sanity, I sincerely hope that you are not), then you are already likely aware that a few months ago, Emily Ratajkowski came out as bi through, uh, a TikTok about green couches. I mean, whatever, it’s…