Category: Uncategorized
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Breaking the bi-nary. (Guest Essay)
Hey folks! Super excited to be able to share this guest essay by A.L. Want to to submit your own essay to the B+ Squad? Shoot me an email! – Lux A major, familiar headache for queer folks is hearing that our identities are short-lived and designed to obscure deeper truth, and bisexuals aren’t exempt…
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Safe for who?
When I was eighteen, I began dating a man four years older than me. The relationship progressed quickly: within days, he was calling himself my boyfriend, within months, we were living together. And when it all ended after three years and three months, it finally dawned on me that this man — my first serious…
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I am not going to defend my moral worth.
There’s this thing that often happens whenever someone is doing a biphobia, a kind of championing of bi respectability, bi worth. A bi person will get up and start explaining why the biphobe is wrong, making a case for the fundamental goodness of bisexuality, of bi people. Bi people, they might say, aren’t half gay…
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Women don’t talk more.
There’s this weird phenomenon — you may be aware of it — where men routinely overestimate how much women are talking. Multiple studies have documented this effect: when a conversation is split 50/50 on gender lines, the perception is often that women are dominating the conversation. Indeed it is only when women are speaking far less than men…
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The bisexuality of it all.
Over the weekend, while I was spending too much time on Twitter (what do you want, it was like 9 degrees Fahrenheit outside!), I stumbled on to a bit of back and forth between bi educators and activists about bi women’s elevated risk of intimate partner violence (IPV). One educator — responding to, ugh, some…
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The only provable sexual orientation.
This morning I was reading a really terrible LA Magazine profile of Bari Weiss, which I’m not going to link because… it’s terrible and you don’t need to read another apologia for Bari Weiss. Anyway, it was making me absolutely miserable, but I kept soldiering on out of sheer masochism, right up until I got to the…
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What we talk about when we talk about bi healthcare.
A few years ago, if you’d asked me to talk about bi healthcare needs, I probably would have stared at you blankly. With some prodding, I might have acknowledged that bi men are at an elevated risk for HIV and should be offered access to the same education and mitigation strategies that all men who…
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But what if you are?
When I first came out as bisexual as a baby-faced teen in the long long ago era of 1997, one of the things I knew at my core was that, now that I was out I had to be proud. It was just a part and parcel of the whole deal, you know? I made my way down…
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But we are bound by more than our trauma.
If you’ve spent any amount of time in queer spaces, you are likely aware of the affection sometimes bordering on obsession that many queers have for astrology. This notion that queers love astrology is so ingrained into people’s understanding of queer identity that the dating app Lex just defaults to showing users’ star signs without even asking,…
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A diagnosis of exclusion.
Earlier this year, on a hot August day, I experienced my first (and, thankfully, only) ocular migraine. It came on suddenly, hitting me as I stepped outside of my apartment: an intense pressure in my temples, and then my vision collapsing into a small circle on the right side, with everything else a sea of…