beautiful monsters

When will I learn?

Wrap-around skirts are not appropriate clothing in a town that is fondly known as "The Windy City."

There is hope!

Newspaper headline today: PM Delivers Anti-War Message to US.

I’m not a lesbian – but one of my girlfriends once claimed to be...

Disclaimer: I don’t actually see myself as bisexual. But I’m not lesbian, and I’m definitely not straight. For the purposes of this rant I am going to use the term bisexual to describe myself because I can’t be bothered explaining why I think that gender is a myth. (Don’t worry, I’ll save that for another day).

Disclaimer 2: Many of the ideas in this rant are probably plagiarised from books I read and essays I wrote in first year, but I can’t remember where most of them came from. The actual quotes are from Bisexual Politics, edited by Naomi Tucker, 1995.

Apparently, bisexuality is trendy these days. I know it must be because I saw two beautiful women kissing in a bar. I’m sure the guys they went home with later were their brothers. I know it must be, cos some trendy girl got drunk and snogged her best friend, and I read about it in Cosmo. It’s nice to be represented in the mainstream media. In the "True Confessions" section. Between an anorexic shoplifter and a woman who tried to seduce her teacher to improve her grades and then spread vicious rumours about him.

I don’t have a problem with a couple of girls exchanging a few breathless kisses. I don’t have a problem with them going back to their boyfriends afterwards. Hell, I don’t even have a problem with their boyfriends going along for the ride, if they’re all happy with that. What gets to me is the way, in the magazines, they’re always beautiful and skinny and they’re always "experimenting," so at the end of the day it’s inevitable that they’ll go back to their boyfriends.

Yeah, sometimes I get a little bitter and twisted. You probably would too after ten years of fighting the same stereotypes, the same assumptions and misconceptions. It doesn’t seem to get easier with practice, just more and more tedious.

Over the years I have been told that...

I’m confused about my sexuality – it’s just a phase some young people go through, but I’ll snap out of it and find a nice boyfriend.

I’m in denial about my sexuality. I’m really a lesbian but I am too afraid to admit it. I’m sitting on the fence.

I’m just trying to be cool/liberated/trendy/politically correct.

I’m promiscuous. Didn’t you know? All bisexuals are. We constantly think about having sex with everyone we meet. We’re probably trying to come onto you right now.

I want to have a threesome with every guy and his girlfriend.

I can never be faithful or maintain a long-term relationship.

I have some mysterious and terrible thing called "heterosexual privilege." I can pass for a heterosexual when it suits me too. I’m a traitor, I’m contributing to the oppression of gay men and lesbians. I get the best of both worlds. I have twice as many options when it comes to lovers, so I probably have a lot of sex.

Do I need to go on?

The one that hurts most is when people tell me that I only think I’m attracted to women because I’ve been sexually abused by men in the past. I can remember one night when I was about eleven, a couple of my friends came round for a sleepover. I remember them talking about boys, about their first "pash." I was lying on the floor, facing the wardrobe, pretending to be asleep. I was imagining going to University and Kissing A Girl. I was sure that University was a magical place where girls kissed other girls, and I couldn’t wait to go there. In my daydream, she had short, spiky hair, but I knew it would feel incredibly soft under my fingers. She had a black jacket, and lots of piercings shining around the curve of her ears. I’d never seen anyone dress like her, walk like her. She was beautiful. She walked towards me, and looked at me with eyes so dark I thought I could get lost in them, and then she brushed my cheek with her fingers, leaned forward, and kissed me. That was months before any guy laid a hand on me.

And then there are the women who claim to be fighting for the right to love whomever they choose, regardless of the gender of their lovers… who then turn around and tell me I can’t fight beside them because I have been known to fall in love with men.

"I bitterly resent the double standard which dictates that dykes should embrace a Virginia Woolf, an Eleanor Roosevelt, a Muriel Rukeyser as long lost lesbian sisters given their sometimes love for women, but would cast me into the outer darkness because of my refusal to pledge eternal allegiance to the cunt."
– Lesbian who got involved with a man.

"Count me in your history books
fighting side by side
for the right
to have a same-sex lover
and not be persecuted for it...
... But don’t then
turn around and tell me
I don’t belong here.
If you claim bisexual cannot mean gay,
then purge your history books
of so many names
that swell your breast with pride –
names of people who have also loved
both sexes."
- Dajenya.

It seems to be very fashionable at the moment to describe sexuality as a continuum, with gay at one end, straight at the other, and most people falling somewhere along the line in between. At the School’s Out youth group they used to play a game - people had to say where they were on a scale where 1 is exclusively heterosexual and 10 is exclusively homosexual. My answer was usually either 12 or purple.

One of the problems I have with a continuum is that I find it hard to put myself in one place along the line, when I am a continuum myself. It’s not just a case of being a 6 compared to someone else’s 8… I am a 4 and a 10 at the same time! Maybe I am a 9 in my romantic feelings, a 5 in my sexual experiences, a 4 in my fantasies… does that mean I am an average of 6? Doesn’t this seem to over-simplify sexuality?

A scale also implies that you are comparing yourself to something fixed. If I say I am a 6 then I am saying that I am lower than a 7 and higher than a 5. But I never know what exactly it is that I am supposed to be comparing myself to! Am I supposed to plot my sexuality in relationship to the person sitting next to me? To the definitions in the dictionary? To how I felt last week? And is it supposed to be about how I see myself in relationship to these points of reference, or is it how I think other people see me, or is it how I want to be…?

To me a continuum of sexuality seems to be creating an illusion of diversity, while reinforcing the idea that there are two opposite extremes, homosexuality and heterosexuality, with bisexuality stuck in the middle. Bisexuality isn’t a shade of grey in between black and white… Bisexuality isn’t even a third different colour… it’s many different colours! There are more meanings of bisexuality than there are people who are bisexual.

Why do we need to have such extremes in our thinking? We can talk about something that is warm, but we need to know that there is a "hot" at one end, and a "cold" at the other. Not only that, but we insist that they are complete opposites. Hot is the opposite of cold, right? But how hot? And how cold? Where do you draw the line in between, with hot on one side, and cold on the other? We can have a thermometer to measure temperatures from 0 degrees to 100 degrees, and we can say that 0 is cold, and 100 is hot. But then what are we going to do if we need to measure the temperature of the sun? We have no way of describing it in terms of hot and cold, unless we extend our scale to place the sun at the "hot" end. Now, our previous definition of hot is starting to look closer to what we have called "cold."

The same thing happens when we use a scale to describe sexuality. If we have a scale from one to ten, what are we going to do if we meet someone who is a twelve? Shuffle everyone along a bit? Yet we insist that there are two fixed extremes, gay and straight, and that they are opposites. Sure, gay is different from straight… but it is not the opposite, in fact there are many ways that they are similar. And bisexual is not some compromise in between, it is something that is different from both.

My one slightly serious, bordering on long-term relationship was with a guy who was supposedly gay, and I was supposedly a lesbian. If we were in a relationship with each other, did that make us straight, or was our sexual encounter queer, because we were queer and our genders were less relevant?

I think that our relationship was very different from a straight man in a relationship with a straight women, or a lesbian in a relationship with a straight woman, or a gay man with a straight man… For a start, our queerness was the biggest thing we had in common! Because we both came out when we were young, we’d had similar life experiences. We laughed at queer jokes, we read queer books, we went to queer venues, we had queer friends... we saw the world in a similar way because of our shared queer identity.

What defined our sexuality? Was it what we did to each other, and when and where and how and with what... or was the only important factor the genitals we had while we did it? (Don’t worry, I won’t go into graphic details about what we did in bed, but take it from me, it was not straight).

Was it more queer if I was in drag and he wasn’t, or if he was in drag and I wasn’t? If we were both in drag, did that make us a straight couple?

I have always felt the need to challenge people’s assumptions by coming out to people I meet from day to day... Every new person I meet assumes I’m straight, so for years I’ve worn queer pride t-shirts around town, and talked about loving women... When you’re queer but you’re in a relationship with someone of a different gender, it’s so hard to be accepted as queer, to be taken seriously. Even within the queer community. People speak out about the way that gay and lesbian people have been overlooked, ignored, not included… but even in doing so they are overlooking, ignoring, and not including bisexual people.

As for the elusive "heterosexual privilege," homophobes don’t seem to take any notice of our privileged status, they don’t take back an insult or stop kicking when they find out that you’re bisexual, not lesbian. The laws that discriminate against gay and lesbian people don’t make allowances for bisexuals who are in a relationship with someone of the same gender. In their eyes there is no such thing as half-queer. Bisexual people have to fight against the assumption that everyone is straight. Bisexuals are just as hurt by homophobic jokes and insults. Bisexual people have to struggle to come out of the closest, or else hide their thoughts, emotions, desires and experiences. In highschool, I had very few friends. The girls were all scared I’d come on to them, or people would think they were queer by association, so they avoided me like the plague. The boys thought it was really cool. As long as I kept shaving my legs, looked at porn with them and entertained their fantasies about having sex with two women, they were just fine with my sexuality. I didn’t feel very trendy back then, so it hurts when people start accusing me of having heterosexual privilege.

"I have been bashed
for loving women
and isolated
for loving men.
You speak of privilege –
let me tell you:
the isolation was much worse
than the bashing."
– Dajena.

There are ways that the oppression of bisexual people is different from the oppression of homosexual people - we face a host of stereotypes and myths about bisexuality. But most of the time, we’re struggling with the same issues, and we’re not going to get anywhere by fighting each other.

Addiction update

I have been strong and resolute all day. I only had one glass of drinking chocolate in the morning, and I have resisted the urges ever since.

(Actually, we’ve run out of soymilk).

There has been some suggestion that I am addicted to reading children’s books and blogging, but it’s not true. I can explain and justify all of my actions. That’s research. That’s practice. I have to do that. Really.

Posted by Fionnaigh at February 12, 2003 07:43 PM