I’m well aware that biphobia is alive and kicking throughout the queer world as much as it is the straight world.
Bisexual folk just can’t seem to catch a break. They’re viewed as sluts, not to mention as indecisive, greedy, immoral and confused. Y’know, the same stuff most queer people get called by heteros. That’s why it’s all the more disappointing when homosexuals often use that same language and that same aggressive policing of sexuality against bisexuals.
It’s truly an unforgiving position to be in if you happen to be bisexual – although it seems men of that persuasion are often marked as definitely, 100 per cent gay and women as definitely, 100 per cent doing it for attention.
A woman can be bisexual, or rather, can have, in the eyes of judgemental morons, meaningless dalliances with other women and remain “straight”.
If a man even just kisses another man, it’s not enough that he may be bisexual, it’s not enough that he may just be doing it for no reason: the ultimate and immediate conclusion so many people reach is that this man must be homosexual.
I guess it can be boiled down to what our society takes seriously in terms of sexual orientation. Women are far more likely to be “forgiven” for their sexual practices because sex without a penis is seen mostly as something that doesn’t count, or something that just isn’t very serious, or perhaps even real.
It’s this undercurrent of unsexy social mores that determines how people view bisexuals of any variety. A man’s sexuality is a serious, real thing – it counts. So much so that a man kissing another man is evidently more serious and less likely to be attributed to attention seeking or experimentation: it’s not titillating, it’s just fucking gay.
It’s with this attitude then, I suppose, that we collectively assume that a bisexual man is something that can’t really exist. He’s either really gay and in denial, or he’s really gay and in denial.
But bisexual men exist and sexual fluidity is not something that is exclusive to women by any stretch, so it’s bizarre to me that this mythical treatment of bi men still persists despite all of our knowledge and progress.
The stigma attached to bisexuality, regardless of gender or expression of gender, still appears to be holding strong. Even if it’s acknowledged as a legitimate orientation, there’s still the risk of being accused of having “straight privilege” and therefore not being “queer enough” to have properly suffered the true queer experience, whatever the hell that means.
Homophobia fucks us all, and there’s no need for us to turn on each other in the face of that. Telling somebody else that their identity is invalid based on some arbitrary level of suffering you’ve decided to ascribe to said identity isn’t going to make a lick of difference to the crap you’ve gone through in your life, so policing somebody else’s is essentially useless and a dick move.
Your default reaction to somebody else’s personal identity should not be disbelief. After all, we’re talking about people, not unicorns.
Header image by Yosuke Muroya.
