Bialogue: Bisexual + Queer Politics

When AfterEllen, what is one of the USA’s premiere Lesbian Media Platforms –  and not one that is known to be particularly warm and cuddly towards Bisexuals/Middle Sexualities starts viewing the trend towards pretending that only Gay, Straight and Lesbian people are real and the rest of us are all some big muddled heap of “no labels” with alarm – something is for sure going on.  As AfterEllen’s article points out:

You very seldom meet a woman who says, “I’ve only ever dated or been attracted to women and I can only picture myself dating or being attracted to women in the future, but I don’t want to put a label on myself.” If you did run into such a person, you’d have no qualms being like “Sweetie, that’s called gay.”

Of course, there’s more than one word a person might use–queer, lesbian, homosexual, gay–but it would be awfully unusual to meet an exclusively same-gender-attracted woman who shunned all of them…

On the other hand … people hesitate to use the word “bisexual” to describe someone who hasn’t used it themselves first, even if they’ve demonstrated attraction to multiple genders and even though “bisexual” is the most well-known and commonly used word to describe that orientation.

Somehow, the LGBTQ community seems to have arrived at the conclusion that calling someone bisexual if they haven’t specifically given us permission to is insulting in a way that “queer” or “gay” isn’t…

Even as rights for gay and lesbian couples and their families are making enormous strides, my bisexual brethren continue to be marginalized by both the mainstream and the LGBTQ communities. We make up the largest single group within the LGBTQ umbrella–who knew? Yet we’re still vastly under-represented and treated as invisible, both in real life and in the media…

As bisexual journalist Eliel Cruz tweeted “Bisexuality is the only time people all of a sudden don’t do labels.“ The AfterEllen article concludes:

Labels are a foundation for solidarity, and solidarity is what gets shit done … if you want to date and/or sex people of more than one gender, there’s a word for that … Words can change the world, but only if you use them.