No, fuck this. Fuck this twice. Yes, there are fifty million things where people who know nothing about bisexual culture, history, or, most importantly, experiences, are happy to firmly tell you he was gay.
Those are not valid sources.
You don’t get it. This is like… Okay, imagine if they did a biopic of him and he’d come out to her as bi, and she’d instead immediately said he was straight. Imagine if that was just another piece of our erasure, another thing that should be celebrating our culture and our community’s achievements that instead pretended we weren’t there.
It wouldn’t be, “well he was very private so he probably would rather have had us celebrate him than talk about his sexuality.”
It would be, “they’re not only erasing a huge part of him and his life, they’re also hurting everyone watching the movie who is seeing this huge amazing part of themself get thrown out like it’s worthless – AGAIN.”
It matters because this happens to bi people even more than it happens to gay people. We have less representation. And bi men in particular have maybe a fifth of the representation that gay men do. Bi trans people have zero representation, AFAIK, even though more than half the trans community is bi, pan, or otherwise multi-gender-attracted; and a lot of us see Freddie Mercury as a role model who looks a lot like us, whether or not he would’ve identified as some flavor of trans if he had lived.
And the representation bi+ people have is frequently piss-poor and offensive – according to GLAAD’s annual reports on representation.
Part of the reason that it’s so easy for a lot of people to brush this off as “well, whichever he was!” is that our culture and history is consistently erased even in supposedly LGBT+ media. We’re seen as basically the same community, with basically the same experiences, who ought to benefit, in the same way, from the same gay representation that everyone else does.
But we’re not, and we don’t.
snowghoul
andulkaphoto
baratheonpilled
jacobvanloon
germansingergirl
