I think"Bi-Curious" is abuse.
I'm a bisexual trans woman of color. This intuition is all my own.
I think "bi-curious" is abusive in the manner that it is commonly used by heterosexuals, gays and lesbians. I think the implied availability of that term is a problem.
Say you're partial to the term: It implies personal exploration, a hypothetical - it's a light-sounding term. As light and assimilating as it gets for any queer identity. You can affirm the term and then shrink away calling it all a phase, after all, you were just curious.
The term is also used the other way, conflated with bisexuality: The stepping-stone coming out story often goes" "I was scared, therefore I came out as bi before gay/lesbian".
For me, the fact that we say "bi-curious" and not "gay-curious" is significant. I don't understand why that's okay.
You know what? If you want to paint a harmless face on your sexual inclination, use your own identity.
I think I have no sympathy for people who've used the term. I don't care how scared you were, I don't care what danger you think you've mitigated. I feel so strongly about this, that I hope that someone with a bigger imagination than mine creates a new slur for it. I dream of a slur so crude, that would it function in a way that gays, lesbians and heterosexuals finally feel an inkling of shame for being inauthentic.
A world without the "stepping stone" has /never/ been unthinkable. If you're desperate to tell the world you're experimenting and trying things, try "lesbian-curious" for example. Yes, it sounds severe because of the semantic exclusion of men, but its entirely possible to be /curious/ about an exclusion without necessarily committing to it forever. It's more accurate, you're not deceiving anyone, or acting on fear. The omission of men from your life might be for you or it might not. But "lesbian-curious" retains the full capacity to be speculative and more importantly, it has nothing to do with bisexuality, and that's /good/.
The ghost of "bi-curious" is very costly for us, we live in its shadow. We could assert bisexual identities forever, yet it's implied we're still, somehow, discovering ourselves. No, we've found ourselves. Period. You and I are simply, permanently different.
How I'm situated: I am a South American trans woman of color. According to statistics, women like me have 35-year average life expectancy. I'm currently 29. Assuming life calls my bluff I have 6 years to live, maybe less, given the way 2015 is looking so far for TWOC violence. I can affirm that I've been bisexual my whole life and i'll affirm it in spite of the statistic and its promise of an early death - right until the bitter end. No last-minute polarization, no doubts about sexual identity.
In closing, I pray "bi-curious" goes away. I pray its conflation to "bisexual" goes away. I pray for harsh social consequences for inauthenticity. I pray that the next time someone drops the stepping-stone coming-out story, that it gains them a sour rejection from their audience. I pray that the assumption of our cultural availability becomes poisonous to those who invoke it, because that is abuse authored by gays and lesbians and we are its recipients.
We don't owe gays and lesbians anything. We don't have to be accessible to straight people. We have a singular, private sexual identity - we can reject "bi-curious" and the role of being a holding place for all sexual discovery. That's too big for us, too big for one person and too convenient for others. Lesbians and gays are too foreign? Let them own that for a change. It's not our responsibility. It's also NOT our responsibility to be a welcoming exploratory space for straight people.
dededos
blakekathryn
areudirty
janainaart
snowghoul
