This is a very beautifully written article and it frustrates me deeply that exclusionists keep linking it as “evidence” about how bi studs apparently can’t exist—just because from reading the title where “stud” and “Black lesbian” are linked, they’ve assumed that the contemporary definition of “lesbian” is the end-all, be-all of what a stud is capable of embodying. Exclusionists are willfully ignorant about “bisexual” being a relatively new identity label and that most (if not all) historical documentation on “lesbians” include bisexual sapphics engaging within lesbian/sapphic community as well … because exclusionists love any excuse to erase bisexuals. Exclusionists can’t tolerate that “lesbian” was once an umbrella term for all sapphics pre-separatism, because they can’t accept that lesbians could have anything in common with cowardly, “fence-sitting”, faithless bisexuals, who could never perform true lesbianism, who could only be “mistaken” as lesbian. (What secret third thing, pray tell, does our lived sapphism count as then, if not lesbianism? We “pass” as lesbians only because there isn’t a single material action a lesbian is capable of that we aren’t. But hey, since we’re lowly bisexuals, perhaps it wasn’t actually gay when my girlfriend and I upended our lives to be together?)
Amid the rampant biphobia in liberal spaces in 2025, I respect the author of this article for clearly doing their part to mitigate disinformation by stating that “stud”, like “butch”, is gender- and sexuality-inclusive; the only real requirement is that you be queer—in some way. Naturally, literally nobody has bothered to read this clear precursor to the article. It’s salt to the wound, because lesbian history is already largely erased and while we luckily still have tons of documentation of bisexuals within lesbian communities (that everyone pointedly ignores), and precious, rare slivers of documentation of bi butchfemme (also ignored), no clear documentation of bi studs have survived as far as I am aware. (IRL contemporary bi studs are, of course, plentiful but rarely acknowledged, even in conversations centered around their supposedly hypothetical existence.) Butchfemme cultures are statistically prominent in BIPOC sapphic communities, and as a femme from a postcolonial country, I am devastated at the systemised destruction and loss of my own ethnicity’s butchfemme histories. Meanwhile, I get to watch western sapphics deliberately try to erase their existing histories through online virtue circlejerking about how this unsustainable divisiveness somehow … protects lesbians? By declaring that bisexual sapphics are pawns of the patriarchy eliciting the “male gaze”. Which surely couldn’t be repackaged (bi)misogynistic purity rhetoric, right?
Bisexuals built butchfemme culture alongside lesbians, and bisexual studs created their distinct culture alongside Black lesbian peers. Bisexual men were victims of the AIDS crisis and bisexual women were part of the lesbian coalition that valiantly stepped up to care for those with HIV, the very effort which ultimately resulted in the “L” being brought to the forefront of what was previously known as “GLBT”. Bisexuals were at Stonewall. Bisexuals created Pride. Bisexual BIPOC built Ballroom. Cry about it, and then regard bisexuals with appropriate respect instead of acting like a conservative homophobe and transphobe that’s obsessed with “what words mean”. You may be gay but you’re certainly not queer until you wholeheartedly credit that bi and trans sapphics have always been perfectly capable of authentically embodying lesbianism, and lesbian culture wouldn’t exist as it is without us.
