Jace: So my bisexual killjoy story this week is a little sad, it’s a little disappointing. Last semester I was co-teaching LGBT activism and resistance in the 21st century and for this particular class we had speakers come in every week to address the ways in which we and our students could practice activism and resistance. And there were so many different leaders on so many different topics and areas, and it was a true experience and privilege to be in that classroom. However, it was during one of these speakers’ visits that I experienced arguably the most uncomfortable interaction regarding LGBT topics.
This speaker in particular was a political activist. She studied communications and actively works on campaign trails for purposes of candidates with a stunning success rate. She’s a lesbian and did a lot of LGBT activism. A few years ago her entire talk focused on the importance of voting and creating lasting generational change by building coalitions across age groups. She spoke about the difficulties in leading a movement with leaders who did not want to step down and those who were rising up not wanting to listen to the experience of those who came before them. I was unsure at what to say, what to ask during the Q&A portion, but eventually I did come up with a question.
So bi+ spaces are in the state of, I like to call it, moriviví. Okay, so moriviví, to give some short amount of context, is a plant that grew around my hometown and the second that you touch its leaves it’ll just kind of shrivel up as if it’s dying, and then when you leave it alone for a while it’ll come back to life. So bi+ spaces tend to burn and rise with a fire, a passion that moves us to do these amazing things, and shortly after, because of lack of funding or volunteers or resources, they disappear. So real, that’s so real. And it breaks my heart, and someone who wants to find bi+ community finds a trail of whatever organization was before and they restart the organization. It begins again. You know, we light up, we go, and then something happens. We don’t have the funding, we don’t have the leadership, we die.
So I explained this to the speaker and I asked what should we do to maintain leadership, any tips to make sure that we can keep this bi+ movement going forward? I didn’t really get the answer I was looking for. There were a few sentences of her explaining the importance of current leaders taking current emerging activists under their wing, and then her response took a sharp turn.
She spoke about how bisexual people, especially bisexual women, directly benefit from straight-passing privilege, that I needed to understand that it was lesbians who did all the heavy lifting in queer history. Bisexual people can’t be queer activists because we reap all the benefits from, quote unquote, “straight-passing” privilege, that we can quote ‘blend in.’ She said that that was why lesbians and gay men were the ones at the forefront, especially when lesbians were the ones caring for gay men during the AIDS crisis. Bisexuals needed to “make space”, she said, for those who have been there from the very beginning.
As I’m telling this story, I want to tell you and I want to tell all of our listeners that I spoke up, that I told her the story of how bisexual people were actively nursing and helping her fellow LG folks during the AIDS crisis. I want to tell you that I called her out for actively and violently reading me and my gender without ever bothering to ask me what my pronouns were.
That wouldn’t really be the truth. The truth is that as she said all of this, I froze. I grew stiff as she related how bisexual people can’t be activists because we directly benefit from straight privilege, whatever that means. I dissociated as she read me as a woman who didn’t know enough LGBT history to understand what lesbians went through.
It was only in the discussion portion of the class a few days after, when a student recounted the event for me as a viewer, that I was actually able to remember what happened in some detail. And it was only when she asked me how I felt that I was actually given the chance to check in with myself and say the truth, you know, like I had never been actively and violently read like that.
Bailey: I think it’s really funny when activists discredit parts of their own community for not being OG when they themselves are not OG. I assume that this person was not old enough to be at Stonewall. Oh well, perhaps she’s aged very well.
But I mean if we really want to talk about the AIDS crisis, then let’s talk about the thousands of bisexual men who died from the virus. And if you write us and hit me with that smarty pants emoji and say, ‘Well actually according to the data very few bisexual—’ I’m going to respectfully tell you to shut the fuck up because the data does not exist because no one was counting the bisexuals in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. They were lumped into the gay men populations, and much like the tree that falls in the forest, just because you’re not asking someone if they’re bi doesn’t mean that they aren’t. At any rate, lesbians weren’t the only people in the AIDS wards and in the ACT UP demonstrations. There were plenty of allies in those spaces and I assure you plenty of them were bisexual. Statistically speaking, probably a lot of them were bi.
For someone, particularly a person with power, to disregard bisexuals and tell them to sit the fuck down because they can blend in is so blasé and frankly dangerous. How ironic for her to tell you to be quiet when silence equals death, huh? You know, I swear the people who wear those fucking shirts are the ones who are hoarding power, the ones that want to gatekeep power and don’t actually want to help the other younger activists behind them rise up, and meanwhile disregarding as many vulnerable groups and populations as they possibly can.
Unfortunately a lot of the work we do as bi+ advocates is just starting from square one, convincing people or trying to convince people that we exist. You as a bi person who has been out for a decade but only has recently gotten involved in LGBTQ+ spaces, I’ve been mostly surprised by the poor treatment I received from queer people themselves. And the thing I bump up against the most is this myth of passing privilege.
Jace: It’s a hard myth to bump against because in some ways it feels true. It feels like monosexuals have a point. It feels like the LGs have a right to resent us, that maybe we shouldn’t step into their spaces after all. Monogamous bisexual people are far more likely to end up with someone who doesn’t share their gender identity. This kind of imposter syndrome is tough, but you’re not alone.
I know that I didn’t fail the cause that day when I froze up. I was faced with a kind of violence that I didn’t know how to handle at the time, and it’s okay if there are moments when you don’t know how or have the strength to be a bisexual killjoy because the movement is all of us, the collective. You can take a sick day. You can take a ‘what the fuck just happened’ day because everyone is here to help you out and pick up the slack on those days
Bailey: And that’s exactly how you push back against the burnout that you were talking about and trying to find bi community. They’re constantly falling apart because there are so many of us that do too much too quickly because there are so many holes in the wall that we’re trying to plug, right? And that’s exhausting.
As bisexual people we occupy this liminal space that’s easily dismissed, but our fluid experiences encompass more than just desires. Bisexuality isn’t just about sexuality, isn’t about sexual desire, and the bisexual agenda demands more. More than just the awareness that bisexuality exists. We demand—our list of demands in our bisexual agenda—is to be recognized as a state of being, as an option, a whole fluid sexuality with a multiplicity of experiences and manifestations, and we need our allies to take action and donate to bi-specific groups, organizations, literature reviews, research studies, etc.
—Bisexual Killjoy podcast, “The Myth of Passing Privilege”
