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Bisexuals often wonder whether they deserve support for who they fully are. Bisexual women and men repeatedly hear that their attractions and way of loving people are "not possible." This wears down even the strongest individual. Stereotypes and misinformation about bisexuality and bisexual behavior—that bisexuals are "really gay," that bisexuality "doesn't exist," and that bisexuals are "confused, can't make commitments or have mature relationships"—all take their toll. Many bisexual people concede to social pressure and "choose"—often depending on whom they're partnered with or the community or group of people they identify with most easily. This affords a certain sense of belonging but only at the cost of denying the full range of their sexual identity and "passing" as either gay or straight. The issues raised with this decision to pass include all the stress and tension created by not being able to fully reveal oneself, as well as the internalized sense of rejection felt by not being accepted fully as who one really is.
The open assertion of a bisexual identity affects everyone, not just the person identifying as bisexual, because it disturbs the set of assumptions that sexual orientations and attractions are binary, exclusive, either-or categories. When someone comes out as bisexual, they raise issues that someone coming out gay does not. When someone comes out as gay, people have learned to see it as merely a "reversed" orientation; that is, this person is oriented toward his or her own gender, not the opposite one. Coming out bisexual, however, calls into question the categories themselves. Asserting an openness to emotional, romantic, or physical relating (or all three) that is not bound by the gender of the partner challenges homosexual and heterosexual people's own identities, not just their recognition of the bisexual's self-definition.
There are several issues of special importance to bisexuals. The one relating to multiple partners is most obvious. Although both heterosexual and homosexual people can and do struggle for recognition of their multiple relationships in a society that favors the monogamous, bisexual people have been and will probably continue to be at the forefront of this debate. Even though it is true that many bisexuals can be and prefer to be monogamous, the very fact that serial monogamy can involve partners of more than one gender complicates not only issues of self-perception but also issues concerning relationship modes, family configurations, and child rearing, in ways that neither homosexual nor heterosexual relationships has clearly brought out.
Many lesbian and gay rights activists maintain an oversimplified political assumption—that gay rights can be won without addressing society's overall erotophobia and the issue of skewed relations between the sexes. For instance, in debates over gay teachers or other employment issues, it is often argued that discrimination against bisexuals is the same as discrimination against gays, that it is only "the gay part" of the bisexual that is being discriminated against. But it is not that simple. Bisexuals are particularly feared and distrusted because they refuse to choose or choose more than one (even if only one at a time). This is part of U.S. culture's deeply rooted erotophobia, sexism, and investment in a monosexual paradigm. Bisexuals aren't just hated because they're queer, they're hated because they're seen as "sexual," or having sexual license in an uncontrolled and uncontrollable way.
In some ways, the current gay reformist push for domestic partnership coverage, for instance, has been an attempt to placate the fears and erotophobia of the overall society—an effort to reassure the heterosexual powers-that-be that gay people "only want the same rights you have," rather than wanting to restructure society's basic building blocks of family and relationships in more open and diverse ways. The polyamory or polyfidelity movement to which many bisexuals belong embraces those of every sexual orientation who want and are creating alternatives to monogamy. This includes many varieties of negotiated relationships, ranging from triads to group marriages, primary and secondary partners, and so on. At a recent poly conference, the natural links between the lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender movements and the poly movement were discussed. Many heterosexuals who are polyamorous admire the queer movement for raising hard issues about sexuality in legal, religious, and social arenas and recognize that the same societal forces that oppose those who love their own gender oppose anyone who would try to create and defend the right to have more than one partner in a marriage or other committed, socially sanctioned relationship. Like those who are polyamorous or polyfidelitous, bisexuals typically ask hard questions about what constitutes family and why there can't be more than one kind of legitimate, committed, sanctioned relationship form that society approves.
What will it take for bisexuals to feel safer to come out? What kind of shift will be required on the part of both the lesbian/gay movement and all society for bisexuals to be free? I don't know all the answers yet, but I do know we are part of making them. The fact that so many bisexuals have come out in the past decade and chosen to be visible and vocal, even in the face of hatred and misunderstanding, fills me with great excitement and joy. Making the world safe for bisexuals, and for all people, will undoubtedly take more than our individual lifetimes. Our journey has only begun, but it is the journey, and not the destination, that really matters.
It's been difficult being so "out." I've never regretted it but I also haven't learned to take care of myself very well yet either. The more visible, accessible and vocal I've become the more I've also been targeted and attacked. It can be disorienting and overwhelming. I don't like being judged, having everyone's negative (or positive) sexual fantasies projected on me, (yes that's what people do to bisexuals), or being accused of every evil anyone can think of that really has nothing to do with me personally, just illustrates the accuser's distress. I don't like being blamed for the spread of AIDS or of breaking up relationships or corrupting children. I don't like the hate and violence that the Right Wing foments against us, or the apathy of folk who ignore that as a threat. I don't like the fact that the women's movement, the progressive left, and the lesbian/gay movement—all of whom should be our allies—don't deal with bisexuality very well and tend to invisibilize and discount us along with the Right. It makes me feel really crazy sometimes, like Cassandra, wanting people to wake up, despairing that they'll ever listen.
Bisexuality and polyamory integrate for me personally because I feel capable of and interested in loving more than one person and more than one gender. It's similar, actually, to how bisexuality and transgender issues relate for me. Even though I'm not transgender I really identify with transgender issues because (a) we're both often misunderstood and ostracized by both heterosexuals and homosexuals, (b) we both are dealing with issues of gender, just in different ways, and (c) we're both expressing, translating, bridging in those gray areas between polarities of identities. It's funny. I often wonder whether more bis are poly or if it's not just the more activist bis who are poly; i.e. the ones who can "pass" more easily as gay or straight because they're in a committed relationship with one sex or the other, or wanna be, don't need to be as "out" about the fight for our rights.
In some ways I think my parents had a harder time dealing with my polyamory than my bisexuality. Even when I went to a poly conference and ended up meeting people there from my parents' church, and asking those people if I could tell my parents I'd met them at a poly conference, still my parents tend to think of poly as something out there beyond the pale that they don't want to understand, whereas they're trying real hard now to accept my bi-ness. I belong to a bi poly support group in Wash., DC that is an offshoot of the main poly group and it's great to be around like-minded people, just to compare notes or play. I've always been both bi and poly, for over 25 years, so they're totally interwoven for me. My bi male partner and I want to create a group marriage or tribe. So we're completely open about this goal when we meet people; our own relationship is built on this basis, this dream. Also bi and poly themes are linked in my own research. I'm a doctoral candidate studying queer feminist sacred sex groups in the U.S. and one of my self-designed courses is "Gender-Mending: On Intersecting Sexualities as Cultural Change," and studying poly relationship forms and what role they're playing with feminism and queer politics and new family and relationship forms is a part of it.
My bisexual activist work is very impacted by my poly identity. I am open about it when I speak as a bisexual in public, and I'm also careful to talk about bisexual variety and a range of bi identities from monogamous to poly, how bisexuals are very varied and we support each others' choices, and right to choice. I've seen the right wing equate bi with poly though in a negative way, and that has caused me to fight back. If you look at some of the media debate and the testimony in the Defense of Marriage Act on Capitol Hill last year you'll find that bis and trans folk are getting scapegoated even more than gays and lesbians in some arenas. We need the entire poly movement's support! Read my current interview with Kerry Lobel, director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, in Anything That Moves—the national bisexual magazine. We talk about links between queer rights and poly issues, it's very important to make the connections clear and to educate about them. I'd like all stereotypes about people sexually to disappear, even the assumptions that most of us are bi, or that there are only two sexes. When we get that far then we'll be getting somewhere.
This June, 10 years after I first appeared in a DC Pride Parade as a bisexual contingent of ONE riding my BI-Cycle and wearing my Wonder Woman With A Hard-On outfit, I finally got chosen as DC's very first Bi Grand Marshal of the Parade. I made sure I rode in the front with both my man lover and my woman lover marching alongside so that people had to deal with the fact that I had more than one lover and that I'm proud, that we are family!
I think that the way to poly tolerance will be through queer rights and women's rights. I wouldn't want it any other way actually because without women's and queer rights, poly rights will just be rights for men to "share" women like they've always thought they could. I don't believe the arrogance of some of these poly groups who think they're doing a forum on "poly" and then have men come to speak on a society where men have multiple wives, period. This is NOT poly to me, this is sexism and heterosexism, plain and simple! I'm excited about the cross- fertilization and the increasing communication between our sexual liberation movements though and I am enthusiastically working for it to continue.
Personally, for the first time I'm in a relationship where I share reciprocal love with a poly man, especially one who is also bi and feminist. It's heaven! We have a woman lover whom we're courting. We're looking to build a family. Our problems come down to problems of trying to understand each other more and struggling with our own personal limitations and blockages much more than jealousy or insecurity stuff. Jealousy, to me, is just weather to plod through, and it always teaches me something I need to learn. A lot of the time I'm scared we can't make our dreams come true. Yeah, but then at least I know I'm not dreaming alone, and that someone else whom I love shares these dreams too! I feel like I've finally come home.
Loraine Hutchins co-edited Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, the book that catalyzed the bisexual movement. A writer/activist for many years, she co-founded BiNet USA: the National Bisexual Network and a local group in Washington, DC—the Alliance of Multicultural Bisexuals (AMBi). She has been out, queer, poly and a sex radical for over 25 years, has starred in masturbation queen Betty Dodson's video, "Selfloving: Portrait of a Women's Sexuality Seminar," and is currently working on a doctorate in queer feminist sacred sex.