Bisexual Fools in Love - All Acts of Love & Pleasure in Her Name
Pride Week Speech, Penn State
April 1, 1996
Copywrite, by Loraine Hutchins


I love the Penn State Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual Student Alliance!  You can't get enough of me. It seems like only yesterday that I was here before. Actually it was 4 years ago. However THIS time you've invited me to be your April Fool. I think that is particularly appropriate because bisexuals are always accused of being trifling fools, of acting "funny," of wanting to have our cake and eat her too. Trifles and fools are both delicious English sweets. The second dictionary definition of fool is - "a crushed stewed fruit mixed with cream, especially whipped cream." Fools tend to be the freaks society can't assimilate or understand. But we're also defined as witty entertainers. For example, an especially devoted and skilled acrobatic performer might be referred to as "a dancing fool."

I certainly am a "fool for love,"
I certainly "rush in where angels fear to tread,"
and I respect the Fool's ancient court-jester hutzpah of speaking the obvious, scary truths no one else dare speak, of naming the dangers and the paradoxes, of naming the Emperor's nakedness out loud.

The Fool is much more than stereotype. He/she is archetype in the great fortune-telling tradition of Tarot. As they say in tarot,:

"The fool is the part of us that connects unconsciously to the greater universal whole that contains all possibilities. It is the fool who urges the personality away from lethargy toward enlightenment and transformation without fear of the future. Whenever change happens, the fool in us is activated.

When the fool comes out, the time is right for your kid to emerge. If you try to hang onto logic or rationality you are likely to get stuck in a hard place. The fool is pure spontaneity, getting in touch with your unacknowledged impulses and unprepared responses to the world. The fool moves from within you. She is not the clear calm voice of the inner sage, but the carefree, irrational impulse - the irrepressible surge of energy that comes out in spring and propels you into things. The fool enjoys a charming playful sense of life, a willingness to experience things.

The universe seems to like those who are open and willing to be moved by their fools; it blesses them with growth and delight. It helps them learn. Remember: no matter how routine your life seems at the moment, the forces underlying that normalcy are mysterious and unpredictable in the extreme."

The LGBT movement is about identity politics, about groups of people organizing by their identity. Sometimes when we're dealing so earnestly with the intensity of identity politics -- as a group, as groups, - naming ourselves and labelling and defending our sexualities -- it is good to laugh a little, to shake out some tension, take ourselves lightly and clear the air.

So, tonight we're going to reclaim the holy power of the Fool, -- from the cruel, practical jokster s/he's been distorted into, and to the fairy-like, elf-life, clown-like magical being s/he really is. Another thing about the Fool that reminds me of bisexuals is that in the Tarot s/he is always stepping off, with complete trust and confidence, into the void. The Fool balances on the edge of the cliff, and trusts the universe that her plunge into the unknown will be a happy one, that she will be taken care of, that things will work out.

Bisexuals, like court jesters, are sometimes held in awe for the connections we make, and the truths we speak, and still not given serious credit when we do. Bisexuals are the butt of jokes -- they say we have the best of both worlds but are confused and unreliable. We're both cherished and ridiculed, looked up to and down at. It's quite a bewildering place to be.

I find this with my "Wonder Woman With A Hard On" act I do for Pride Days and other events. Usually I wear this "unicorn horn" on my forehead as a strap-on dildo on top of this red, white & blue sequined Wonder Woman spandex leotard I pour myself into. As you can see, I'm a large woman, an aging woman, and people are never quite sure how to take me; whether to take it seriously as political commentary, whether I'm making fun of myself, whether it's alright to laugh at, or with a fat woman who's enjoying her body and telling stories about what makes her alive in her body in the world, or whether they should censure me. (Examples about comix, inventor of lie detector, prisons, socialize men to accept strong men, never clear whether she's straight or gay, her transits, her all women's island...)

Lani Ka'ahumanu inspired me to play Wonder Woman when I went to San Francisco in the mid-80s and became part of their Bisexual Contingent in the Lesbian/Gay Freedom Day Parade there. We made special BIPHOBIA SHIELDS (***) to protect ourselves when the gay crowd hissed at us. Everyone was dressed up as famous bisexuals or bisexual puns -- BiCuspids, Bi Focals, Bi Cycles, Bi-ana Ross, Lady Bi (Lady Di of the Royal Family), Mayor Bi-ane Feinstein (who was San Francisco's mayor then) and a big sign for Eleanor Roosevelt saying she had "both her lovers in the White House," which is true, she had Franklin and then there was a room down the hall for her special friend, Lorena Hickock.

Also I started doing the Wonder Woman act to play both with gender boundaries and with our ideas of beauty, so I could more readily talk about these ticklish issues in a way that surprised or entertained folk enough to slip through their biases and fears. As you can see from these pictures I brought of me in Wonder Woman drag over the past ten years, the spandex has aged too and my breasts no longer stay safely inside, they spill out of bounds. My goddess! What would happen if women, (particularly OLDER women, who should know better) went around top free and enjoying it, just like men do all summer? No, I can't do that tonight! (It would distract from what I have to say.) So I couldn't decide whether to dress as WonderWoman tonight or not. (You know what they say about us bisexuals -- they can't decide!)

This whole debate about choice in itself really bugs me; as if choice is something that can't be defended, is irresponsible (just like fools, here we go again) and that sexuality (actually we're really talking only about homosexuality because het sex isn't seen as a choice anyway) that sex is only legitimate if you can't help it, if you're compelled by nature to feel how you feel, if you have no control over your desire. (The Devil made me do it! No, I'm just fooling.) Of course there's chemistry and attraction is still a magical mystery, but perhaps desire is partly genetic and partly conditioned. Same-sex loving deserves defense, but we can advocate for it in this broader context of women's rights and sexual liberation for all, and NOT cede our right to choice.

Choice is an important American freedom. Yes it can lead to uncertainty, especially since right now our ways of relating, of relationships -- of family and marriage and community, and even nation, are all in flux, all in need of being re-defined. But that just means we need to teach loyalty with respect for diversity, to teach conflict resolution with the need for finding common ground.

If we don't defend choice we let them divide us, we let them destroy the unity of our larger strength. Let me give you two examples. One is the example of the notorious Mayor of St. Paul. The Mayors of the Twin Cities have supported the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Day celebrations there for years. But two years ago the new mayor of St. Paul balked. He said he could support a recognition of lesbian and gay rights, "because they didn't have any choice, they were born that way," but that he couldn't support a pride festival inclusive of bisexuals and transgenders too because these people were just being stubborn and "could change if they wanted to." That belief is an insult to all of us working for sexual liberation and has to be challenged. Another example of the importance, for ALL people of defending bisexual rights, is that these reparative therapists who claim they can "change someone back to straight," often get an edge into our consciousness by appealing to our parents in a falsely well-meaning way. For instance a lot of PFLAG folk have the attitude that parents should accept their kids if they're truly gay but that if their kids tell them they're bisexual, then that kid always really means he or she is gay. Or should be made straight? NOT!

I even heard a story about a PFLAG mom in Long Beach who decided after many years of working with PFLAG that she herself, my god, might be bi, and was told by the PFLAGers that she shouldn't come out as a bi PFLAG parent because that might muddy the waters too much -- after all, we all know that PARENTS are straight and KIDS are GAY, right?!!

We use the term monosexual to mean all non-bisexuals, those who are only attracted to ONE (mono) sex, whether it be the same-sex or the opposite sex. We do this to emphasis that straight people and gay people have a lot in common if they'd just see it that way. But I don't mean to disrespect or minimize monosexuality, just to question its supremacy as a paradigm. I argue that we can defend BOTH fate and choice, that BOTH fate and choice deserve protection. Some people need their sexual identity defended BECAUSE they can't choose, didn't choose it, they just are unchangeably who they are, and some people need their sexual identity defended because they CAN choose. Maybe some people's identities are based more on self-discovery of an inner essence and some more on freedom to experiment and explore different expressions. Even within bisexuality you find this. Some people need the freedom to test out whether they're really bi or not and some just discover they've been bi all along.

Bisexuals think we invented the term "monosexuality" and I have to correct that. I found "monosexuality" in an Italian gay liberation text written 20 years ago, and I hear the Germans used it before that. Mario Mieli, was part of the early gay liberation movement in Italy and Great Britain, back in a time when "gay liberation" meant liberating the "gay fool" inside yourself, when the point was to "explore your gay side," not to worry about "choosing sides." Before I read you this quote I want to explain that he plays a lot with words. He uses the word "transsexuality" in a slightly different context. He uses it in the sense of being attracted ACROSS sexual boundaries, of containing all sexualities within oneself. In this chapter called "Homosexual Desire is Universal," -- he says:

"...neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality necessarily correspond to any specific mental, somatic or hormonal characteristics; both the gay desire and the desire for the other sex are expressions of our underlying trans-sexual being, in tendency polymorphous, but constrained by oppression to adapt to a monosexuality that mutilates it. But the repressive society only considers one type of monosexuality as `normal,' the heterosexual kind, and imposes educastration with a view to maintaining an exclusively heterosexual conditioning."

I don't mean by using this quote that I think everyone's bisexual. I think we can't possibly know that and that it probably doesn't matter anyway.

I quote Mario Mieli from the 70s because I think it's important to recall a time before we were so entrenched in identity politics, us-v. them, polarizing politics, and because i want us to see ourselves at this moment in history, poised like Fools over the void of what we'll make of the rest of our lives, yet, savvy of where we've come from too.

Let's look just at where we've come from most recently, in the last 4 years since I was here last.

Four years ago our anthology Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out was new. Bi Any Other Name spoke for an emerging bisexual community and identity and helped build that movement. Our book, which I've brought a few copies of with me here tonight, (special student discount price) includes the coming out stories, songs, poems, cartoons and essays of 76 women and men, 25% people of color, aged 18-82. It includes bisexual women rabbis and ministers, an Indian park-ranger, psychologists and school teachers, cross-dressing mathematicians, college basketball stars, survivors of incest and battering, war resisters, veterans and anarchists, peep show performers, phone sex workers and porn stars, factory workers and computer programmers, toxicologists and poets, academicians and folk singers, safer sex educators and punk rockers, public defenders, ACT-UP activists, and witches, grandparents and teenagers, single people, monogamous people, and those who love more than one. Bi Any Other Name's contributors have since then brought out their own books:

Closer To Home: Bisexuality & Feminism, by Beth Reba Weise
Bisexual Politics, by Naomi Tucker, Liz Highleyman, Rebecca Kaplan
Exhibitionism for the Shy, by Carol Queen
Bisexuality: The Psychology & Politics of an Invisible Minority, by Beth Firestein, (coming this August)
and a new book on bisexual movies by Wayne Bryant, coming out next year.

And that's not even including major new works like Dual Attraction - a scientific study of bisexuality by Kinsey Institute researchers, and Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life by Harvard Shakespeare scholar Marge Garber, who previously wrote a book on transsexuality called Vested Interests. (If you don't have time to read her book read my review of it in the new spring issue of the Journal of Lesbian, Gay and Bi Identities. There has been an explosion of new bi books this year -- Plural Desires: Writing Bisexual Women's Desires, from Canada, Bisexual Horizons, from Europe, and Bisexuality and the Challenge to Lesbian Politics, from this country. We still have our wonderful bi magazine, ATM: The mag for the Uncompromising Bisexual, and many other zines. The Bisexual Resource Guide, out of Boston, has doubled its size in the last four years.

And Brett Beemyn, who helped organize the incredibly successful 1993 Conference Celebrating Bisexuality in Washington, DC and the 1994 Queer Studies Conference in Iowa is now compiling a new anthology of writings by bisexual MEN! We have already lost so many bi men to AIDS, several who wrote for Bi Any Other Name have died since it came out, it will be good to hear the stories of more bi men.

Four years ago we weren't talking about queers. Queer Nation was still pretty new and the word queer hadn't been reclaimed or re-defined or disputed over as much as it is now. We talked about "lesbians who sleep with men," and "queer het sex," (never could figure that one out) but there wasn't such a broad umbrella of debate and discourse and expression of things queer.

Of course there are small-minded people, particularly in academia, who will still debate whether "queer" includes bisexuals or not, but I know you have and will confront them when they do. "Queer" isn't a completely adequate word and we can't make it embrace everything sexually radical or transgressive but we can use defining it as a way to question many other words and definitions too.

It has seemed more and more in the past 4 yrs that there are two simultaneous, overlapping movements which co-exist in the same universe together, only one doesn't admit that the other exists. The one that thinks it's the only one is what we call in Washington, the "gayristocracy," which is most represented by gay white male Hollywood money and Capitol Hill powerbroking. And then there are the rest of us, who have already gotten over the gender war/sexuality debates, (well, we haven't gotten over them but we're at least comfortable dealing with them, and we understand that true sexual liberation IS about human rights for ALL people, not just white, gay, male ones. We know we must connect issues, -- talk about immigration, and affirmative action, and welfare, and jobs -- as issues that affect all queer people, because they do, and talk about marriage and military issues from a feminist and progressive, re-evaluating perspective, not just a status quo one.

A few years ago there was the cry that bisexuals, and transgender people were diluting or confusing the lesbian/gay movement in our attempts to link our issues together. But we bisexuals and transgenders, at least the queer-identified ones, are NOT coopting the gay movement but opening it up, helping it return to its radical roots, and connect to other like-minded struggles for liberation in a wider way.

Transgender people range anywhere from cross-dressers and drag queens and bull daggers to those passing as another gender from the one they were assigned at birth, whether they ever get a sex change operation or not.

I hear that there's been debate here about whether transgender people are part of your community or not. I don't know how there could be any question after you've hosted Leslie Feinberg, Minnie Bruce Pratt and Kate Bornstein, but since there is let me speak to that. I know it's very complex and involves many overlapping lines. (That's part of what makes it fun.) I know there are divisions too in the transgender community. I know that some just want to be accepted as the female or male sex they feel they inherently are and don't identify w/queers. That doesn't bother me. I think it's important to respect & support them, however they sincerely want to express gender. But what's far more important to me is this: bisexuality and transgender identities both bring up assumptions of gender & question them - bisexuality more in terms of sexual object choice & transgender in terms of one's own gender identity. But there are bi trans people and transgendered bis. There are also transgendered folk who identify as lesbian, gay and heterosexual, and none of the above , and bis for whom gender is very important and well as those for whom it's not.

The point of all of this? We need these connections & overlaps articulated and examined if we as a society are to be whole. And we bi, t, l & g and those supportive of us need to come together for this to be able to happen, in society.

Last summer Female to Male transpeople held their 1st national conference in San Francisco. It was reported on by Jack Fertig, a genetically male gay man (also known as Sister Boom Boom, of the Sisters of Perpetural Indulgence, there). He says he discovered that FTMs are some of the sexiest men on the planet, partly because they have learned how and chosen to perform maleness consciously, in the world. As he says, "In a way, they are real men, as no other men are because straight men take their masculinity for granted & gay men "have had to struggle w/sexual issues "but FTMs "have had to CONSTRUCT their masculinity from the ground up, to overcome everything around them just to be men. Our mythos of masculinity tells us that this is what a `real man' is - self-creative, independent, willing to stand up to convention to be himself, to live a life of honest responsibility." He goes on to explain that he thinks we don't recognize passing FTMs as easily as we see MTFs, partly because "anyone can wear trousers but the media love to play up the shock of a cock in a frock. Also being socialized & trained as women, a lot of FTMs are more deferential & quiet," whereas MTF transsexuals "are frequently just as assertive & demanding of attention as their masculine upbringings have taught them to be."

Since April 1992 we have seen both tremendous set-backs in the movements for queer rights and all human rights, -- the passing of Colorado's Amendment Two -- which DEFINITELY included bis, and precipitated the Co. bi slogan to the gay community -- if the right includes us why can't you -- and its clones in other jurisdictions, increased murders, hate crimes and outright indifference, and the Rep. ascendancy in Congress.

We've also seen tremendous success:

Four years ago BiNet USA: The National Bisexual Network was not yet incorporated as a nonprofit organization nor structured regionally and nationally with a board of elected representatives. Now we've launched a national bisexual youth initiative, a bisexual press kit/media training packet, (last summer's Newsweek cover story on bisexuality was part of that strategy) and are meeting in San Francisco this August. There's a Mid Atlantic Bi Retreat happening three weekends from now in West Virginia, and an international conference of bisexuals gathering in Berlin over Memorial Day, the 4th international bisexual conference to happen in about as many years.

Four years ago the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and PFLAG - Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays -- did not include the bisexual and transgender movements in their mission statements. Now they do. THIS year in Detroit we had a bisexual keynote speaker at NGLTF's Creating Change conference, a major transsexual leader was given a special award, and the hottest workshop there was a MIXED gender workshop led by the Safer Sex Sluts.

Also, I think what's interesting about this recent incident in Salt Lake City, Utah where the high school group was banned from meeting in the school is that it's not actually a GAY student group, it is a Gay/Straight Alliance, so the straights are being forbidden to meet with gays or support them too. That is so important to understand. Because I think it is more and more in these INTERSECTIONS that the most interesting battles and debates and transformations will happen.

It's not just same sex loving that changes things. It's women demanding our rights, many people's justice movements overlapping I don't want a limited queer rights movement that talks only in terms of marriage and military rights, of being like them rather than opening up options farther for all. I want this society to get more comfortable with building alternative families AND sex, to not shame away any of our child like wonder.

It's important that we talk about values as much as the right wing conservatives do. Our bodies matter, our good feelings, our pleasures, our rights to them matter, and we can defend them, we can righteously do that. And part of the way we do it is through art and imagination, through music and poetry. Here's a sentence, taken from Elias Farajaje-Jones' keynote address to Creating Change this past fall, that describes what I mean. Elias is a history of religion professor at Howard University Divinity School in Washington, DC, a priest in long dreadlocks, tatoos and multiple body piercings, a Dad who nurtures his new baby , and who says his baby can choose its OWN gender. Elias is a beautiful bisexual man who had a husband as well as a wife, until his husband died of AIDS. This piece of his is called -- Queers in Intersection.

Queers in intersection
where we strive to articulate
how the war against women and their bodies
from the Burning Time
until the beginning of the dismantling of abortion rights,
is connected to the masculinization of healing,
to the hardening of religious dogma,
to the driving out of the Goddess,
the expulsion of The Other -- of Muslims & Jews from Spain,
is connected to the slave trade and the invasion of the Americas,
where Africans and indigenous people were massacred,
because they were considered to be like women,
incarnations of evil, unbridled lust,
too connected to body & sex,
and where the Earth was destroyed because,
like women,
it was wild,
like dark-skinned people,
it needed to be dominated and controlled.

(My other favorite comment of Elias's is:
"I don't have a lifestyle, I have a life, thank you!")
It's getting late and I'd like to leave you with a few seeds of ideas for future discussions, and then -- one last poem.

First let me say that I DO believe that we are changing things, if we just keep on doing it, more of us, together, wanting a better world enough. My own mother couldn't even talk about bisexuality a few short years ago and now she's a leader in her church, which is also President Clinton's church, helping the church reconcile with its gay members. She invites homophobic church members and gay people to her house for tea, and has them sit down and listen to each other, share their stories and fears.

Donna Redwing, one of the leaders of the campaign to defend gay rights in Oregon, tells a great story about some of the original Traditional Values Coalition women who are no longer working on the side of Hate. Why? Because after the first referendum in Oregon several years ago some of these activists on both sides of the issue -- these conservative church-going, heterosexually married women and some of their lesbian counterparts -- got together in each others' homes and got to know each other better. Now they're in alliance and Lou Mabon can't break them apart. And guess what? It was the conservative women who initiated it, not the dykes!

It's often said that we do best by talking with those who DON'T agree with us, that public opinion polls show that it is KNOWING someone gay, personally, which changes people's minds the most.

If we come from the place of either/or politics, (of us and them, with nothing in between), it still puts us in the place of denying complexity and diversity, of the place of victim, of giving up our power. Here's an example. The assimilationist gay movement likes to argue that queers are 10% of the population. Then the right wing counters that recent (certainly bogus, but they don't think so) studies have shown that exclusively gay men make up only 1% of the population. Even though the studies didn't even ask the same things and were done fifty years apart, the point should be (1) that we cannot have accurate numbers on behavior or self-labelling identity as long as people are afraid of losing their homes, families and jobs, as long as there is gay-bashing, and (2), as Nashanga Bliss says in Bisexual Politics, it is just as valid to look at the Kinsey studies and say that 40% of the population is behaviorally bisexual and then add that to the primarily same-sex loving population and come up with 50% queer.

Lesbian leader Urvashi Vaid says that it's important to recognize that polls show only one-third of the population is solidly against us. We all collectively make up another third. Then there is that undecided middle third. It's that undecided third that's up for grabs. That's a possible 66%!!

However, people who've been discriminated against don't usually articulate their values until they've first come out publicly and asserted their pride. That's why it's so important to come out. As more of us come out and gain confidence I have faith that we WILL continue to counter the hate-filled, so-called traditional family values movement with more inclusive, loving examples of building democratic families and communities in ways that include everyone.

Someone asked me what new books and queer theory writers I found interesting and I think it's important to quickly mention a few.

Sociologist Paula Rust has just come out with this book I mentioned earlier: Bisexuality & The Challenge to Lesbian Politics. It's part of NYU Press's Lesbian Life & Literature series. Paula defines herself in the intro as someone who identifies as both lesbian and bi. It's based on her survey research with 100s of bi and lesbian women, many of whom have identical sexual experience but choose to identify one way or the other for political reasons. As she says, the issue is lesbianism -- the construction of lesbianism as a choice in lesbian/feminist discourse and the construction of the identity of the political lesbian. Bisexuality isn't the issue. Rust argues that bisexuality merely exposes controversies and contradictions in identity politics and lesbian ideology that have been w/us for 20 yrs.

Another interesting feminist researcher is Clare Hemmings, a bi activist from England. Clare loves to theorize about bisexuality, about HOW you can possibly describe a fluid and changing id. She talks, in a recent issue of ATM, about how, and whether bi. id. can be articulated and "marked out" by examining the use of public and private space. We talk about "gay male neighborhoods" or "lesbian community" but it's much harder to describe bi space. It's too facile, she says, to say that bi space is found in gay & het space both, because it isn't, really. When "bisexuals comes into contact with straight, lesbian, & gay spaces: it "highlights the problem w/seeing sexual identity as exclusively formed in and thru communities..particular places. Is she challenging the ethnicity model? It also exposes, like the FTM imagery I quoted earlier does, how we make assumptions from only partial, and not always correct, data. She says, "It is all too easy to write...as if les/gay men, hets and bis live in self contained bubbles, color-coded for simple recognition," and that bisex. (and all sex? I ask) can't be captured in snapshots or surveys but needs to be understood as very context-specific.

Of course.
But what do we do with all this?. One of my fondest memories from Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues is the scene where the main character, Jess, the FTM, is being seduced by a MTF. Both of them are used to passing as a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth and Jess has certainly never been into men she just likes acting as one. And then she find herself attracted to one, except he's a woman. I always ask audiences, so, does this describe a bi relationship, a het relationship, a gay relationship, a transgender relationship, or what? And WHY does it matter?

So I hope I've convinced you that identity politics are useful to a point but limited, that WE have family values, if we can let ourselves and be allowed, to live them, and that some of the most interesting new queer theory is coming out of bisexual writers minds, whether queer academia recognize it yet or not.

I'd like to close by reading you a poem written by Lani Ka'ahumanu for the last Queer Studies conference - In Theory, In Query, In Deed:

"For now I look you in the eye and say
I will not be the skeleton in our family closet
I will not be your homo or heterosexual asumption
I will not be your scapegoat
I will not be contained
I will not betray my truth

I am spontaneous combustion
I am fluid motion seeking her complement
I am language searching for new meaning
I am social construction looking to change

I am a sexual borderline bandit
a traitor to the cause

I am your nitty gritty
raw naked to the bone
shameless fluid desire
come home
I am your primal cream
I am your forbidden dream

I am beyond binary

I am sexual
without category
I am sexual without gendered reference points
riding the chemistry
as it unfolds

I am a free range chicken
don't fence me in
I can cockadoodle doo your do
and lay with the best of your hens
I am a middle aged hippie dippy dancer
a criss-cross hop scotching
ready or not here I come
boat rocking radical
in a swiftly shifting paradigm
heading towards the next millennium

If I pass
for other than what I am
do you feel safer?

I ask
where do you draw your lines?
whose back do you watch?
who do you include?

Do you hear what I'm saying?

If I pass for other than what I am
do you feel safer?

My light skin
My female lover
when I have one,
or for that matter,
My male lover
when I have one,
are tickets
to games
I don't want to play

I am the bone of your contention
I am the white noise whisper that will not cease
I am the muddy waters, the complication, the confusion of issues

I will not give up my freedom for safety

I will not be patronized
I will not be tokenized
I will not be tolerated, and
I will not be quiet

I am not satisfied
with the concessions bisexuals have been given
Just who is it
who thinks
they are giving what
to whom?
I have been here all along
I have as much to give,
as I am given

This is a two way street

I am a sexual politic
free to follow the geography of my desire

I am a human politic
carving out new language
in a time when there are not pat answers

I want us to go to that naked place
where terror
and the desire for justice
lives inside our soul

Search for the place
that remembers,
we are family,
we are a tribe, one among many
we are connected and dependent upon the earth,
the air we breathe,
the food we eat,
the water we drink,
and each other

We are the descendants and the ancestors

I want us to go to that naked place
where we remember the truth
for the truth is all we have
and, the truth is all we need

If we do this
we can influence the flow of evolution,
by risking being part of the change."

Thank you and goodnight!

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