“Bisexuals are greedy,” a friend once told me back in high school, “They should just make up their minds.” Her statement didn’t make any sense to me at the time, I was just on the verge of identifying as bisexual, but nobody knew that just then, and now most people still don’t, but there doesn’t seem to be any point in coming out when no body I care about would really care… or is there? Apart from female bisexuality being the focus of gratuitous heterosexual fetish, bisexuality is largely invisible and invisible things are easy to ignore and difficult to talk about, which is probably why there are thousands of bisexual women seeking out internet forums, confessing to the ether of cyberspace their similar stories.
Many of these women are living what appear to be heterosexual lives but something is missing, they fall in love with their best friends but are unable to tell anyone. Telling friends could ruin a friendship, telling their husbands could ruin a marriage. Being public could mean being exposed to judgement. Many of these women are socially isolated, and have no connection to queer community, so the internet is the only safe space to express their hidden sexual identities, desires and the overwhelming longing that many of them share.
Often bisexuality isn’t taken seriously. Mainstream society doesn’t know quite where to place it, other than in heterosexual fantasy or some quirky marginal category. Bisexuals often experience discrimination from within the queer community, sometimes resulting from the ease at which they can ‘fit in’ to heterosexual society. Male bisexuality, not often being the subject of heterosexual fantasy and is more subjected to homophobia. Bisexual men are often regarded as a myth, and are seen to be in some transitional period between thinking they’re straight and realising they’re gay. The New York Times recently ran an article about
the scientific quest to prove bisexuality, which demonstrates how marginalised bisexuality is, even compared to homosexuality.
For a lot of bisexual people, both men and women, it’s easier to ‘play straight’ and take on a heterosexual identity, at least publicly. Many still identify with dominant
romance narratives about how life and partnership should go: find someone of the opposite sex, get married, have kids, and so on, as one friend of mine expressed: “I’m bi, but I still see myself setting down with a man in the long term because that makes sense for having kids and stuff.” Another friend, a bisexual feminist activist, expressed internal conflict over her identity when she found herself in a long-term committed heterosexual relationship: “I’ve always identified as bisexual, but now it just seems like I’m straight because I’m in this relationship.” She felt alienated from the queer community she had been part of.
Some people resent all identity labels, other people feel more closely connected to other communities and their sexual identity is submerged beneath labels like ‘mother’, ‘artist’, ‘lawyer’ or ethnicity and class related identity. Some people identify as ‘pansexual’ to include all the variances of gender rather than just two. ‘Bisexual’ is just one word to describe sexuality, which can be an intricate, fluid and complex thing. Since Kinsey, scales have been a common tool. People can be positioned or position themselves as a number or location on the scale, somewhere between heterosexual and homosexual. It’s quite simplistic, but it may be impossible to accurately map sexuality that differs from person to person and culture to culture.
‘Coming out’ as bi seems like nothing to shout about. The hesitation comes from questioning whether my sexual identity is private or public. I know some gay men who feel their sexuality is private and everyone assumes they are straight and other gay people who feel like it’s an important political statement – making a marginal group more visible. In recent years a few celebrities like Anna Paquin, Lady Gaga and Angelina Jolie have come out as bi in order to make such a statement. I don’t know whether these statements make much of a difference or whether they are just absorbed into the hetero fantasy or marginalised. Many of my historical heroines were bi including Frida kahlo, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Mead and Simone de Beauvoir, they were largely inside the invisible closet.
As a bisexual woman, ‘coming out’ is almost a non-event, hence the ‘invisible closet’. I haven’t been trying to hide anything, but no one can tell. Apart from the brief period of my life where I wasn’t attracted to men at all and was in a relationship with a woman, it has been easier for me, like the forum women, to perform a fairly ‘normal’ heterosexual identity, not particularly by choice, but because it is more difficult to swim against the current and because exposing the marginalised ‘personal’ makes us vulnerable. Either way, I will continue to live-out dual sexualities in whatever way makes the most sense to me at the time.
These traps often focus on current situations in our lives, work worries, romance worries, issues of powerlessness and frustration. These are the ‘problems’ that are the easiest to fixate on, but more often than not the fixation results only in stress, in an escalation of tension, in the metaphoric banging of heads against brick walls, and not in anything remotely resembling solutions. As Einstein said:
The normal conscious beta mind can’t really do this, you need an altered state. But when you do get a glimpse here it is a beautiful and rare moment of clarity, of seeing the forest for the trees, of realising that most of the time we are just looking at a couple of pixels out of a massive screen and interpreting the world from a ridiculously narrow perspective. It’s interesting that it is the traps themselves that often provide a gateway for this kind of experience. The tension they create – the tension of contradiction – provides a platform for noticing… and a potentially transformative space.