Diving Right Into the Rough Waters of Bi Bias

By Maria Padhila

Tom Daley, an extremely hot and very skilled British Olympic diver, made a YouTube video, very sincerely and sweetly discussing his life, the way those kids and those celebrities do today. In it, he made an announcement that surprised many and touched off an old debate: that he was dating a man (he’s 19 and his sweetie is pushing 40, but that doesn’t seem to be getting anyone’s knickers in a wad) but that “of course, I still fancy girls.”

He is so young and vulnerable in the video, and still so clear about his athletic goals, and looking at his eyes, I could only think about my daughter. Young people are becoming so good about expressing themselves and being open, despite what everyone says about electronics turning them into little robots.

In the video, he talks about the support he’s gotten from his family, and the backlash he anticipates from the public: “Some people might call me a liar,” he speculates. This is true, as ironic as it sounds: by being honest about his fluidity of identity, he leaves himself open to being called a liar.

I remember the first time I encountered anti-bi bias: I was at a drag club, my goodness, about 25 years ago? And the performer was touring the tables, making jokes. She asked a young woman: “Are you a lesbian?” “Bi,” the woman replied. “Biiiiiii?” said the drag queen, her voice as arch as her eyebrow. “Bye-bye.” And she sashayed away, adding some choice words to the effect that such middle-of-the-road phonies don’t even bear snarking about.

At the time, my most loving relationship was with the gay man I lived with (and with whom a woman I’d had a fling with had also had a brief romantic/sexual relationship), and I was at the club with a woman who was my friend but with whom I’d had sex.

A year or so later, I felt a distinct chill when I joined a self-proclaimed “Lesbian and Bi Women” writers’ group. After two months of feeling like I should be wearing an “I am not a tourist” t-shirt, I left the group. At that time, I was living with a straight man and a gay man; I had a romantic/sexual relationship with the straight man, but the gay man was a friend to both of us.

Fluidity in preferences is nothing new. Neither is people who fall squarely on one edge of the rainbow or the other getting upset about such fluidity. What’s new is that these prejudices and assumptions are getting debated in places like the front page of The New York Times Sunday Styles section, where writer Michael Schulman put forth the line that says it all:

“Bisexuality, like chronic fatigue syndrome, is often assumed to be imaginary by those on the outside. The stereotypes abound: bisexuals are promiscuous, lying or in denial,” he writes. “They are gay men who can’t yet admit that they are gay, or ‘lesbians until graduation,’ sowing wild oats before they find husbands.”

I guess some of us just never leave college? More from the article:

“The reactions that you’re seeing are classic in terms of people not believing that bisexuality really exists, feeling that it’s a transitional stage or a form of being in the closet,” said Lisa Diamond, a professor at the University of Utah who studies sexual orientation.

Population-based studies, Dr. Diamond said, indicate that bisexuality is in fact more common than exclusively same-sex attraction, and that female libido is particularly open-ended.

Schulman went on to write about how bisexuals are often shunned or don’t admit it for fear of being shunned and branded as phonies; how bisexuality is more readily accepted for women than for men; and, most annoying of all, the assertion by so many that men who are bisexual are “really gay” but just can’t admit it.

That’s what had me choking over the delicious hemp-and-chia-seed waffles Isaac made Sunday morning: this ridiculous statement in the article from pundit Andrew Sullivan, something that should piss off any self-respecting man, gay, bi or straight:

“I suspect … that there will always be far fewer men who transcend traditional sexual categories — because male sexuality is much cruder, simpler and more binary than female.” [Sullivan] called Mr. Daley’s claim about liking girls “a classic bridging mechanism to ease the transition to his real sexual identity. I know because I did it, too.”

As long as we’re going all anecdotal evidence about this, Mr. Sullivan, how about this: I know gay men who occasionally have sex with women. I know straight men who have occasionally had sex with men. I know gay men who never, ever want to have sex with a woman, and straight men who never, ever want to have sex with a man (put both my guys in that category, oh well). And I know bisexuals. What men (and trans men) I’ve known all have in common is that their sexuality is neither crude, simple, nor binary. It is just as complex and varied as any woman’s, any trans woman’s, or any human’s. Maybe we could just leave it at that.

According to research by Elisabeth Sheff (author of the recent book The Polyamorists Next Door), there tends to be more bisexuality in the poly world in part because there’s no happy place for bisexuals in the LGBT communities. But bi-bias exists there, too. It’s not chronic fatigue syndrome but a similar malady: Unicorn Hunter Fatigue. People are exhausted with the Hot Bi Babe stereotype, both in terms of dealing with people trying to find one, and in terms of being expected to live up to such an image. Sheff outlines the stereotype humorously in this article:

It is so common that it is cliché for a female-male couple to approach their local or virtual polyamorous community searching for a female bisexual to add to their relationship and form a “FMF triad” with both women relating sexually to the man and each other. These free-floating bisexual women waiting to be snagged into an existing relationship are rare enough to be called “unicorns” or “hot bi babes,” and the couples that seek her are termed “unicorn hunters.”

In her most exaggerated form, the unicorn is an attractive single woman in her mid 20s, eager to move to the couple’s dilapidated farm in rural North Dakota to care for their children (but not get pregnant herself), work in the fields, clean their house, be their sex toy, remain silent when it comes to the couples’ relationships, and disappear whenever it would be inconvenient to explain her presence to the couples’ family or friends.

Many couples who approach poly communities seeking the unicorn are disappointed by the glaring absence of women lining up to be vetted for inclusion in their relationship. Not only are most poly women already in at least one relationship and thus disqualified from the mandate to be single, but they also tend to be wary of being seen as objects to fill a pre-ordained role instead of three-dimensional people with lives of their own. Unicorn hunters generally either broaden their parameters to include a wider range of partners, or give up and go away.

Bi-phobia in poly and maybe in all kinds of relationships may stem from partners not being sure where they stand — or what the other person is going to do next. It’s really about issues such as trust, ability to be in the moment, seeing other people as people and similar deep-dives, not about sexual identity alone. And that makes relationships with bisexuals no different from those with full-on straights or gays, doesn’t it?

Outside of these poly situations and in the mainstream media world, the New York Times article is a good overview of what bisexuals have had to listen to for years, and a little discouraging in that it’s still going on. But it’s also encouraging in its survey of how the younger people coming up today don’t invest so heavily in labels and identity markers.

This was, after all, the year the first openly bisexual person was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives: Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. In some ways, she embodies this sense that bisexuals can’t be counted on to advance the LGBT “cause” (despite having earned their letter in the phrase); she has introduced eight bills, none of which have anything directly to do with LGBT issues. Four of them are for veterans’ issues; that’s her top cause and an important reason she was elected. In another way, it could be seen as liberating; not everything we do has to be about an identity label. Maybe we care about equal human rights, but we still fancy seeing veterans get better health care.