My take on Biphobia
Ok, here's an article I wrote last year on Biphobia. I sent it to two Bi-friendly journals and 3 websites that publish GLBT interest articles and heard.......nothing at all, from anyone about it. Not sure if that was editorial comment or not, so read at your own risk!
My take (For what it’s worth) on Biphobia in the GLBT “Community”
By Elizabeth L
I came out to myself in my mid teens, but it took until my early 30s to be “out” and open to everyone else. Well, ok, almost everyone else. My parents were told, by a vengeful ex-boyfriend when I was 18. When confronted with the information, I refused to deny it or be ashamed, so they willed it out of existence in their minds and lives. For 25 years now, they have pretended it doesn’t exist. All of these experiences revolved around my identifying as a bisexual or as I put it, “I like girls, too”. I have been married twice, and am still married to husband #2, who is well aware of my sexual preference and is very supportive of me. Husband #1 was, shall we say, aware, period.
I was forced, by my ex-husband, who is career military, to be very closeted during our marriage. When I met my second husband, it was practically the first thing I told him, as I had had enough of the closeted bullshit at that point. My daughter I told when she was 13, and found out she had already figured it out on her own. She also is very supportive and very protective of me, especially when it comes to the Lesbinistas.
Lesbinistas, I hear you ask? Yes, and most of you bi women know exactly what I’m talking about. These are the “Pure” and “Real” lesbians who, when told that a woman is bi will immediately reply with some enlightened statement such as, “NO ONE’S bisexual! You’re just too scared to admit you’re a lesbian!” or, “Oh great – another fence-sitter” or my favorite, “Yeah, I went through that phase, too – then I got honest with myself”. These are the same women who put lovely things in their personal ads like, “No drugs, diseases or bisexuals”. How lovely it is to rank below drug addicts and STDs in someone’s esteem! I was told by a group of these women that I was not welcome to attend the lesbian support group at my local “community” center until I, “ditched the man”. There is no bi women’s support group, so I haven’t set foot inside our LGBT center since it happened, about 6 years ago, and have only attended 1 Pride event, since I got rather depressed about the utter lack of Bi representation or even acknowledgement there.
So what’s going on here? Part of it could be that I’m a little thin skinned, to be sure. After years and years of hearing woman after woman tell me about what utterly unfaithful, home-wrecking, heart-breaking bitches Bi women are, I admit to getting a little prickly when someone testily tells me they were just kidding, and geeez, don’t you people have any sense of humor? Yes, I’m mad as hell, but I’m hurt, too, by the very people I turned to for support and a sense of community. I’m also cursed to be part of the generation who can remember when Pride fests were just starting up and there was a very heady, and very real, sense of family to them. It really was about love being a Very Good Thing, no matter who it was you chose to express it with. And there was also a strong sense of it being all of us against “them”, since we all knew the straight community by and large didn’t put us into narrow little sub-groups, we were all just plain “wrong”.
Nowadays, it seems to me it isn’t being included in the “community” at all that matters, because the community, as such, hasn’t existed for a long time. These days we are first members of our various sub-communities, and pay only lip service to the idea of one community, or of a family. We all live in the little cubby holes that we’ve allowed the bossy boots in the TBLG community to put us in. (Yes, I mixed the letters up. I wonder if “the order doesn’t matter” when they’re third!)Now I’m all for being proud to be bi, or a bear, or a gender queer, or what have you, if all the pieces could still come together to make a whole. They can’t, or won’t, it seems increasingly to me, and there’s the problem. Try to get a lesbian contingent to show up at a transgendered rights rally, or ask a gay or lesbian group where your bi group can set up a table at a marriage rights rally and see what happens.
Hell, I can’t even get most lesbians I talk with to admit they’re being biphobic when I catch them at it! I play online games at a very popular site, which has several “Rainbow Rooms” for BTGL players to chat in. My profile on the site states that I am bisexual, just as lesbians and gay men have that fact stated in theirs. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a lesbian say to me, “Oh great, another bisexual. Why don’t you guys start your OWN room? This one is for gay & lesbian players”. Or they will read my profile and spend 30 minutes telling me all about this backstabbing Bi bitch who broke their heart. I always counter, as politely as I can, that being dishonest or a cheater is not behavior exclusive to bisexuals, always to deaf ears. And when I tell them that they would never tolerate someone talking about lesbians in those unfair and stereotypical terms, they can get downright mean.
I read recently that one theory for this generally accepted bigotry towards bisexuals is that just as homophobia can spring from a fear about aspects of oneself in a straight person, so can biphobia in a lesbian or gay man. Those gay men and lesbians who have in the past, or even occasionally still do have sex with the opposite gender may feel a need to prove their “purity” by harassing and belittling bisexuals. I will admit that this makes some sense to me on a personal level. About 3 years ago, I decided to start calling myself a lesbian. I was just so fed up/discouraged/pissed off at the treatment I was getting as bisexual that I decided to “pass” for a while. I was amazed at how completely and quickly I was accepted as a “real” lesbian. I was included in conversations, I was invited to meetings and gatherings, and I swear I even got asked out more. Nothing else about me had changed. I still had the husband, I still was attracted to both sexes, but somehow the magic “L” word had given me something the “B” word never had: respect.
Still, I wasn’t happy, because I wasn’t being me. So I told the lesbian group I had started hanging out with that I was still married. This was greeted by immediate sympathy, and I was told that a lot of them had taken a while to “ditch the man” but not to worry, it would come to pass, and anyhow, I was being true to myself. Well, no, I wasn’t. So I took a deep breath and told them that I had no intention of divorcing “the man” because he was kind, and compassionate, and a good friend. Oh yeah, and I still occasionally snogged him, too. Do “real” lesbians occasionally snog men? Of course they do. Do “pure” lesbians ever stay married to a man, happily and successfully? You betcha. Still, my announcement had roughly the same effect as setting off a bug bomb in a phone booth: a lot of coughing and sputtering, and a mad scramble to get the hell out of there. The group told me I was no longer welcome, the invitations dried up, and I was once again living in the bisexual fringes.
Ok, you say, we get the point. Now what the hell do we do about it?
Well, I’m reminded of a sketch that Bob Newhart did on Mad TV a few years back. He played a therapist, and a woman came to him on a friend’s recommendation, because they had said that Newhart was good and cheap. He told her it would take 5 minutes to cure her and cost $5.00. She hands him the money, rather doubtfully, and begins to tell him her problem. It seems that she has a debilitating fear of being buried alive in a box. No one has ever tried to bury her alive in a box, but she’s still terrified. Newhart tells her he’s going to give her two words to carry with her and remember: STOP IT! She can’t understand what he means by this, and he replies, “…I’m not speaking Yiddish: STOP IT!” She tries to give him all sorts of justifications for her phobia, and he responds to each one, “We won’t go there.” And it’s really that simple, people.
Stop reacting to people with hostility because the person that hurt you who happened to be bi. Stop feeling threatened by somebody else’s relationship/love/lifestyle. Stop trying to justify hateful comments by hiding behind, “Just kidding”. Stop being a member of the BGTL police. STOP IT!
I know you want to quote me all sorts of studies/polls/articles that seemingly justify your position. I know it may be scary to think about including everybody under the rainbow again, or caring about the “their” rally, or cause. I know it’s easier to fire off an anti bi rant then to think about how the other person is going to feel when they hear it. We won’t go there. You know it’s the right thing to do.[object Object][object Object]
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Re: My take on Biphobia
Originally Posted by mannysg
What can you do? Uncertainty, in terms of finding a reliable social role can be kind of angst-producing. Going to the extreme of pretending to be other than you are in order to find social acceptance, just isn't very healthy. Ostracization of course has its downside, heh, heh, heh -- but in pretending to be other than you are you lose track of yourself -- and that's the one who knows how to love.
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