So we know that the queer community is basically a community of society’s rejects (and that’s a big ass compliment). And sometimes it feels like you have to be the perfect outcast. The perfect immigrant. The perfect woman. The perfect queer person. The perfect black person. When there is no such thing as perfect. And because now we have the space to be all of these things, it's like we forgot that the messy, disruptive ones were the ones that created this space for us to exist to begin with, through the simple chaos of being human, of being different from the standard norm. It’s like we’ve been fighting for so long to have this space and to just be, that we forgot how to stop fighting, even with others within our groups. Such as the double standards that surround the prejudice and stigma around bisexual individuals. Like yeah, we expect that from the general population because anything that isn’t straight is – apparently – incomprehensible, but not from the queer community.
All of these things that make us different, being a woman, queer, being black, or a stay-at-home dad, basically anything but a macho white cisgender male, destabilizes the system of oppression and toxic masculinity. And because of this continued oppression, sure, it’s created a sense of camaraderie within these groups but it’s also created a need for competition — like being ‘the best woman’ or the ‘gayest gay’. Individuals that identify as bisexual face opposition not only from the general population, but also from within the queer community, especially from the gay and lesbian communities. It’s like a sort of sense of superiority in their own queerness because they are more ‘defined’ or straightforward. Everything is about how it looks, no? And bi individuals are “perceived as having ‘complicated stories’” (Holthaus) and are “erased in favor of attractive marketing campaigns” (Holthaus). The thing is, it seems as though we have forgotten that “complicated stories” are what instigated the rise of the queer community in the first place. Anything that deviates from the norm is ‘complicated’ and as much as gay and lesbians got the queer spotlight first and managed to enlarge that spotlight to the point where other queer individuals could also exist within it. The whole community began as a collection of ‘complicated stories’.
“Negative stereotypes bisexuals are at least as pervasive in gay and lesbian communities as they are among straight people” (Holthaus). What bisexual individuals face is a double standard from the gay and lesbian communities. It’s as though they are allowed to be as open and free with their sexuality within their label but they want to box bisexuals in as well. The concepts of bi erasure and bi invisibility come to mind. Camille Holthaus, in her article “Bisexual Activism” defines bi erasure as a person’s identity being ignored or explained away based on their past relationships; meaning that if they were in a relationship with someone of the opposite gender, then they are heterosexual and if they were in a relationship with someone of the same gender, then they are queer. While bi invisibility is when men are assumed to be gay and women are assumed to be lesbian or they are assumed to be straight allies.
Hypocrisy, hypocrisy. It’s just so interesting to think about the fact that people who have fought so hard to be able to explore and realize their identities as gay or lesbians, that they would actively rob others of their own identities as bisexual. It’s the constant assumption that if a man is with a woman he is instantly straight, rather than a bisexual man who is, at the moment, in a relationship with a partner of the opposite gender; and the same goes the other way, if the man is with another man, it is assumed that he is gay rather than bisexual with a current partner of the same gender. This goes back to both Adrienne Rich’s Compulsory Heterosexuality and the outdated concept of ‘the closet’. Because just how parents are now starting to not assume their baby’s gender, why shouldn’t the same be afforded to a person’s sexuality? Why is a person’s sexuality ‘straight until proven queer’?