Claiming the B in LGBT

Illuminating the Bisexual Narrative

H. Sharif Williams, Kate Harrad, Jacq Applebee, Meg-John Barker, Elizabeth Baxter-Williams, Jamie Q Collins, Grant Denkinson, Symon Hill, Juliet Kemp, Fred Langridge, Kaye McLelland, Marcus Morgan, Milena Popova

• Publisher: Thorntree Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781944934613
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios LGBT

Even as the broader LGBT community enjoys political and societal advances in North America, the bisexual community still today contends with decades of misinformation stereotyping them as innately indecisive, self-loathing, and untrustworthy. Claiming the B in LGBT strives to give bisexuals a seat at the table. This guidebook to the history and future of the bisexual movement fuses a chronology of bisexual organizing with essays, poems, and articles detailing the lived experiences of bisexual activities struggling against a dominant culture driven by norms of monosexual attraction, compulsory monogamy, and inflexible notions of gender expression and identity. Kate Harrad's anthology of a thriving identity yearning to realize itself provides a vision of bisexuality that is beyond gay and straight, rather than left to merely occupy the space between.

1
The Basics

Editor: Kate Harrad

Part One: Definitions and Numbers

“For me, it is that I am missing a little bit of wiring that allows other people to discriminate between the genders when it comes to attraction. Not that I consider it a deficit—it is a little like the unusual brain symmetry that allows someone to be ambidextrous.”

DH Kelly

Are labels really necessary?

People often say things like “labels are for jars” and “we’re all just human, so why divide people up by race/gender/sexuality?”

It’s a reasonable question. The answer is that language matters, and it matters just as much here as it does anywhere else. Apples, strawberries and grapes are all fruit, but nobody says “all fruit is fruit, so why distinguish?” Gender and sexuality labels give us potentially useful information about someone, just as it’s often useful to know whether someone is tall or short, or vegetarian, or terrified of snakes. The important thing is that the label is accurate and descriptive, and not imposed by someone else.

So that’s why we think it matters that some people are bisexual and are able to call themselves bisexual.

“I could finally describe what I felt. And what’s more, I could describe it using existing words, which made it easier for others to understand what I meant.”

Mharie

Definitions

If you asked random people in the street for a one-sentence definition of bisexuality, you’d probably get two things: a weird look, and a sentence such as “someone who’s attracted to both men and women” or “someone who has sex with both genders.” This is also what you get if you search online for a definition, and from most dictionaries.

If you ask someone in the bisexual community how they define bisexuality, there’s a good chance you’ll get something slightly different from the above. This is because the current dictionary definitions aren’t the ones used by a lot of bisexual people.

Why not?

Well, several reasons:

• They focus on sex and sexual attraction—but bisexuality isn’t just about who you’re sleeping with.
• They make people assume that to be bisexual, you have to be equally attracted to men and women. Not true!
• They’re based on the idea that bisexuality is a half-and-half sexuality: you’re half gay half straight. Lots of problems with this one. For one thing, bisexuality is a sexuality in itself, not something you can divide up. For another, much of the bisexual community doesn’t view gender as binary.

All of these issues will come up later in the book. Let’s quickly address one thing, though: sex. Or rather, the potential absence of sex.

How do you know you’re bi if you’ve only slept with one gender?

We can’t emphasize this enough: you do not need to have slept with anyone to know what your sexuality is. After all, heterosexual people are allowed to call themselves heterosexual before they’ve had any sexual partners. So, equally, lesbian, gay and bisexual people should be allowed to know who they are attracted to before they’ve done anything about it.

That doesn’t mean you have to decide on a label early on; it means that you can choose one at any age if you find one that fits. And you can change it later if it stops fitting. Sexuality labels can be applied and then removed and then applied again, just like … well, actual labels.

And if you have had sexual experiences, it’s still okay to define yourself based on attraction and not who you’ve slept with. You can be a bisexual person who’s only ever slept with women. Or you mostly sleep with men but feel romantic only about women. Or you don’t want to have sex with anyone, but you fall for all kinds of people. Or you’d like to experience sex with men, but you haven’t found the right man yet. If a label feels right, go for it.

“I’ve had relationships with men, women and people who those categories don’t fit—but it’s the attraction that makes me bi, not the actions. I was every bit as bi when I was fifteen and had only ever dated and kissed boys.”

Fred Langridge

Some useful definitions

So, do we, the bi community, have our own official definition of bisexuality?

Not exactly. For one thing, we’re lots of overlapping communities, plus loads of people who never go near a community, so it’s not as though we have monthly meetings where we sign off new bisexuality laws. But these are two of the most useful and frequently quoted definitions out there:

“I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted—romantically and/or sexually—to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”

Activist Robyn Ochs, robynochs.com

“You’re bisexual as soon as you stop being exclusively attracted to only one sex.”

The Bisexual Index, bisexualindex.org.uk

People also often find they have personal definitions of “what my bisexuality means to me.” For example:

“I’m attracted (romantically and sexually) to people whose gender is like mine and to people whose gender is different from mine.”

Fred Langridge

“I tend to define my sexuality as ‘attracted to people regardless of gender.’”

Milena Popova

“It means gender isn’t a limiting factor when considering who I might want to be in a sexual relationship with.”

Karen

“If one day I feel attraction to a woman, I don’t have to think ‘Does this mean I’m gay?’ or ‘If this carried on, would it mean I was a lesbian?’ If one day I feel attraction to a man, I don’t have to think ‘Does this mean I’m not gay after all?’ or ‘If this carries on, at what point do I lose the right to call myself lesbian?’ If one day I feel attraction to someone who identifies as neither binary gender, I don’t have to think ‘What does this mean about me?’

None of that noise exists in my life. As far as gender-linked sexuality is concerned, there isn’t some territory over here where I’m officially supposed to walk, and some territory over there where I’m not supposed to walk. It’s all one whole, and I already live there.”

Jennifer

Numbers

How many people are bisexual? This is really two questions: How many people identify as bisexual? and How many people behave in a bisexual way?

It’s become clear in recent surveys that in terms of self-­identification, bisexuals make up a significant proportion of the LGBTQIA+ community. In 2011, 3.5% of US adults (about nine million people) identified as LGBT. That broke down as 1.7% lesbian/gay and 1.8% bisexual. A more recent survey in 2013 found that 40% of LGBT Americans identified as bisexual, which made them the biggest single group. And more people are identifying as LGBT in general: 4.1% in 2016 up from the 3.5% figure of a few years earlier.

In terms of behavior, we wouldn’t want to claim anyone as bisexual who didn’t themselves identify as such. But it is worth noting that the 2011 surv...