Do Not Hide Your Bisexuality

Many people pretend bisexuality doesn’t exist because, when it comes to sex, gray areas scare them. They want dating dos and don’ts, tricks that’ll guarantee orgasm. They want to know if they’re “normal” or kinky. They want to know if they’re “gay” or “straight” and, more importantly, they want to know which one you are, too.

Humans relate to each other by categorizing, and while “bisexual” seems like a legitimate category to me, it’s not black or white, nor is it made obvious by whom you’re currently sleeping with.

LGBTQ people are regularly and continuously forced to stuff their identities into a choice of two limiting boxes built by the fears, shame and policing of others around them. These boxes, claustrophobic to a feeling of wholeness and suffocating to self-love, leave many of us without the freedom, expression and acceptance of the full spectrum of identity. These boxes have professional journalists asking Laverne Cox what her genitalia looks like; they force us to choose between two bathrooms at the mall; they have strangers asking children with two Mommies what their Dad does for a living.

Bisexual people are attempting and dying by suicide at three times the rate of lesbian and gay people. The entire LGB youth community attempts suicide at four times the rate of their straight peers and a staggering 41% of transgender and gender non-conforming people attempt suicide, compared to a 4.6% national average. 

As bisexuals, we are not the only other-than-straight, other-than-cis people who are being invisibilized to the point of erasure. And if we remove ourselves from the LGBT community because we think that we are, we are only causing our community further harm.