You can't take the sex out of bisexual

[geminigirl]

I had the opportunity today to do some talking about bisexuality to people...gay and straight.

I had the chance to talk about middle ground. I talked about feeling not gay enough for some, and not straight enough for others. I talked about how I had the words "gay" "lesbian" and "straight" in my vocabulary long before I had "bisexual" as an option.

I talked about self-esteem. About how when it's hard to fit anywhere, it's hard to feel okay with your label. And stereotyping...how just because I'm the type who likes to have both it means nothing about other bisexual people, but that for me, I feel out of balance.

Most importantly, I had a chance to talk about internalized homophobia. I got to talk about my own internalized homophobia. Admitting to that was incredibly painful, but cathartic and soothing at the same time. But I'll admit, I have my own. It's perhaps why I struggle so much with my own label. I don't worry about walking into a room and being percieved as gay...I have the opposite problem in fact. But what I do know is that I have moments of wishing I could be one way or the other. Moments when I have to explain for the thousanth time that I like both, that it's not a phase and I'm not confused. The times when I have to explain that I'm not necessarily sleeping with men and with women...that it's not all about threesomes and hot sex and getting both. I'd love to give up having to explain bisexuality.

At the same time, it's such an integral part of who I am, that I wouldn't be me without it.

And the point I made at the end...

homosexual men=gay
homosexual women=lesbian
heterosexual people=straight
bisexual=?
No matter how much I say it's not about sex, you just can't take the sex out of it.

Comments

[wandra.livejournal.com]

I liked reading your post.

Some rambling thoughts, possibly not at all relevant to your point:

No matter how much I say it's not about sex, you just can't take the sex out of it.

Do you want to?
Is it just that you want to be able to as much as gay and lesbian and straight people can?

When I was struggling with coming to terms with re-identifying as bisexual after 16 years of being a lesbian, one of the hardest things was that this word had "sexual" in it. I felt so bad about myself (I was quite severely depressed at the time) that I thought I was never going to have another sexual partner, and that this must be obvious to people, and that they would laugh at the very idea and I would feel even more humiliated than I did already. It took me quite a while before I could even say the word.

Coming through that for me involved feeling better enough that I could contemplate the possibility that my sex/relationship life might not actually be over yet, which meant accepting myself as a sexual person (actual sexual relationships helped too, but I don't think they would have happened unless a lot had changed for me first) and also realising that a lot of my feelings had to do with having just spent 17 years in a lesbian culture with very negative attitudes towards bisexuality. I could think up all the (valid) reasons I liked why I didn't like the "bi" bit or the "sexual" bit, but in the end if I was going to overcome that negativity I had to just use the damn word.

And although having to do those things was painful, I think on the whole it was good that I had to do them.

And in fact what I was saying was that I was now (to some degree) open to the possibility of relationships with men as well as relationships with women. That I was sometimes attracted to men, not just as friends but possibly as more, and that what made that different from being a lesbian with male friends was that that attraction had a sexual component. It's not all about sex....but it is about sex.

I have this other perception (which may not be accurate, but has been borne out to some extent by experience) that people don't look at me and see someone who fits their idea of a sexual person. I can be quite flirtatious when I feel like it, but I lack the kind of public sexual vibe that some people seem to have. I'm in my forties, I'm fat, I'm scruffy, I live on my own, I don't have much of a social life. If people hear me describe myself as "bisexual" and hear the "sex" part more loudly than the rest, it does at least remind them that sex isn't a prerogative of the young and conventionally pretty. And it's useful to me as validation of my own (considerably revised :-)) sexual identity.

Also, how about:
bisexual= bi

Or does that still need too much explanation?

Hetrophobia

[sf-rose.livejournal.com]

I suffer from that too. About half the people I know currently assume I'm lesbian, the other half assume I'm hetrosexual. And I don't necessarily want to go into all the detail of "explaining" myself. Especially when it isn't really relevant to a particular relationship. (I am single.) If I were to date a man or woman successively I won't hide it. People will just have to deal with their confusion.
Labels serve two functions: 1) to provide some kind of information about yourself to those around you and 2) to provide a way of naming yourself. The label I've chosen for myself is "bisexual lesbian." It reflects the fact that I'm primarily attracted to women but find men also attractive, but not to the same extent. It turns the whole notion of "____" sexual on its head. "How can be you be a lesbian yet bisexual? That doens't make any sense!" I leave it to them to figure it out.

At this point, I have more internalised hetrophobia than homophobia. If I had to "choose" I'd choose to labeled lesbian or queer. Yet, I don't want to pretend I don't find some men attractive. Because that's a lie. It's not the truth about my life. Yet I have internalised homophobia because I don't correct people's assumptions that I'm straight...unless we've become close and I want them to know all of me.

Which is precisely where labels fall short. They're approximations, short hand. And should be treated as such. They don't name reality. For example, if you label someone hetrosexual (the so called "normative" state), people assume that there's more to that person than being sexual. People who "other" sexual don't have that luxury, particularly bi people who don't refuse to fit neatly into one category or another. And thus get pounded by both sides.

No

[nmc.livejournal.com]

You can't take the word 'sex' out of 'bisexual'. It's kind of stuck there, and all the kings horses and all the kings men aren't going to take it out. On the other hand, there's 'sex' in gay, lesbian and straight, too. All of the labels are about the kind of people you'd consider having sex with.

On the other hand, none of them are really about sex. My saying I'm bi tells you nothing about the ways I prefer sex, only about the people I might have sex with. Nothing about what's happening in my bedroom, only who might be in there with me. I think that's an important distinction to keep in mind.