Bisexuality
Rarely are the words, “I’m bi,” heard. Whether on TV, film or even from friends and family, it’s almost nonexistent. Coming out as gay is thought to be brave; a pivotal moment in someone’s life. Coming out as bi, however, is often met with rolled eyes, being viewed as a sexual object, and even with the chant, “Bi now, gay later.” Being bisexual isn’t heralded as brave: it is often treated as if it isn’t even a real thing!
Many well-known blogs have used the purple analogy to explain bisexuality. Purple is known as its own color and not half red, half blue. There are even several shades of purple, some with more red or some with more blue. The same exists in bisexuality, where attraction can be fluid. Some can be hetero- or homo-romantic (meaning that when it comes to establishing romantic relationships they are primarily attracted to members of the opposite sex, or same-sex, respectively) but do enjoy physical, sexual contact with someone of different sex than their partner. Some can be polyamorous and even cohabitate with both sexes. And others decide on their romantic and sexual partners freely, a person to person decision based on what about the individual might tickles their fancy.
Understanding bisexuality
Photo by Isi Parente on UnsplashWhile bisexuality, on the surface, should be welcomed as yet another beautiful way of living—loving hearts and not parts, if you will—bisexuality is often viewed in a not so great light or simply swept under the rug by both the straight and broader lesbian and gay communities.
I asked men and women who identify as bisexual to help us take a look at what it means to be a shade of purple in the big world of pink and blue. It should be noted, and of some concern, that most did not want to be identified by full name, or to use a photograph, in order to avoid judgment from one community, the other, or both, or even because of the risk of losing their jobs and family.
Being Bi
Sorting through the responses to our questions on bisexuality, early feelings of attraction for both sexes was a common theme. Most relate it to the same feelings as straight or gay people face. “I’ve known I was bisexual since I was very little,” Emma Frye stated. “I realized I was not attracted solely to one sex as early as I understood attraction. Most people know they’re straight or gay early in life; I was the same with bisexuality”
Some state that they did not recognize their feelings as bisexual, or perhaps did not know there was a name for it, like Lish Rodriquez: “I didn’t know about bisexuality—I just knew that I liked those people. As I grew older and the media picked up more stories about homosexuality and the AIDS/HIV epidemic, it gave me the word ‘bisexual’ to identify with.”
What comes up also, is the difference in fluidity. The majority of respondents were in an opposite-sex marriage and thus present outwardly to the wider world as heterosexual. Out of those people, many refer to themselves as “swingers.” This is a way for them to explore their bisexuality, with or without their spouses’ involvement, while keeping their marriage and families intact.
Taking the “B” out of “LGBT”
Despite its banner of open acceptance, there is a great deal of questioning in the wider lesbian and gay community about the status of the “B,” and just as some have called for the expulsion of the transgender community from LGBT, others are calling for the removal of the “B”.
One Tumblr blog, “Unpopular Opinions,” states, “I think we should take the B out of LGBT. Bisexuals have it way better than most of us in the queer community. They have straight privilege and ride on the coattails of the gay community.”
Turns out, that just as in the transgender community some agree for very different reasons, some bisexuals likewise argue that this just might be a good idea. Recently a YouTuber known as BisexualRealTalk called for the “B” to be taken out of “LGBT.” He concluded that a bisexual looking for support in the LGBT community was ultimately going to have more questions, be left with a greater sense of uncertainty, and come away with a deeper sense of being alone. “Expectation kills,” he says. “The LGBT community is not our friend”
In fact, a major Canadian study published by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in 2010 called “Bisexual Invisibility: Impacts and Recommendations,” found bisexual men are 6.3 times more likely, and bisexual women 5.9 times more likely, to report having been suicidal than heterosexual people. Bisexuals are also 3-5 times more likely to feel suicidal than gay men and lesbians.
The majority of those we surveyed also felt discrimination from the LGBT community. Rae Schomburg-Hall states, “I receive scorn from most lesbians as they feel I should ‘pick a side’ and I must just need to ‘make up my mind.’” She feels she is seen as “a confused individual. An oversexed person, just looking for fulfillment. Not to be trusted. An interloper. This, coming from a community that heralds inclusion and acceptance is just…just…wrong.”
Views and Perceptions About Bisexuals
Reading through blogs and articles mentioning bisexuality, it doesn’t take long to find the words "greedy," “whore,” or “slut” being heaped upon bisexuals individually or as a group. The belief that bisexuals, regardless of the evidence, aren’t actually, or can’t be, monogamous is another common attitude.
“There are definitely people who think being bisexual means the exact opposite of monogamous, which is kind of hilarious” answers one of our participants. “I think people's sexuality is so personal, and it varies from person to person. Not all of us sleep with everyone, just because we can, although I have had close friends say that I was a whore or a slut because I dated both ‘sides’ from my pool of friends as a young adult.”
R.J. Aquiar, YouTube’s “NotAdam,” has a series he calls “Ask a Bi Guy,” where he addresses many of the perceptions and attempts to use his personal experience to change the attitudes on bisexuality. In response to our questions, he wrote, “There are still so many people out there who can't accept our identity as valid. They're so adamant about sticking to their existing world view, so they'll look for any reason to dismiss us rather than accept this new information that might require them to change their world view. That doesn't necessarily make them bad people, since it's human nature to do that. And it's even more understandable when you look at how much society enforces that gay/straight binary. Most people would, for instance, refer to a male/male or female/female couple as a ‘gay couple’ rather than a ‘same-sex couple’ while a male/female couple is most often referred to as a ‘straight couple’. If you know what to look for, there's bi-erasure all over the place. This can make it really difficult for a bi person to consider coming out since it means having to face all of that adversity head on.”
Men vs Women
Attitudes men versus women concerning bisexuality certainly differ. It is often said that women have it “easier” being bi. The acceptance of a bisexual woman actually involves oversexualizing her. When a woman says she is bi, many men would jump at what they think is a sure-fire way into a threesome. Very rarely is she viewed as a potential monogamous partner.
And if she comes out to a potential same-sex partner? She is often not taken seriously. There is a fear she will want to return to a heterosexual fantasy of husbands, children, and white picket fences in the suburbs. After all, bisexuals are always viewed as having the potential for passing in straight society as an option. One lesbian told us “I’m scared I’ll be hurt by bisexual women, so I won’t mess with them at all”.
Bisexual men do face a different demon, and because of it, very few men will ever come out as bi. Cooper S Beckett—author of “My Life on the Swingset” and “A Life Less Monogamous”—offers personal insight on this. There is “the immediate assumption that I was gay and kidding myself. I've been told it was a phase as well. Straight men don't like bi men, because they're afraid of another man coming along and treating them the way they've traditionally treated women, as someone you could cajole into doing something. They're worried about being cajoled into ‘gay sex.’ I've been told to my face by a gay man that I'm not bi, I'm just on the road to gay town. It's shocking and sad. But I think acceptance is growing.”
Finding a Tribe
There are plenty of online communities to join. Binetusa.org and shybi.com are places to discuss the unique challenges and obstacles bisexuals face. Bisexual.org has a fantastic library of articles, and discussions, and even lists famous people you might not have known were bi. In your local community, look at meetup.org to find bisexual or bisexual friendly meet-ups.
It is much easier to research within the bisexual community than to look in the LGBT community. It is most important to fight for your rights and support others who are questioning or longing for understanding.
“A lot of LGBT experts call bi people ‘the silent majority', since there are likely a lot more bi people out there who would rather hide than come out and deal with all the stigma,” Aguair writes. “Unfortunately, the only way we can change that is for more bi people to live their lives openly, and demonstrate firsthand how much it doesn't have to be that big a deal. It also illustrates how important it is for bi, pan, and other sexually fluid people to come together and form a community to support one another”
Pam Simmons, who has struggled with her bisexual identity for many years, wrote, "The best advice I could give is to find someone you trust and share what you are feeling, how it is affecting you, your fears & doubts. The journey to identifying as bisexual may be a lifelong process. But that’s ok. You define you…. Nobody else. Be true to yourself. And most of all, love yourself.”
Local writer Greg Howard
Local writer Greg Howard has begun to make a name for himself in the world of Young Adult (YA) and, increasingly, Middle Grade literature—especially for LGBTQ+ and allied readers.
Last year, I talked with Howard about his then-new middle grade release, The Whispers, and just a little under a year later I sat down with him again to discuss his new book and some upcoming work. Middle School’s a Drag: You Better Werk hit the shelves on February 11, 2020, and if you haven’t seen it yet, look for it, especially if you have young readers around.
Middle Schools A Drag Book Cover
Greg Howard
James: So, last time we talked, you had just released The Whispers. How has the response been?
Greg: Well, it was interesting, because it was everything from getting letters and emails from parents and teachers and kids who just loved it, and parents who told me they were able to have conversations with their kids through it, to some very ugly emails and letters. Which is very interesting to me because The Whispers is such a sweet, innocuous story. I mean, it is gay lite, you know what I mean? that is not what the story is about, in a lot of senses. There is a kiss, and he has a crush. And it's a very chaste kiss...
I even got this one email that kind of broke my heart from this father who wrote me an email and just laid into me about how his 12-year-old son had picked up this book... I didn't even know that was still a thing but apparently it is: he laid into me about pushing my homosexual agenda on his son and how dare I ... blah blah blah. He even sent me a picture of The Whispers ripped up and in the trashcan.
And I thought to myself, "Oh my Lord, if that if that kid is gay, he just saw his dad throw him in the trash, basically." That thought just broke my heart. So heartbreaking letters like that but also some very heartfelt and beautiful letters too.
Also, I just found out this week, by the way, that The Whispers nominated for the Edger Award for Best Juvenile Fiction. That's an award given by the Mystery Writers of America so it's like the Oscar of mystery writers, so very excited about that.
James: Your new book is Middle School's a Drag. So you're doing something very different this time around...
Greg: Very different from The Whispers, yeah. This one took a more comedic route. Although The Whispers had some comedic elements to it... But, yeah, this one I just kind of went in a little different direction.
When I was a kid, I was a little bit of an entrepreneur. We had this storage room and laundry room off of our carport in South Carolina where I lived. My dad had a big oak desk in there, and I would go in there and start businesses, so to speak. I called it The Anything Shop. I started a little general store that my dad built for me out of cardboard, and I gave croquet lessons and charged kid money. You know, just a total rip off: I was making up the rules as I went. That's kind of what started the idea for this story, because Mikey, in the story, considers himself a kid entrepreneur. And he works out of his family's storage room laundry room off the carport like that.
James: So how did the drag kid element come into play?
Greg: I got inspired when I was watching Good Morning America... They had a special on drag kids, and one in particular whose name is Desmond Is Amazing, and it was really the first time that I had seen kids doing drag, very seriously, like this was their passion, this is something they wanted to do to express themselves and perform. And I was just amazed, in an incredibly good way... I felt very happy for these kids, and these parents that were supporting them. So that gave me the idea of bringing a drag kid into the story, which has not been done yet in Middle Grade.
So all this gave me the idea for one of Mikey's businesses to be a junior talent agency. His first client is this drag kid named Julian, who's an eighth grader, and his drag persona is Coco Caliente Mistress of Madness and Mayhem. That's where the idea started from. I'm really proud of it. People are liking it, which is always good, you know, and I'm hoping this will reach even more kids than I reached with The Whispers.
James: What would you say is the theme of Middle School’s a Drag?
Greg: This is a fun, uplifting comedy. It's about a boy, Mikey, who is gay and he knows he's gay and he's even out to his parents and his best friends. But he hasn't made like the big announcement to the middle school yet, and he's really worried about coming out that way. It's not about him not accepting he's gay because he does. He's just worried about how people are going to treat him when they find out, so that's kind of where this one's coming from.
Mikey learns from Julian, the drag kid, about being confident in who you are. The quote at the beginning of the book is by the drag kid that inspired me, Desmond: "Be yourself always." So I use that as the quote opening the book. So, this book, to me, is just pure joy; it's just fun. It's easy to read: people are telling me they read it in a day or weekend. I love that, there's lots of hijinks in it, lots of gay stuff, lots of queer stuff.
James: Have you heard from people? Are there any common thoughts or responses?
Greg: The thing that I'm hearing most is the pure joy people feel when they read it. When I write I don't think about making people feel a certain way, but I am hearing a lot of people saying that that's what they felt when they read it. And that made it left them feeling hopeful and triumphant. And I like it that they're using the word hopeful again, because that was a big word with The Whispers. It ended with a lot of hope, and the theme of the book was hope, and I love the fact that people are finding that similar theme in this book, even though it's so completely different from The Whispers.
James: With the book tour starting, are there festivals or events you are looking forward to?
Greg: I love doing SE-YA Book Fest in Murfreesboro. It's one of the bigger YA book festivals, and it has Middle Grade. It has all the big writers in YA and Middle Grade. I think the big name this year is gonna be Angie Thomas who wrote The Hate You Give and On the Come Up. I love going to that one.
What I love about those festivals is that a lot of them have student days, so there's one day that they bussed in kids from schools, and those are the best. It is amazing to see this big open room full of writers giving autographs, and these middle school and high school kids acting like they're rock stars. That's so friggin’ cool, because I never met an author when I was that age. They are just enamored, and we all love it. We just love seeing their excitement about books.
James: Tell me about what you're working on now: Do you have anything in the works?
Greg: Well, I just actually turned in my latest book called The Visitors. It will be out next summer, 2021, and it's a ghost story. I've always wanted to write a ghost story, again based on my childhood. We grew up next to this old deserted haunted rice plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina, and we had our own little ghosty experiences there.
I wrote this story kind of harkening back to my times there, and it's about the spirit of an 11-year-old boy who had died mysteriously on the plantation. These present-day kids come and befriend him, and they help him figure out how he died, so he can be free of the place, because he's stuck there. That was fun to write, I loved writing that one, and of course my life was a little more settled, so it was easier to get it out and on the page.
James: What motivates you?
Greg: I mean, this is my dream for the rest of my life! It makes it all worth it, talking to the kids and ... we talked about this, but here's just not enough yet in Middle Grade literature for [LGBTQ] kids. I mean, YA [Young Adult] is great! There's tons of stuff, but not enough a middle grade, so I'm kind of making that my focus right now. I did write a YA novel, Social Intercourse when I first started, but I have kind of found my niche in Middle Grade writing about queer kids. It seems to be working, and it seems to be resonating with parents, with teachers, and with kids. My goal is to give queer kids their happily ever after, one story at a time—that's my mission.
James: So, with The Visitors that will make three Middle Grade books. We talked last time about the challenges, about the gatekeepers and things like that. As a writer, what do you enjoy about writing for those kids?
Greg: I think one is I just enjoy the voice of that age group... Somehow I'm able to tap into it… And I love the fact that I can write these books that are getting into the hands of kids who are seeing themselves represented, you know? There was another review, I think on Amazon, where somebody said about The Whispers something like "this would have been a great story. But why did the kid have to be gay? That just ruined it."
I just want to shake that person and say, "Because there are kids out there that they need to see themselves in the books they read!" I don't know about you, but I never saw myself in books, except by imagining something is going on [behind the scenes].
I love that I had this one parent at my Parnassus event for The Whispers... She picked it up and read the back to her son, who was like 11 or 12. When she said the kid has a crush on this older boy, he looked up at her and said, "Mom, it's like he knows my life!" And I'm thinking, "Yes, I see you, I see you kid!"
James: So, what are your longer-term goals?
Greg: I'd love to keep writing books for Penguin; they've been amazing. And I would like to do more school visits, which is something that I just started doing this past year with The Whispers.
In Chattanooga, I spoke with this rural middle school in front of 300 sixth graders. And then I spent a period a classroom and did a writing workshop. And that was amazing and inspired me to do more of that. In that writing workshop there were about 30 kids. I had at least four of them come up to me and come out to me after, in tears.
I'm not talking just flippantly saying, "Oh, hey I'm gay." These kids were terrified. They came up to me separately at the little book signing after the writing workshop. They would tell me then, and they would speak very quietly, and they were crying. And I just want to help these kids and tell them it's gonna be okay. What I usually end up saying is, “Thank you for telling me that. I want you to know that you're not alone, and you are loved.” And I always ask them if they have support at home, and luckily, so far, they've all said yes, which I think is wonderful and amazing. So I want to I want to do more of that.
NOTE! Since the publication of this article, it has become widely known that Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood and Marriage Story producer David Heyman’s Heyday Television is adapting Middle School’s A Drag for television, with its joint venture partner NBCUniversal International Studios.
You can find Middle School Is a Drag most anywhere books are sold. It can also be purchased online from Amazon in print or for Kindle. For more on Greg Howard, check out his website!