Why Bisexuality Is So Hard to Write About

This is where writing about bisexuality becomes harder than simply living it. Being bi doesn’t require you to do anything in particular. A bisexual person can live a monogamous life with an opposite-sex (or same-sex) partner and, if they have a partner who is aware and accepting of that fact, be more or less happy in that state of affairs — even if nobody else knows about it other than perhaps your Internet providers. Still, there are strong arguments for being “out” as a bi person. Aside from the obvious benefit of being able to venture out to fulfill desires one’s primary partner cannot in the context of an open (or “monogamish,” in Dan Savage-speak) relationship, there’s the issue of bisexual erasure. Bi invisibility is a debilitating social problem for bisexuals (it certainly has been for me). The only real solution to this problem is for bisexual people like myself to out themselves.

And here’s where I start waging war with myself. On the one hand, I believe firmly in bi visibility. I’d love to see more bi folk publicly out themselves, especially with so few bisexual public figures (particularly men). It seems obvious that we should encourage bi people to be open and frank about their sexual orientation. On the other hand, I don’t particularly relish the idea of bandying about my bisexuality in the public sphere like it’s an Ivy League degree. I’ve never been out to my work colleagues, and if any of my extended family know about it, that’s probably because they’re reading this column right now (Hi!). But I’ve done nothing to intentionally conceal it from relatives or coworkers; there’s simply never an obvious opportunity to bring it up. When you’re openly gay and in a same-sex relationship, that fact is more or less guaranteed to come up eventually. When you’re bi and in a hetero marriage, you really have to go out of your way to bring it up.

My generation came of age amid a wave of gay pride and successive legal and social victories for sexual minorities. We were fed a diet of “coming out” narratives by way of movies, TV shows, and other media. The coming out story is familiar to us by now: a closeted teenager opens up to family and friends, running the gauntlet of schoolyard bullying and family hand-wringing. It’s practically a modern fairy tale. Of course, few if any real-life coming out stories look like something out of Glee, and the protagonists in said gay fairy tales are invariably young, white, and economically privileged. But for bi kids (and bi adults) there is no corollary. To be “out” as a bisexual person is to be running a never-ending parade of closets — coming out as a single person, as a coupled/married person, as a poly or otherwise non-monogamously dating person, and so on. Just when you think you’re “out” you’re still “in”.

I have long felt that the “closet” metaphor doesn’t really work for bisexuals. A more apt metaphor might be found in Schrödinger’s cat. In his legendary thought experiment illustrating the problems inherent in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger postulates a cat that is simultaneously both alive and dead. Reality collapses into a single state only when the box’s contents are observed. Like Schrödinger’s cat, we bisexuals exist in something of a superpositional state, appearing either straight or gay whenever “observed” — i.e. observed doing something gay or something straight. And yet, when nobody is looking, we happily go our own way, occupying both identities at once.

The reality of bisexuality is, of course, nowhere near as complicated as quantum mechanics. Unlike a living-and-dead cat (or Einstein’s hypothetical gunpowder keg, which for an instant is both exploded and unexploded), simultaneous same-sex and opposite-sex attraction is not a theoretical paradox. If we weren’t so hung up on our individual identities, and so dogmatically committed to monogamy, there would be no such issues around bisexuality. But until we come to terms with the problems inherent in our societal expectations around monogamy, bisexuality will continue to seem like some sort of quantum state. Schrödinger’s genitals, if you will.