I've been a very bad queer lately. Of course, much of that is due to the fact that it is difficult fo me to organize myself under my current circumstances in the ways that I would like.I could write an entire blog just on class and location (and race and gender and...) as they relate to access to organizing, but I digress...
The reason I'm discussing bisexuality is because the way I keep myself engaged wih my communities as of late is through periodically catching up on what's going on in our news (and by 'our' I don't just mean queerness). So I guess it's to be expected that there will be times when I'm late on a story. This was such a case, and it happened by chance.
I was reading an article about a certain cable television news anchor on some random website I found via Google. This website had a link to a story from March or April of this year.
Here is a link to one of the more in-depth articles (I found several) to give you the jist of the story:
http://www.advocate.com/News/Daily_News/2010/04/20/Ballplayers_Sue_Gay_Softball_League/
I would like to point out that one thing the article fails to mention is that they are suing for discrimination because, although the NAGAAA is a private organization, the venues they used to play were public property, and therefore subject to law.
My initial reaction was, "Not this again." I began to read comments from readers (on several sites), and I notced that certain themes seemed to pop up again and again. I will write about these themes in a series.
The first, and maybe most obvious question is: What does it mean to be "gay enough"? I thought specifically about bisexual identity as it relates to queerness. If human sexuality is a Kinsey scale, can a bisexual ever be "gay enough"? Wouldn't that imply that we are gay, as many gays and straights alike (mostly gays, let's be honest) keep telling us? Do we even want to be gay? I mean, because...we're not, right?
This then, caused my reaction to the story to have a duality to it (surprise, surprise): on the one hand, I felt (and still feel) that those bisexual men, as queer men, should have been able to play - whether or not to disqualify them qualifies as discrimination aside, I thought it was wrong, and ironic considering the way gays and lesbians have been (and still are) treated. On the other hand, I felt, "What kind of message does it send for three bisexual men to be included among their gay brethren, only to have their bi-ness erased, by being considered "gay" (as oposed to "not gay", as they were determined to be)? The binary problem, that is, the idea that things are only "this or that", manifests greatly in this story.
So as I sat in my ambivalence, I thought about the histories of the queer and black communities. The struggles for bisexuals, transgendered folks, and multiracial folks to carve out our/their own identities, though rich with history, seems to be fairly recent as major movements, as far as I can tell. Before this, we were, consenting or not, lumped in with The Other, gays and blacks respectively (and often still are).
So again, on the one hand, I not only want to be, but in fact demand that bisexuals and trans folks be included as part of the queer community as a whole. Not out of some puffed up sense of entitlement, but with the knowledge that The Movement and the community have never been just gay and lesbian in the first place - and I'm talking about decades here. And I'm talking about before Stonewall. Our stories, seemingly erased from queer history, except for those of us who fight to keep them alive, and rewrite them into the narrative.
On the other hand though, I do desire to distinguish myself from the gay identity, not because homosexuality is maligned in our society, not because of some pretend heterosexual privilege that some people seem to think I possess simply because I'm bi, but because I am bi, that is how I want to be seen. (Although I readily concede that if in a relationship with someone perceived as male, in that moment I do benefit from heterosexual privilege, just as a person of color who passes as white can benefit from white privilege - but it is not my identity itself that gives me heterosexual privilege, because, at the end of the day, I'm not straight [or gay]. I'll touch on this more in depth at a later date.) It isn't "Call me this because I don't want to be that!" It's "Call me this because this is what I am." It's really that simple.
For all our similarities, there are many differences. We are collective fraternal twins - not identical, but close enough and similar enough that we ought to have a bond. I'll never be just like my siblings. I was never meant to be. What's important at the end of the day is that we remember that we're family. I hope you remember that as this series continues.
In Solidarity,
D
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