Bi Visibility Day 2017

Happy Bi Visibility Day! We celebrate every year on this date, and you can learn more by visiting BiNet USA or GLAAD.

I’ve been posting all week, flash fiction (which will replace my current Featured Story) and book reviews and the Big Bi List (which is still growing!). Today, I’ll get a little more personal.

A great conversation in the Queer Sci-Fi group on Facebook took me back years, recalling my teenage crushes on celebrities. Before I Got Religion™, I used to think my fan crushes on women were just admiration. I wanted to be like them or look like them or something. I didn’t, actually (I’ll get to that). But I also didn’t have the language to describe it. I just knew I wasn’t what the girls at school called me (which you can guess and I won’t repeat here). After I joined a church, I figured that it was a “sinful desire” to be suppressed. The rest…well, my coming out story is floating around in my archives, back around three and a half years ago.

My earliest memory of being fascinated with a celebrity was when I was maybe eight or nine. We were at my grandparents’ house for the summer, as we usually were. That summer, an ad ran for the Broadway production of Cabaret. This was long enough ago it was the Joel Grey version. My pre-adolescent self was utterly captivated. Every time the ad was on, I would drop everything and go watch. I would not exactly call my near-obsession with Grey’s androgynous Emcee sexual attraction. But there was definitely something I liked. Still do, in fact, on both counts. Joel Grey is still pretty in his eighties, even when not made up, and I still love that particular aesthetic. There is something in me that responds most strongly to people whose identity and/or presentation blends and transcends the gender binary.

(Side note: Just to keep things in the family, Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing was my first real girl-crush. While everyone else swooned over Patrick Swayze, I was thinking he was one lucky guy. She, too, is still gorgeous and seems like a really cool person.)

For years, I kept my real-life crushes only to boys. I was pretty decent at suppressing anything else. I did once let something slip. I was talking to a guy about movie stars he thought were attractive. I made a comment that one woman was more beautiful than another, and he paused, considered, and then agreed with me. I recall feeling really weird about it, but the subject never came up again. Even now, three years on from coming out, I still struggle to admit when I find a non-male person attractive, famous or not. I’m fairly sure the thread in the QSF group was the first time I’d publicly owned my teenage fancies.

I’m not a person who becomes romantically or emotionally attached easily. Mostly, as a monogamously-married bi person, I simply find people interesting and nice to look at. There’s not much that I don’t find pleasing to the eye. People are so cool! I mean, there is a heck of a lot of variety in humanity, and it’s fun to admire all different kinds of things. I’ve never really understood when people say they think an entire category of people are unattractive. I especially don’t understand making fun of physical features.

Like with people, I have a wide range of taste in books. Yesterday, I tweeted about my frustration that authors of MM romance were using the label “LGBT” for their work. Not as a tag category on booksellers, but on their personal websites. I asked that if people are exclusively writing MM, especially if it’s only cisgender gay/bi men, that they call it what it is. Lesbians (and queer women and non-binary people in general) are being obscured by the mountains of MM books available.

While I understand some of the reasons for labeling as “LGBT,” as a reader, it’s frustrating. I want to find authors in genres I like who write all across the spectrum. Not with just side characters but as main characters. I also don’t want my LGBT books to be limited to romance or my romance to be limited to LGBT and/or MM and FF (for example, I want more romance where the MCs might be an MF couple but one or both are bi—and it’s no big deal).

I suppose my appetite for books and my fondness for admiring all kinds of people are parallel with my interest in all kinds of things. I’ve never considered myself a superfan of anything. Not people or books or authors or celebrities or movies or comics. I like so many, many kinds of things. Maybe it should not be at all surprising that I don’t want to “pick a side” in any aspect of my life.

You know what? There are benefits to my kind of rich enjoyment of life. I’ve made friends all over the place, read books in a wide variety genres, listened to many kinds of music, and tasted traditional foods made by people from all over the world. Why would I ever want to limit that in any way?

Sometimes, people think that I’m not “queer enough” because I married a man. Yes, they’re probably right in that a homophobic society encouraged me to limit my partners to cisgender men. It doesn’t mean that I only married him out of obligation, and it doesn’t negate my bisexuality.

To use a different example, I’m fairly adventuresome when it comes to trying new foods. I’ll give most things a go. Yes, I would even eat insects if that’s what was being served, and no, I would not complain. When someone invites you into their home and their culture, not only is it polite to appreciate it, it’s also fun. Anyway, I have not actually eaten bugs or octopus or even the comparatively mundane caviar. Does that mean I don’t have the potential to try them? Nope. I still would. Do I need to provide you a list of past Food Credentials in order to have you believe I’d taste new and (to me) unusual stuff? I should hope not!

Being bi is a matter of potential. I’m in a monogamous relationship. But if for some reason that changed, I’d be cool with that too. And if I were single or non-monogamous, then I’d be open to whatever. That’s all it means for me. No more, no less. You don’t need my relationship history or my list of celebrity crushes or to browse my book shelf to see how many queer books and which kinds I own. It’s enough for me to say, “This is who I am, this is who I have the ability to love, and that’s the end of the story.”

So what does that mean in a more specific sense, if I’m not about to leave my spouse to go have Bisexual Proof-Texting Adventures? It means mostly that I want to expand the kinds of books I write. If I like to read all over the map, why not let that out in my own work too? I’m excited to see where it goes.

Hey, if you made it this far, thank you. Happy Bi Visibility Day, and happy reading and writing!

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