On Bisexuals
The universal donor of dating.
This is entry two into The Public Letter Project— I invited anyone who feels so moved to send me a letter, and I’ll write public replies to a few of them. Sort of like an advice column, but without direct advice. More details here.
For many reasons, I couldn’t stop thinking about this letter after it arrived. My reply veers more advice-y than I think others will be, but here’s the letter (and just fyi the bolded text is my own doing)—
I'm a 50-year-old cis woman and have recently come out to myself and my cis, heterosexual husband of 17 years as bisexual. I've known/suspected/been considering for seven or eight years that I am bisexual, but I'm afraid of my bisexuality. Specifically, I'm afraid there is something I need to *do* as a bisexual person (I have never been with a woman). I do not want to leave my husband; he is my person in all the best ways.
I am a writer and I am afraid I will never write anything that truly pleases me unless I explore my bisexuality physically and concretely, out in the world. But I don't want to explore it in that way. I want to accept it and write about it and be alone with it and learn to love myself fully. There are days when this feels like it will not be enough, like I'm fooling myself, or somehow holding myself back from being fully alive in the world. Those days are days that I feel like I am living inside the body and mind of an insane person who is loud and mean and wants to bully me into action.
My husband is more comfortable with my bisexuality than I am. He has encouraged me to do whatever it is I need to do. I have brought up the prospect of me dating women, or having sex with women, or bringing a woman into our marriage. All fine with him. All seem like good ideas when I bring them up, but I ultimately land on not wanting to do any of them; having brought them up, they no longer seem like necessary actions. It's a little bit like when I'm writing a story and I see the way forward quite clearly; having seen it, that way forward becomes boring and unnecessary.
In his introduction to the craft book My Trade is Mystery, Carl Phillips says "There's a distinction, though, between the hobbyist and the artist for whom there is no other way. I wrote poems, off and on, in high school. I continued writing, here and there, in college and even served on the poetry magazine staff. Then I stopped for almost ten years, during which it never really occurred to me to write; I certainly didn't miss it. But when I did start writing again, the writing— though I didn't know this at the time— was the medium by which I wrestled my way toward a clarity about something I couldn't understand in any other way, my own queerness, which I'd somehow suppressed, not been ready for, had suspected and turned away from, as from a childhood monster the child hopes to make disappear by closing his eyes."
Have I suppressed my own queerness? I think I have I suppressed it by hiding it from myself, denying it, and turning away from it. But now that I accept it, I wonder if writing that pleases me will follow that acceptance. Presently, writing feels very hard and scary, like a punishment. And the writing itself is not good, not artful, not even very true or resonant or heartfelt. Take for instance, this inartful letter.
—Amy Lyons
Dear Amy,
First of all, I disagree that your letter is ‘inartful.’ It is serving a purpose and is speaking honestly and for those reasons I find it both resonant and heartfelt.
It makes perfect sense that you’re feeling afraid of your bisexuality becuase (with the exception of some very enlightened people under the age of, say, 25) almost everybody seems to look sideways at us.
Many lesbians (but, of course, not all) will claim that bisexual women simply haven’t yet come to their senses. And of course the typical straight male response to a bi woman is, that’s hot, which really just means that’s not threatening the way that a female partner wanting to have sex with another man would be threatening. (I’m not implying your husband belongs to this group; any stable, loving marriage should have room to affirm such changes or developments.)
Also— all the bi men I’ve ever known have faced a lot of unvarnished prejudice from straight women, who often see them as baffling or gross or simply closeted homosexuals.1
Wait wait wait— Hold on while I make a big deal out of this one thing—
All of these dismissals of bisexuality carry the inherent belief that a person who has any desire towards men, will eventually chose being with a man over a woman.
Is it any wonder this part of you has stayed quiet, especially since it seems like you found a great partner who happens to be a man?
Since you and I both came of age long before all these enlightened 20 year olds were running around with their bucket hats and pansexuality, it’s even harder to untangle. Seemingly all the examples of bi women we grew up with were highly disturbed sexual deviants. And when I first started to feel not straight in my teens I didn’t have any of that unhindered libidinal energy that bisexual women from movies always had. It’s difficult to inhabit a sexual identity that does not seem to exist.
When I first started dating women at 25 I was also terrified that I was a fraud. All the ex-boyfriends seemed like evidence. Was I gay enough? What if I just kept ignoring this nagging feeling? Was it really necessary? In hindsight I say, yes, of course it was necessary and no ignoring it wasn’t going to help anything, and the ex-boyfriends didn’t disqualify me, not at all, they were one half of the evidence of my bisexuality.2 But mainly I was afraid I that I might be a version one of those dreaded straight women described here:
Though the nagging thought that I was not straight had followed me around for a decade by then, was dating women while I still pretty confused about how to be not straight a gesture of making my problem someone else’s problem? Was I displacing my heteropessimism on the lesbians? Many bisexual woman have had this fear, I now know, and more than anything else I think it’s a side effect of the widespread desire to turn up the contract on the greyzone orientation of bisexuality. Human beings are not known for our tolerance or understanding of ambiguity.
Like you, I am married to a man now, however, he’s also bi and conversations about all this have been a part of our relationship since day one. This being my first serious, long-term relationship with another bi person, I’ve been surprised to occasionally have felt the what-if-he’s-actually-a-closeted-gay-man anxiety, despite the fact that he’s given me no reason to fear this. This shows me how deeply I’ve internalized the denial of bisexuality, the extent to which I disbelieve myself. But please believe me that bisexuality exists. It’s a thing. Perhaps what is frightening to everyone about this orientation is that it can’t really be expressed, in its totality, in a single relationship. It implies something hidden always going on within the bi person, some other way they could be living, some future, different life they might be moving towards. It implies a (terrifying?) abundance of imagination.
However, what happens to your bisexuality if you’re not in an open relationship? What happens to the part of you that’s gay if you’re in a straight, monogamous relationship? And what would happen to the part of you that desires men if you were in a relationship with a woman? Is one half of you on ice?