ACADEMIC STUDY: Are you 18+ years of age, live in the USAandself-id(even just quietly mosty to yourself)asBisexual+,Biromantic+ or otherwise a member of the LGBTQIA+ Communities?
in japanese, there’s a term for a person who dual wields swords called “ryoutoutsukai”, literally meaning something along the lines of “two sword user”. it’s ALSO a euphemism for bisexuality
Duel-wielding is bisexual culture
両刀使い noun
two-sword fencer; expert in various (more than one) fields; person who likes alcohol and sweets equally well; bisexual (person)
[image description: an extreme close-up of light blue forget-me-not flowers against a blurry blue background. white art deco letters in all caps say “monosexuality is a heterosexist idea used to oppress gay people and erase bisexuality from history and society”]
like what if they were right? what if the concept of monosexism rests on the insistence that there ARE two and only two genders, two and only two sexes, two and only two gender roles, to pair up in the first place? that makes sense, doesn’t it?
what if that means that it doesn’t just loathe bisexuals, because our very existence breaks that binary, but also intersex people, aces/aros, and trans people of all types?
what if that means that it does tolerate both straight and gay people, on the surface, but it’s demanding a rigid adherence to gender norms that the majority of gay people don’t fit into in the first place?
remember how Senator Barney Frank, and the HRC, fought for years to keep “gender identity and expression” out of the united states’s Employment Non-Discrimination Act? and even the Advocate magazine said, if it had passed that way, “many LGB individuals would have still been vulnerable to job loss as it would remain perfectly legal to fire a masculine-presenting woman or a feminine-presenting man. Those viewed as somehow outside of what society expects from us in terms of gender would remain a target.”
what if that’s heterosexism versus monosexism?
One part of our community sees things as being centered around “gay versus straight”, and thinks that we are only oppressed if people think we’re gay. Some of those folks acknowledge that cissexism exists alongside it, so people are oppressed for being gay or trans. In this worldview, people who “look straight” - intersex people, aces/aros, “het-partnered” bisexuals, nonbinary people, straight and passing trans people - are privileged. Gay men, lesbians, and anybody who will be read as gay or non-passing, are oppressed.
The other part of our community sees things as being centered around “violating the gender binary”, and thinks that we are oppressed when we are seen as bending or breaking that binary. This includes gay men, lesbians, and/or non-passing trans people, but it also includes everyone who is nonbinary, passing trans people, intersex, ace, aro, bi, et cetera.
Because the rule of the gender binary is that there have to be two and only two genders, which have to correspond correctly with the two and only two sexes that are acknowledged, and the two and only two gender roles, and they have to be with each other, and only each other. That is how the gender binary works. That’s what it is.
I think that one perspective is what we label as “heterosexism,” and the other is what we label as “monosexism”. I think this is the big divide that has always, always been present in the community. And I think that lately we’re being told over and over, by the first group, that believing monosexism exists is anti-gay, and it’s keeping everyone from seeing that actually, monosexism itself is anti-gay.
I am seeking participants for a research study on the challenges (biphobia in particular) that bi+ women experience while participating in LGBTQ activism on campus.
Anyone who…
identifies as a woman to some degree who also experiences attraction to more than one gender (including but not limited to: bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, queer, fluid),
is a current undergraduate student (or recent graduate) who is (or has been) involved in at least one LGBTQ student organization on campus,
Bisexual activist and scholar Robin Ochs just announced the successful conclusion of a project she has been working on for 7 ½ years in collaboration with Amy Benson of Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library.
Back issues of Bi Women (now the Bi Women Quarterly) (1983-2009) and of North Bi Northwest (a publication of the Seattle Bisexual Women’s Network) are now archived and available via Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library. They have been digitized, and are searchable and available to the public.
Here’s the press release from Harvard’s Schlesinger Library:
Boston is home to the longest-lived bisexual women’s periodical in the world. Bi Women Quarterly, a grassroots publication, began in September 1983 as a project of the newly-formed Boston Bisexual Women’s Network.
Staffed entirely by volunteers, and containing essays, poetry, artwork, and short fiction on a wide range of themes, Bi Women Quarterly provides a voice for women who identify as bisexual, pansexual, and other non-binary sexual identities.
Robyn Ochs, editor of Bi Women Quarterly since 2009, donated the only complete collection of this publication to Schlesinger Library several years ago with the agreement that it would be preserved, and digitized in a searchable format. The digitized collection at Schlesinger covers the years 1983 to 2010.
We are delighted to announce that this project is complete, and this resource is now available to researchers and to the general public through Harvard’s catalog.
Making the voices of bi women accessible will hopefully provide researchers primary material with which to begin to fill this gap.
Issues of Bi Women Quarterly from 2009 to the present can be found online a BiWomenBoston.org. These more recent issues will be added to the Library’s collection in the near future.
bi people: *more likely to be victims of rape than gay or straight people*
bi people: *more likely to live in poverty than gay or straight people*
also bi people: *more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence than gay or straight people*
also bi people: *more likely to face discrimination in the health care system than gay or straight people*
still bi people: *get paid less, on average, than gay or straight people*
and still, bi people: *more likely to suffer mental illness than gay or straight people*
some fucker on the internet: no but really bi people aren’t oppressed because they’re bi it’s because people think you’re gay. biphobia is a lie. only homophobia is real. hate me please bi people but you cannot deny my ultimate logic™
Shockingly there are it seems a number of people who continue to be so discomforted by even the idea of Bisexuality that instead of researching the above by now very well know/well verified statistics, they commenced to whine, carp, complain, deny and fuss instead.
So for all those whose “google finger” seems to have broken, let us assist you:
Yipes! At this time tremendous amounts of sold and reliable research showsthatBisexual+ People have the WORST Health + Quality of Life outcomes of ALL demographic groups: Gay, Straight or Lesbian! But when confronted by this instead of say … clicking the link to find out why, assorted biphobes and other species of malcontents reacted by winging on that bisexuals must be lying and making this up! *head desk*
Yikes Me thought this lunacy restricted to repubs oiy
The desire for perfection and clarity in every aspect is one of the biggest hurdles in the discussion of queer history.
It comes in many forms, one of the ones I have encountered the most personally is the desire people seem to have for queer people of the past to line up with some moral baseline before being understood as queer. As if the queer community is some monolithic paragon of virtue that must be gatekept.
There were queer Nazis, slave owners, abusers, colonizers, and murderers, beyond that there were scores of queer people complicit in those kinds of actions. They are just as much a part of the queer community as the best among us.
There is also this ever-present want for clear concise evidence that is unimpeachable, which is a little silly when you think about it. Queer people from three hundred years ago are not going to define themselves in ways that are easily understood and labelled by us now. How could they be expected to? When some historians say that modern labels can’t be applied to people in the past, they aren’t entirely wrong, but they aren’t entirely right either.
Calling a woman who had never heard the word lesbian used to mean anything but “someone from lesbos” a lesbian, is not perfect, because the best way to find a label for someone is to follow their self-identification and we don’t always have that. But lesbians can look at her poetry as an echo of their own experiences, and using the word lesbian to discuss her can be a useful (if imperfect) tool to connect our present to our past. Queer people from the past have experiences in common with modern members of the community, and that is worth discussing. That being said, that doesn’t mean they can be expected to be perfect representation. In fact, expecting “good representation” from anything but fiction is a recipe for disaster.
Also since queer history is a relatively new field of research, we can’t expect every conclusion we come to, to be the right one. We are products of our time just as much as the people we study, and that’s okay. Mistakes can and will happen, and those mistakes will make room for correction and growth for the people who come after us. Yes, we should be putting our best foot forward, but we just have to accept that we will slip sometimes.
The expectation for perfection is a form of discrimination. Plain and simple. Queer history is a study of complex, messy, horrible, brave, and incredible people from the past, and the ties that connect them to us here in the present. As someone who has spent a lot of time thinking and researching that subject, I have to say: the messiness of it all is what makes it worthwhile.
idk im really tired of 15-17 year olds who have never interacted with the gay community irl and spend too much time on tiktok trying to act like the authority on all that is lgbt+
mean this in the kindest possible way. if you are too young and unsafe to go to your gay community center or pride here’s some ways you can connect to gay history.
I would also like to add the History of Sexuality website! It’s a peer-reviewed, open-source digital resource about the history of sexuality and gender. They’ve got a really extensive bibliography of books that you can search by things like topic and reading level, summaries of and addresses for research collections from around the world (though currently, many of them are based in the United States), and links to digital projects that you can access online.
It’s got a wide range of resources, from academic works to grassroots archives, all of which have been tagged and made searchable by an interdisciplinary team of archivists, librarians, historians, and other scholars. You can learn a lot about queer histories and communities, and even see some of the ongoing work that activists are doing right now!
I’m so excited to finally get to share these with you! Later this month, the SLCC Student Writing Center is going to be running a workshop on queer identity and re-imagining monsters. I had the very cool opportunity to draw some posters for the workshop, and went a little overboard in terms of quantity.
Only the three drawings on the left ended up being used, but I’m still really proud of all of these. You can find more info about the writing workshop here.
My dad gave me this book from his library years ago because, well, he knew me. I never got around to reading it, but given The State Of Fandom right now I feel duty-bound to give it a go so I can share juicy deets, so stay tuned for that…
Update: did David Jenkins literally read this book
Further update: GOOD GRAVY
Fellas is it gay to share your booty with your fellow transgressors
