First things first: my friend died a week and a half ago.
If it is strange to learn that I considered the director of Super Size Me to be a friend, well, it is stranger still to publicly say that he was. I don’t really like to put my business on main, but I will say that a) we met in 2019, after his fall from grace, b) we became close enough to pitch a project together and then, when the project didn’t go anywhere, occasionally text each other about Single Drunk Female, but c) remained distant enough that I only learned about his passing when someone posted the above linked article on Bluesky.
Oh, and he texted me when my dad died. In my memory it was some beautifully written, touching message, but when I looked back at it this past week, I found that it was actually a very perfunctory “so sorry to hear your dad died” text. I think this is what that Maya Angelou quote about people remembering how you made them feel rather than what you said is about. The actual content of the text didn’t matter so much as the fact that he reached out to me when I was desperately sad.
Anyway. I mention this partially because in this year of death and loss it feels particularly important to let people know when someone I care about has left the mortal plane. I also — well, look. I know what Morgan’s reputation was. I know the things he did to women. Indeed, the whole reason I was introduced to him in the first place was his ill-advised attempt to either (depending on your perspective) apologize for a lifetime of shitty behavior and commit to making amends or get out ahead of scandal before it bit him in the ass. (If it was the latter, he failed spectacularly.)
And because of that, it feels important for me to say that, flawed as he was — and he was very flawed — Morgan was still someone who wanted to be better, who tried to be better, who wouldn’t have been in my life if those things were not true. I am not in a position to say whether he succeeded or failed. I know only that he tried, and now he cannot try anymore. And that breaks my heart, and it feels important to put out in public.
But this is a newsletter about bisexuality. So:
It is, somehow, Pride month, and the the Discourse™️, she is apparently in full blast. I have been ignoring it for the most part, because I am too old (and, as you may have guessed, too sad) to care about any of it. Also I’m not on X anymore, not really, and I think that’s where the most intense of it all goes down.
But I did see someone on Bluesky make the argument that all this “no kink at Pride” and “don’t bring your cishet boyfriend to the club” stuff is purely the domain of online weirdos, and if you venture out into the real world, among real queers, no one thinks or acts like that.
I have a couple of thoughts about this: I suspect that if you are a small town queer, this is probably true, at least to a point. In a city like, say, Buffalo*, having a queer-affirming space, period, is exciting enough that queers can’t really afford to be picky; people take whatever community they can get, cishet boyfriends and all.
But once a space reaches a certain critical mass of queers, I find that this is simply less the case. When you have enough lesbians, you don’t need bi women to pad your numbers; it’s easier to be a bitch to us when your dating pool is big enough without us.
Or that’s been my experience, anyway.
So I said, in response to that person on Bluesky, that while I would love to agree with their sentiment, it felt clear to me that it was wildly understating the amount of biphobia in IRL queer spaces. Because what is “don’t bring your cishet boyfriend to the party” if not a stand in for biphobia? I think we are all aware that it is not literally about people’s straight partners; it is very clearly just one more way of making bisexuals feel policed and unwelcome.
In chatting with someone else about my remarks, I made the comment that this kind of in person biphobia is one of the reasons why I have stayed away from in person queer spaces, or at least carefully curated the ones I will choose to go to. For some reason, this was the comment that the original poster — the person insisting that biphobia in queer spaces is solely an online phenomenon — chose to respond to, specifically by informing me that clearly my problem is that I don’t leave my house and if I did I would see that IRL queer spaces are an all accepting wonderland.
Friends, this is what pushed me over the edge.
I am too fucking old, and have been out for too fucking long, to be disrespected in this manner. As a forty-one year-old who came out at fourteen — at a time when it was much harder and much rarer to be an out queer teen — I was openly queer at a time when in person queer spaces were pretty much the only way of being in queer community. Yes, we had the internet in the 1990s, but like… not really.
And so my feelings about biphobia — feelings that are encapsulated by the writing of bisexual activists from the 1980s and early 1990s, a time when the existence of the internet was even more of technicality — were not shaped by shit posters shit posting. They were shaped by existing in queer spaces in real life, in spaces that nominally accepted me and yet never felt quite right. Spaces where I always felt like I was holding my breath, just a little, because not only did I sometimes date men but I simply didn’t have the right aesthetic, didn’t have the right worldview, simply was not right.
Have those spaces become wildly more bi inclusive in the past 20 years? I mean possibly, but it seems unlikely. The biphobia online may be more overt, but that’s mostly because people feel more comfortable saying the quiet part out loud in a place like X.
I don’t think that the online posting queers and the offline IRL queers are wholly different species. Indeed, they are often one and the same, just showing off different sides of their face.
But also? Maybe you have beat me to this point, but the whole argument biphobia is simply an online phenomenon, if bisexuals ever went into real queer spaces we would know it doesn’t really exist — what is this if not another way of telling bisexuals that our pain is just imaginary, that our oppression is nothing more than mass delusion? What is it if not one more form of erasure, one that, in this case, erases our ability to testify to our own pain?
I am, as noted above, too old and sad (and tired, let’s not forget tired) to care too much about this. I will be in the spaces where I feel comfortable. I will avoid the spaces where I don’t. This is how I have adapted to life, this is how I will continue to live.
But I will not be told that biphobia is simply a figment of my imagination. Not just for me, but for all the other bisexuals who need to know that their pain is very real, and they have every right to feel it.
*I’m using this as my example primarily because it’s the only non-NYC city I have lived in, don’t come for me
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