Share

Share

Share on Facebook Share on Facebook Tweet Share on Twitter Share on WhatsApp Share on WhatsApp

SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER

Photo: Bisexual Hinge

Bisexual activism is often a marginalized struggle within the LGBTQ+ community. This is due to the various stigmas and prejudices faced by bisexuals—being considered fake, “just going through a phase,” confused, traitors, and others—which result in the invisibility of their struggles and demands. Among their most urgent needs are the recognition of their sexual orientation and their representation in different spheres, the creation of strong networks and a nationwide activism effort, inclusion in the curriculum of Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE), and the historical documentation of the community.

The bisexual movement emerged in the early 1970s in the United States, although there is evidence of bisexual groups, such as Blossomy, predating this period. In 1972, the "Ithaca Declaration on Bisexuality," written by the Quaker Committee of Friends of Bisexuality, appeared in The Advocate magazine, addressing a gay audience for the first time and seeking to raise awareness about bisexuality. Also during this decade, the first bisexual groups emerged in various cities across the United States, followed by groups in Europe and Australia. In the 1980s, the first bisexual organizations led by and for women appeared, closely linked to feminism. And towards the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the need for bisexual unity culminated in the First International Conference on Bisexuality in Amsterdam in 1991.

Recovering memory

The organization Bisagra Bisexual spoke with Presentes about the need to historicize the movement, one of the topics discussed during the recent Plurinational Meeting of Women, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Trans, Travesti, Non-Binary, and Intersex People (EPMLBTTNBI): “It is extremely important for us to recover the history of our activism , to recover the experiences of other activists who paved the way for us. For example, not everyone knows that Marsha P. Johnson, a key figure in the Stonewall riots, was bisexual, or that Alejandra Sardá was one of the first activists in the local sexual dissidence movement to identify as bisexual.”

Since 2012, the workshop on bisexuality (originally "Women and Bisexuality") has been included in the official schedule of the EPMLBTTNBI (National Conference on Lesbian, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex People). A year earlier, a group of bisexual people spontaneously organized the workshop in a schoolyard, unofficially, due to the need for a space to address the experiences of bisexual people, experiences that were often silenced or excluded from lesbian workshops. Their conclusions included the need for the workshop to be officially launched. The organization Bisexual Feminists was created in 2012 at the Posadas Meeting. "That year the workshop was quite large, it split into two sessions, and we also marched together. From that moment on, we began to gain more visibility in the public sphere through two main areas: on the one hand, bisexual meeting spaces, and on the other, supporting struggles related to the feminist and LGBT agendas," said representatives from Bisexual Feminists.

At the Feminist Encounters

The members of Bisagra Bisexual say they have a record that since 2013, at each Encuentro (Meeting), the conclusions of the workshops have included a request for a workshop specifically on bisexual activism. However, this year the workshop on bisexuality was removed from the program and changed to “Bisexualities, Pansexualities, and Polysexualities.” “What happened was an attack on our identity and our political activism,” says Bisagra Bisexual. “This gesture was a clear erasure of the history of our movement, of the struggles we have been waging for some time. Furthermore, a highly biased agenda was imposed, one that portrayed bisexuality as a concept with contradictions and complexities.”

Faced with this situation, bisexuals decided to organize the workshop outside of the official one, filling five committees, and managed for the first time the workshop “Bisexual Activism”, which had among its conclusions: “the implementation of Comprehensive Sexuality Education and the reformulation of its contents so that bisexual existences are visible; encouraging alliances and the strengthening of local and regional networks to enhance bisexual visibility; the recovery of bisexual activism within the history of the LGBTIQ+ movement; and the postulation of the intersectional character of bisexual activism, which is decolonial, anti-racist and anti-neoliberal; among others.

For Bisexual Feminists, “being bisexual means feeling desire, attraction, or affection toward one's own gender and toward another. We don't specify which gender it is, which is why we speak of bisexualities and not bisexuality. This desire can fluctuate and/or can be a potential.” Furthermore, “for us, bisexuality is a political identity; it's the way we name our experience. This is fundamental to achieving visibility and thus being able to participate in a political and affective collective, but above all, to legitimize our existence in the realm of words and rights. It is essential to name desire in the different territories we inhabit and move through.”

Invisible majority

The bisexual population tends to be larger than the homosexual population. The 2016 study “Invisible Majority: The Disparities Faced by Bisexual People and How to Address Them” by the Movement Advancement Project and several bisexual organizations in the United States indicated: “Bisexual people represent approximately half (52%) of LGB people in the United States.” However, their demands, experiences, and representations are frequently made invisible or treated as a joke. “Bisexuality becomes the ghost that haunts LGBTQ+ spaces, as if it were a rumor, and it creates a space denied to us,” says Bisagra Bisexual.

The need for bisexual activism is urgent. “We understand that what is not named does not exist, that remaining silent only contributes to the social denial of categories that are not fixed, that cannot be static, that can only be understood through fluidity,” says Bisagra. Julia Giannattasio, a bisexual woman and feminist activist belonging to the Kinkfem and Movimiento Mayo Merlo groups, explains that the importance of activism lies in the fact that “we have historically been (and continue to be) made invisible and stigmatized with prejudice and misinformation. We advocate for the recovery of rights and visibility from a transfeminist perspective.”

Many prejudices against bisexuals come from both cisgender heterosexuals and the LGBTQ+ community. Micaela is a bisexual feminist activist from Capilla del Monte, Córdoba. When asked about her experience as a bisexual woman, she replied: “Every time I was questioned, it was from a position of prejudice about my sexuality. When I was with cisgender heterosexual men, they often assumed I would accept a threesome and all their fantasies in the best heteronormative porn style. Or, conversely, the ever-present fear of 'You're going to leave me for a woman,' where they feel threatened or their masculinity is undermined. When dating some lesbians (not always, not all), the tacit accusation of being 'incomplete,' 'lukewarm,' always 'half in the closet' was recurrent. Or outright rejection because 'bisexuals don't know what they want.'”

"The undecided ones"

Other stigmas associated with bisexuals include being categorized as indecisive, “going through a phase,” traitors, partygoers, promiscuous, people with STIs, immature, unfaithful, or “not gay or queer enough to belong to the community,” they explain. Bisagra Bisexual (Bisexual Hinge) stated: “We tend to emphasize what happens to us within LGBTQ+ spaces not because we aren't affected by the violence of the heteronormative regime, but because sexual dissidence is supposed to be our space, not a place of constant struggle for what is rightfully ours.”

In her work “Bisexuality: A Disguise for Internalized Homophobia?” (1998), psychologist, feminist, and sexual rights activist Alejandra Sardá-Chandiramani stated: “In this normalized sexuality, with performance indicators and goals to achieve, where desire appears controlled, named, and limited, and the margin for the unexpected and for change is minimal, bisexuality bursts forth as a disruptive element.” Along these lines, Grace, also a psychologist with training in gender perspective and bisexual herself, said from Formosa: “I think what challenges us is the dismantling of fixed categories that our bisexual existence presents. It proposes questioning all assumptions regarding stereotypical roles in romantic relationships.” And from Bisagra, they declared: “Bisexuality makes people uncomfortable because it is not fixed; there is no single bisexuality, nor do we understand it as static. In a world where the norm and the demand is that we be determinable and predictable, categories that are in constant flux are terrifying.”