So here I am. Being bi. And visible.

Like I am most days. Showering in a bisexual manner. Brushing my bisexual teeth. Biking to work bisexually. Bisexually offering reference assistance to researchers. Lunching on bisexually-approved pizza. Picking up my bisexual wife after work so we can indulge in public displays of bisexual affection.

This is what a bisexual looks like.
July 2014

Though of course most people don’t know I’m being bisexually visible. People who see me on the street unaccompanied probably assume I’m straight (unless I’m on a street in JP, in which case they probably assume I’m a dyke). With Hanna, they probably assume I’m a lesbian. Because as a culture we read people according to the gender of their partners, and we humans with our funny little categories have a rough time understanding folks whose desires don’t map neatly onto the binary system of gender we’ve invented for ourselves.

I don’t really care, most days, who people think I fuck.

But here’s the thing: Because of biphobia I spent the first 27 years of my life thinking I wasn’t queer enough. Because I liked dudes as well as dykes, and people of all shapes, sizes, and self-presentations were equally likely to make my squishy bits a bit more squishy.

This is what a bisexual looks like.
(While also believing she isn’t bisexual enough for it to count.)
July 2007

I wish I could tell my twelve-year-old self, fifteen-year-old self, seventeen-year-old self, twenty-one-year-old self, twenty-six-year-old self to stop worrying so much about how much wanting constituted enough to claim labels. I wish someone had told me to trust my desires, my hunches, my gut.

Visibility is about politics; the politics of having language to speak of your own desires and the right to claim those desires in public. Most days, I don’t give a damn how other people interpret the kiss I give my wife, the m/m erotica we discuss over coffee, the ring on my finger, the men in my past.

But on bi visibility I want y’all to be darn sure you know “bisexual” is a word I lay claim to. The simplest, most universally-recognized word to describe the landscape of my desires past, present, and future.

This is what a bisexual looks like.
(Maybe knitting rainbow socks on a lesbian land trust will make me enough.)
June 2005

For all the twelve, fifteen, seventeen, twenty-one, twenty-six year olds out there wondering if they’re enough: My answer to you is that you are. Pay heed to your own desires; don’t let people who don’t believe in unicorns tell you that you’ve no right to exist.

You do. We do.

It’s a wild country. Leave your prejudices at the door.