Pride Month 2021: Back, Black, and Bi-er

Long time, no see eh? I’ve missed y’all. Grad school was one of the hardest experiences of my life, and these last two semesters put me through it, to put it lightly, but that’s over and done with now. I’m going to take this summer to re-configure my relationship to sex ed work in general, but this feels like a good way to get my feet wet again. This Pride Month in particular has been a lot, so I’m glad I waited until the end of the month to post this.

The last time I wrote about Pride Month was back in 2018, when I was a baby bi and still monogamous. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was still very much invested in the biphobic idea of being validated as a bi person in a heterosexual-appearing relationship. This need for validation obscured my perspective and made me feel that I didn’t really have a place in the community. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had internalized a lot of rejection from the queer community at my undergrad university, most of whom were lesbians and who, for varying reasons, don’t give the time of day to bi women.

As an aside, I don’t know where I’ve landed in the whole “it’s biphobic to not date bi women that date men” conversation, but I do think it’s more nuanced than we want to acknowledge. It might be biphobic, but I also think it’s okay for someone who wants nothing to do with men to refuse to date people that still prioritize them as romantic partners. As I get older I’m just less invested in making people interrogate potentially problematic lines of thought. Unless I’m directly in community with you I’m not gonna spend my time debating this point.

Back to the topic at hand, I felt that I had to be out AND dating a non-man in order for people to let me claim the title of bisexual, but I don’t have to “let” anybody to a damn thing. Identity is weird like that; some of them, like race, are generally inflexible and if I say I’m something no one is going to see me as anything else (Rachel Dolezals of the world notwithstanding). But because sexuality is a spectrum it’s harder for people to understand that it’s more transient and can change between weeks or months let alone years. I don’t believe in the concept of coming out as much anymore either, which definitely shapes this new perspective.

Chalk it up to age and experience, but I care less about who does or doesn’t think my identity is valid. In the past few years, I’ve learned so much about compulsory heterosexuality and higher violence rates experienced by bi people, things that are missed when we spend days on Twitter arguing about the validity of a bi person who primarily dates people of one gender or another. So somebody thinks I’m not a real bisexual because my primary partner is a man…….okay? That has nothing to do with me. I remember going on a date with a woman a few months ago and wondering if I looked queer enough. That thought in particular makes me laugh because most days I look at myself and wonder how anyone thinks I’m straight. Perspective is key and validity is a scam.

I don’t necessarily feel more bisexual than I did in 2018 now that I’ve dated people who aren’t men. They were relationships just like any other, and I don’t think gender dynamics were as big of a deal in those relationships as I thought they would be. It’s funny because I always thought that dating a person who wasn’t a man would unlock some new level of gayness for me, but it didn’t. It was regular relationship stuff, just with another pair of titties and commiserating about period cramps.

Relationships are hard work regardless of gender, and people are capable of doing you dirty regardless of gender too. I’m less focused on labeling and describing every small facet of my identity and just making sure that I’m living in alignment with my goals, values, and priorities. I don’t know what my pride post in 2025 will look like (or if I’ll even be blogging then), but I hope whatever version of myself writes it is living their truth.

Review: Panorama, an Upcoming Memoir by J. Ross Victory

From its opening pages, Panorama, authored by J. Ross Victory, shows the reader that self-growth and self-discovery are not easy journeys to embark on. Positioned as a standalone narrative but also an extension of the author’s memoir Views from the Cockpit, Panorama is a soul-baring look at how one man reckons with identity and healing past wounds, told through a series of narrative vignettes based on the author’s time in South Korea and his life post-return to the United States. His voice is a welcome one to the world of memoirs, as there is a noticeable literary dearth of bisexual Black men openly discussing their challenges and successes in love and life. 

Coming off the heels of recent representation via Love is Blind, the Netflix reality show in which a man named Carlton made a name for himself by going on a hyper-misogynistic rant about being rejected by his fiancée for being bisexual, Black bisexual men have been on the offensive doing damage control. With an essay after the book’s conclusion positing the development of a BSP (bisexual-sapiosexual-pansexual) identity umbrella, Victory’s positioning of his bisexuality within the larger story arc is a needed reminder that hypermasculinity and biphobia do more than just oppress people who are on the receiving end of it; they develop a form of spiritual death in the people who embody them as well.

In talking about his love(s), loss, and the consequences of avoiding pain, Victory seeks to remind readers that our decisions are ours alone to make, and while you cannot undo something once it has been done, you can use that knowledge to grow as a person. Whether that growth is always at another person’s expense is up to us to decide.

While Panorama is better contextualized when read directly alongside Views from the Cockpit, it reads easily on its own once you, the reader, understand that the book drops you in the middle of an existing story. It can be a bit jarring at first because you feel like you’re missing some important background information, but everything that needs to be explained, is, over the course of the book. This kind of structure demonstrates the tension and urgency that Victory feels, due to the stream-of-consciousness narration style at certain points. Within this tension is, to me, the fundamental question the book wants us to answer: “where do we find love?” and its companion, “what do we do with it once we’ve found it?”. 

Panorama does a great job of telling us what NOT to do with love. The major concern that most people have when reading a first person narrative about real life is the risk of an unreliable narrator. We’re only receiving one side of the story so it would stand to reason that the author would want to make himself look better. If that’s the case in Panorama, then the real story behind some of the experiences described in the book must be abhorrent, to say the least. Victory is not a particularly likable character for a decent portion of the book — I often found myself wanting to shake him back to reality or give him an Iyanla Vanzant-esque dragging for his behavior. 

Panorama’s power lies in its nonchalance. On its face it appears to be simply part of a memoir by a Black bisexual man who has chosen to publicly reckon with his misdeeds via his art. And while it is that, it also pushes readers to look at themselves and where they find themselves — politically — in the world. Where is love there? How can we all extend grace to ourselves for what we feel are unforgivable mistakes? Victory doesn’t answer this for readers, obviously. But by sharing his story, after reading, you are left with a need to reach into yourself and see how you can answer those questions. I urge you to pick up a copy of Panorama — and Views from the Cockpit while you’re at it — if you are interested in a Black ex-pat perspective of South Korean life, want to support a Black bisexual male author, or want to know how one man has chosen to search for answers to life’s difficult questions.

Link to Panorama

Link to Views from the Cockpit

Ross Victory’s Website

Instagram: @rossvictoryofficial

National Coming Out Day 2019: My Closet is Actually an Invisible Box

Every year on National Coming Out Day (Oct 11), I have a dilemma. I always wonder if I should tell my story because it doesn’t really have an ending. Or, a cute one at least that makes people feel hopeful and inspired. But in therapy I’ve been pushed more to stand in my truth and be open about who I am because I owe it to myself. Playing small only hurts me-and people who could benefit from what I have to say-in the end. So here goes.

I should preface this by saying that the whole notion of coming out is kinda trash. There are a lot of reasons why people may not want to come out publicly, not least of which is the actual potential for violence. It doesn’t make their identities less valid, nor does it mean they’re trying to be sneaky.

That being said, I guess it makes the most sense to talk about the “thing” that people always think about on National Coming Out Day: Sexual Orientation. I really wanted to write about my journey into sex positivity and how I see myself as less of a sex educator and more of a Sexuality & Pleasure Aficionado but then this post would be an extra 2000 words so. More on that another day.

I’ve written about being bisexual before, but like a lot of identities my relationship to it has changed over time and I never had a true “coming out” so what better time to reflect on that. I first knew i wasn’t straight when I was about 9. I kissed one of my (girl) friends during a sleepover and liked it, a lot. I still had crushes on boys, but I had a crush on her too. I couldn’t really name what I felt but I just knew that I wanted to do all of the things I thought I wanted to do with a boy with her too.

Cut to middle school. I’d been ambivalent about my sexuality for the most part. But then “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry came out, and suddenly it was cool to be into girls? Except, it wasn’t. During that pop culture moment it became abundantly clear to me that as a woman, being interested in other women was only cool at parties or to get the attention of men.

That’s the Bisexual Pride flag, in case you’re not familiar.

Otherwise, being attracted to women for your own enjoyment made you a dyke bitch and that wasn’t something ANYONE wanted to be. I remember hearing the word bisexual for the first time around then and trying to claim it for myself, only to be told I was just a poser saying it to be edgy. That makes me laugh now, but as a 13 year old who didn’t know a single thing about myself or the world, whose identity up to that point had been formed by other people’s opinions of who I should be, I just assumed they were right and let it go.

And then we make it to high school. After a disastrous couple of years marred by the grief of losing my maternal grandmother (the person who had the second biggest influence in raising me after my mom), bad relationships with abusive shitheads, and anxiety attacks that almost kept me from graduating, I met the person who I thought would solve it all for me, my soon-to-be-husband. Did I also mention that I was in the throes of a religious and spiritual crisis about my relationship to Christianity during this point in my life?

When I met him, despite being so young I thought I had finally figured it all out. I didn’t have to worry about my sexual orientation any more. I was dating a man and we had no immediate plans to break up so even if I was still interested in dating women it didn’t matter right? I was straight for all intents and purposes because I had picked a side. You see where this is going.

My freshman year of college I went to a talk by Robyn Ochs, a bisexual activist. It was like the heavens opened up. I guess the whole time I had been looking for permission to admit to myself that I was bisexual and that that was okay? It sounds so obvious in hindsight, but one of her major points was that your relationship status doesn’t invalidate your identity. Cue my 18 year old brain exploding. You mean I can be in a long term relationship with a man and STILL be bisexual!? Color me shocked.

In the years since, I’ve interrogated my relationship to my identity, in part because it really bothers me how much of my identity is ascertained by my romantic proximity to an assumed cisgender, heterosexual man. No one knows the intricacies of my relationship and yet there’s a lot of assumptions made about me because of it. By straight people and other members of the LGBTQ+ community (bi erasure by other queer people is a WHOLE post in and of itself). I dabbled in id’ing as queer for most of college, because it was just nebulous enough that I didn’t think anyone would make me defend myself. Plus I had short hair and a septum ring for a lot of this time period so I just generally fit the aesthetic of a queer liberal arts major.

After graduation, around the time I started Sexology Bae, I began id’ing as bisexual again. I try to avoid being a hypocrite, so I felt that it was doing a disservice to people I was claiming to want to educate or inform to tell them that they should be honest with themselves about needs, wants, and desires when I’m not doing the same!

Identities are as varied as humans are, so I don’t claim to be the One True Bisexual. It’s just that this the most accurate way to define myself, and I felt like Identifying as queer was a reverse flattening of my identity, basically another way to hide without naming who I truly am. So that’s where I am now. I’ve “come out” to myself, the internet, and the people closest to me. And it’s interesting how little a difference it makes in my daily life.

I felt crushed by the weight of not knowing how to name who I was, but I don’t really see it as a “coming out of the closet” story either. I was never really in a closet, more like an invisible box. And I still find myself in that box, mostly when I’m dealing with hyper-religious family members (or coworkers) and decide to pick my battles. But being read as straight isn’t a privilege to me because straightness isn’t something I aspire to. That being said, not being read as visibly queer in most arenas of my life affords me a certain level of privacy which depending on context can be a blessing or a curse.