drawing bisexuality back into the picture

excerpt from Drawing Bisexuality Back into the Picture: How Bisexuality Fits into LGBT Legal Structure Ten Years After Bisexual Erasure, published in the Cardozo Journal of Law & Gender.

[I]f I am not free and if I am not entitled equal to heterosexuals and homosexuals then homosexual men and women have joined with the dominant heterosexual culture in the tyrannical pursuit of E Pluribus Unum and I a bisexual woman committed to cultural pluralism and, therefore to sexual pluralism, can only say, you better watch your back!
- June Jordan, On Bisexuality and Cultural Pluralism, in Affirmative Acts

INTRODUCTION

In 2000, Kenji Yoshino published a paper exploring the social erasure of bisexuality. He introduced the paper by empirically proving that bisexuality was invisible through a quick survey of popular news sources that featured volumes more articles about homosexuality than bisexuality. Once he showed that bisexuality was invisible, he made sure to distinguish between the incidental invisibility of bisexuality, perhaps because of the low number of bisexuals, and its deliberate erasure. Yoshino theorized that monosexuals—individuals who are
attracted to only one gender, such as heterosexuals and homosexuals—created an epistemic contract to erase bisexuality in social culture. He argues that monosexuals erase bisexuals in three ways—class erasure, individual erasure, and delegitimization—and proposes that monosexuals have three reasons for participating in and encouraging this erasure: “1) an interest in the stability of sexual orientation categories; 2) an interest in the primacy of sex as a diacritical characteristic; and 3) an interest in the preservation of monogamy.”

My article, written on the tenth anniversary of Yoshino’s seminal piece, is not an update on whether bisexuality has gained social visibility in the last ten years or an examination of whether invisibility is still maintained by a contract among monosexuals. Rather, I begin from the position that bisexuality is invisible in legal culture, like in Yoshino’s social culture, and pose two hypotheses for this invisibility. First, I believe that while Yoshino’s analysis retains viability when
analogized to the legal context—which he explores within sexual harassment jurisprudence—I propose that bisexuality is inherently invisible to the law, beyond the reach of deliberate erasure. A plaintiff’s bisexuality is only at issue in the law where there has been an affirmative outing. That is, in cases where sexuality is at issue, plaintiffs are presumed monosexual, and must either declare their own bisexuality or have it found for them. I explore this legal invisibility in two contexts in Part I of this article.


Second, I argue that where bisexuality is legally relevant it has been erased within the legal culture because it is complicated and muddles legal arguments that depend upon the binary of sexuality. Yoshino addresses this reliance on the binary of sexuality as a fundamental part of homosexual investment in stabilizing sexual orientation by erasing bisexuality, but I argue that this factor is much more prominent in legal culture than the social context. In Part II of this article, I use the suspect class analysis under the Equal Protection Clause to show how bisexuality
complicates legal arguments, and propose two solutions through which bisexuality can be introduced into the Equal Protection analysis without compromising sexual orientation’s suspect classification.

The erasure of bisexuality, representative of all sexual identities between 100% homosexual and 100% heterosexual puts the fight recognition of sexual and gender minorities at a disadvantage. Not acknowledging sexualities along a continuum, weakens arguments for granting rights to and preventing discrimination against the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community. I conclude with the proposition that inclusion of bisexuality, and indeed of all non-binary identities, is crucial for the LGBT civil rights movement.

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frank ocean, being bi, and other continuums

from a service I gave at my unitarian universalist congregation. 

Last week, R&B singer Frank Ocean rippled the music industry and the LGBT community by posting a letter on his blog, sharing that his first love was a man. He published the letter in anticipation of the debut of his first full-length album; days later, he performed his single Bad Religion on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, singing lyrics about which we all now knew the background story.

Frank Ocean is the first major R&B singer to explicitly talk about being in a same-sex relationship. But I don't want to talk about the gendered politics of the R&B and hip-hop world. I'm not equipped to, nor would it benefit to add my voice to the thousands of voices in that arena after his announcement last week.  No, today I want to talk about what I talk about best: how Ocean's announcement made me feel. And hopefully, by talking about my feelings, I can explore a few things with you today about continuums of gender and sexuality.

I begin with a brief, but hopefully not dry historical framing. In the middle of the last century, Alfred Kinsey began releasing the findings of his extensive interviews with thousands of men and women who shared with him the details of their every sexual and romantic counter, every dream and fantasy. So surprising were the revelations uncovered by these interviews that Kinsey had to create a new platform from which to talk about human sexuality: the Kinsey scale. Refined and or rejected by hundreds of scholars, the Kinsey scale placed human sexuality on a seven-point continuum: from 0 to 6, 0 begin exclusively heterosexual, 6 being exclusively homosexual, and 3 being "equally heterosexual and homosexual, or bisexual."

Revelatory yet flawed, the Kinsey scale has become a ubiquitous measure of sexuality in the American LGBT movement. Further expansion and revision of the scale have produced the Storm Sexuality Axis, which plotted sexuality along two axes, and the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, which allowed for the dimension of time and compares sexual experience with emotional attraction and self identification.  

Aside from the famous Kinsey scale, Alfred Kinsey’s other most important contribution to the modern LGBT movement (and human sexuality in general) was the revelation that so many people were bisexual! According to Kinsey’s research, approximately half of the people he interviewed were exclusively heterosexual, another 3% were exclusively homosexual, meaning that almost half of his subjects could be identified as bisexual. His scale did not differentiate between sexual and emotional attraction versus experience, but the results were nonetheless shocking.  

The most modern study of bisexual invisibility, out of the LGBT Center in San Francisco, found that approximately three times as many women identified as bisexual than lesbian, and about half as many men identified as bisexual as gay. When the question was expanded to attraction as opposed to identification or experience, a 2005 study found that 20% of all respondents expressed having been attracted to people of more than one gender.

I have a personal stake in these findings, identifying as bisexual myself (and I suspect that many self-identified bisexuals would feel the same way) but clearly, the literature shows that WE ARE EVERYWHERE!

But back to my feelings. When Frank Ocean published his letter, I had two simultaneously deep and sharp stabs of emotion. The first was gratitude and I will return to my gratitude in a moment. The second emotion was fear: a dark and clouded fear that made me wince with sympathy. For though I do not know what Frank Ocean was thinking as he wrote his letter or the words to the songs that would necessitate the letter, I do know what I would have felt, for I have been there. The closet (for that is what we have chosen to call the state in which we are all assumed to be heterosexual, or zeroes on the Kinsey scale) is a stifling, but safe place to reside. Another term for the closet is "covering," erasing that part of you that makes you different from the expected norm, your sexuality, your gender, your race. Removing your cover, stepping out of the metaphorical closet - you are deliberately unveiling that which makes you different.

We are all different from the expected norm in some way, and some of us in many ways. We are all in the closet, we all "cover" something. We make the daily calculus whether the closet, the cover, is either safer or more stifling.  The math depends on our environment, our circumstances, our privilege, our community, our inner strength, our will-power, our resources.

Here is the other dimension to the sympathetic fear I felt when I read Frank Ocean's letter: when your distinction, your difference, what you cover, is invisible to the naked eye, you will be coming out of the closet, uncovering your differences, your entire life. As long as there are those who assume same-ness, there will come moments when we must assert difference, take off the cover.  And each uncovering requires the same calculus, the same strength, the same fear. I am sure that Frank Ocean’s letter was not the first time he told this story, nor will it be the last. And each telling, each uncovering, will be accompanied by fear, trust, relief, expectation.

And so I return to my gratitude for Frank Ocean, for taking off his cover for us in this moment. For trusting us to see one facet of his life. I am also grateful to Frank Ocean for what he didn’t say. He didn’t say “I am gay.” Instead, he told us a story about his life. He uncovered a piece of himself that was previously hidden and asked us to trust him, asked us to love this fuller version of himself. Asked us not to judge, not to label, but to love.

I wanted to talk about bisexuality today because I think we need to understand that we have a flawed view of human sexuality, one that can be made more whole by understanding sexuality along a continuum and understanding that many more of us are standing along the line than are standing on the endpoints. So too for gender identity and expression: there is no one standing in the end zones, no perfect specimens of “man” or “woman.” We are all on the field, expressing our gender identity as best we can, wearing jeans and baking cupcakes, reading love stories and collecting flowers, betting on races and having great table manners.
What Frank Ocean’s story really teaches us is to love. If we agree that many of us are “covering” something, our sexuality, our desires, our true gender expression, then we must always be open to the uncovering, the revealing, the revelation of someone’s true self.  In order to fully affirm the worth and dignity of every person, we must treasure the uncovering as a symbol of trust and return it with the love it deserves.

For indeed, we all experience our own uncovering. For many, it may be leaving the traditional closet. To friends, to family, to ones that we love, to the entire R&B community, to the entire internet.

For others, uncovering may start with finding a community like Bell Street, a community in which you don’t need to cover at all, or maybe just cover less than normal.

When I was 20 I came out to my two closest friends. I felt safe and loved and vulnerable and in a moment of spontanaeity, I lifted up my cover and let them see a truer, deeper me, a more whole me. In his letter, Frank Ocean talks of sitting in a car, telling this man he loved him, and feeling as if he were at the edge of a cliff.  I too sat in a car, those years ago. I too was at the edge of a cliff.

Frank Ocean's words: I sat there and told my friend how I felt. I wept as the words left my mouth. I grieved for them, knew I could never take them back for myself. He patted my back. He said kind things. He did his best. But he wouldn't admit the same. I felt like I'd only imagine reciprocity for years. Now imagine being thrown off a cliff.  No, I wasn't on a cliff. I was still in my car telling myself it was gonna be fine and to take deep breaths. I took the deep breaths and carried on.  UPDATE 5.16 - I've been meaning to add this article to the site. The giants whose shoulders Frank Ocean stands on: http://www.sfbg.com/noise/2013/02/13/beyond-frank-ocean-la-pe%C3%B1a-takes-deeper-look-hip-hop-inclusivity. 

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willpower as a finite resource

reposted from offbeathome.com. 

We moved two weeks ago. I usually like moving, but this move was particularly hard. We loved our place, but our landlord was selling it and couldn't guarantee that the new owners would let us continue to rent. So we moved, and I found myself feeling taxed.

Moving, I found, is a willpower-depleting series of decisions and self-control. I'm not even going to talk about FINDING a place to live in the first place. That process has its own place in the valley of the damned. For me, it was just the move. As we packed, we purged a lot of our belongings. In the first few days we donated six bags of clothes and nine bags of books. We recycled paper, metal, and glass. We sold and gave away furniture and bikes.

Some people think we have a finite amount of willpower each day. Some days we make big decisions, some days we make little decisions, some days we make a lot of decisions, some days we make only a few. If we use up our finite amount of willpower early in the day, we might not have enough later to make the "better" decision or exercise our will-power.

This theory has been used to show how hard it can be for people to break the cycle of poverty. Using extreme self-control to cut costs and making heart-breaking decisions for your family every day can deplete your willpower very easily, making it more difficult to make those (already) impossible choices, applying for yet another job, or thinking about going back to school.

And as the move got closer, my willpower frayed.

"Do we want to save this (old book/slightly cracked picture frame/ripped blanket/unopened box of pencils) or should we donate it?"

"FUCKING CHUCK IT OUT!"

I was completely surprised and rather disappointed by my vehement nonchalance. I am not a wasteful person. We are environmentalists and live a relatively thrifty life. But we threw out a LOT of stuff. And each time we did, I felt guilty. And the guilt sapped my willpower. And then we'd have to make another decision. And we'd throw something ELSE out. More guilt. Less willpower. Another decision.

Like the sneaky hate spiral, the guilty-willpower vortex spun out of control until I had a breakdown. Not fun. But when I emerged from the other side, refreshed by a night of NOT packing, I realized what was going on. We were making a TON of decisions and I needed to save my willpower for the big ones. For example, what are we getting on our moving-day pizza?

I needed to realize that it was OK to throw out that picture frame (totally crappy anyway), if it meant I could make better, self-affirming decisions later on. My life as an environmentalist is not disaffirmed by each thing I don't reuse/recycle; rather, it is affirmed by my long-term commitment to greener living. Throwing out a frame doesn't erase a lifetime of recycling. One bad decision doesn't erase all the good decisions. In fact, it makes the good decisions easier.

So, next time you've had a hard day and want to chuck the newspaper in the trash instead of walking to the recycling bin 5 feet away, do it! It just may allow you to make a fabulous decision the next day.

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