“But how can I be bisexual if I haven’t been with any girls?” That’s the question Belén, 37, has been pondering for nearly two decades. He knew from his first summer at college that in addition to men, he was also attracted to women. Now he knows he fell in love once and it wasn’t reciprocated, but he always thought “it was nonsense” on his part. , that maybe it’s because being a feminist had something to do with or even liking girls “to fulfill the usual patriarchal fantasy”. “The years go by and we go backwards, there is shame, doubts, questioning…” he says. Last Monday he attended his first meeting of bisexual people, in Madrid. And when she introduced herself as “Belén, bisexual,” she got excited.
“I’m just in that moment saying ‘okay, yes I am, this is my truth.’ And it’s like a weight was lifted off my shoulders, but it took me a long time to get there,” says the woman, who recognizes that the fact of not having had sexual and emotional relationships with of women contributed to making her process difficult. “It seems like if you haven’t done it, you can’t call yourself that. It’s a constant pressure that’s everywhere and we get it directly. told my psychologist that I was bisexual, she told me that it wasn’t possible because I hadn’t been with a woman.”
The story of Bethlehem is no exception. Many bisexual people are used to receiving similar comments, to being questioned about their sexual or romantic practices or relationships in a conception of bisexuality which demonstrates to what extent this identity is hyper-vigilated. Being invalidated for who they are if they don’t conform strictly to what others assume bisexuality is is a shared experience that causes many to question themselves, feel distrustful and almost an imposter.
There’s nothing more bisexual than doubting whether you can truly call yourself bisexual. There is more evidence in this doubt and wondering whether you have enough points on your card than in the points themselves.
Elisa Coll
It’s a kind of identity border policing. And those who patrol them, who think they can decide who is or is not legitimized to be bisexual, come from both heterosexual and LGTBI backgrounds, the consulted voices agree. And there are quite a few bisexual people who point out what the community itself is sometimes like. weird which made them feel that they were not fully part of the group while at the same time the usual prejudices that associate this sexual orientation with vice, promiscuity or confusion fell on them.
“I’ve had many discussions and meetings where someone will jump in and say ‘well, I don’t know if I’m bisexual because I’ve never had relationships with people like that.’ And there is nothing more bisexual than doubting whether you can really call yourself bisexual. There is more evidence in this doubt, it is more of an identification with the community. bi this constant doubt and question of whether you have enough points on your map, rather than the points themselves,” summarizes writer and activist Elisa Coll.
The author of Bisexual resistance: maps for livable dissent (Melusina) alludes to a “brutal examination” by which it seems that only those who do it “check in certain boxes, one can recognize oneself as bisexual” and maintains that, even if these check “they can help someone feel legitimized”, the reality “is that they are a trap” and they work “in the very short term”, because in the end “if you stay too long with one type of partner , it will start to appear on the horizon the label of lesbian, gay or straight and you will be classified as if your identity depends on the sex of your partner It turns out that we are feminists for questioning romantic love and. in our case, it seems that the couple is the center of our lives.
The pressure to prove
Carmen, a member of the Biejales collective, remembers a few moments when coming out didn’t raise any questions, a lot of questions: “How many partners have I had, if I slept with a woman, why did I come out?” so late. I remember some lesbian friends who referred to those who were bisexual without having had relationships with girls as “lip service bisexuals.” » All of this led him to go through a long and tedious process. “It was hard for me because I felt like I was occupying a space that didn’t belong to me. I even thought he did it for attention or to be more coolwhich doesn’t make sense, but there you go…” he admits.
“When I came out, it wasn’t because I had a relationship with a man. I realized it was bi long before the first time, and if I had never met one, I still would bi“. Jordi Molinari says it clearly, who called himself heterosexual until the age of 31 and after approaching feminism and the LGTBI community, he ended up understanding that he had always been bisexual without realizing it. realize, a path that has not been without obstacles. “We question ourselves because it’s as if we had to prove something, show a sort of map and be very clear about what we really are,” he illustrates.
A resident of Barcelona and a member of the bisexual men’s group Señores Bi-en, Jordi quickly recalls some comments made to him at that time: “There were people who told me that of course I was going to try men because I haven’t. He was successful with women. There was also a person who, seeing on my cell phone who I was talking to Tinderhe even questioned me, telling me that all the conversations took place with women and not men.
Ultimately, we’ve always been told that we need to be equally sexually, romantically, and emotionally attracted to men and women, which is also very exclusive among non-binary people, but the reality is that diversity is huge.
Jordi Molinari
However, if anything has helped him, it’s dismantling these common conceptions about bisexuality that come from the outside. It was, he said, “like a button” that “freed” him. “Ultimately, we were always told that we should be sexually, romantically and emotionally attracted to men and women equally, which is also very exclusionary with non-binary people, but the reality is that the diversity is enormous and they should not attract you in the same way or with the same intensity. There are people who only attach emotional ties to one sex and sexually to another sex and remain everything. also bisexual,” he explains.
For Elisa Coll, what is interesting is to transcend practices and not reduce bisexuality “to a particularity of desire” but to understand that it is an identity crossed by other elements. “We are much more defined by the state of questioning, the feeling of betrayal, of coming out late or of complicity with the community than by attraction to this or that. Ultimately, bisexuality is tolerated as something individual and depoliticized, but it is not understood that there is a whole structure, biphobia, that affects whether you are aware of being bisexual or not. “It’s not just attraction, it’s violence and shared experiences.”
From mental health to isolation
These dynamics of hypervigilance are not trivial for those who suffer from them. Not only because they end up delaying and hindering the processes of personal recognition and acceptance, but also because “they endanger our mental health”, in the words of Coll, who also emphasizes ” isolation” accordingly: “As part of weirdthe most valuable tool we have is to network, but careful consideration means that until one is absolutely sure, it is. bidoes not approach communities. However, you can never be sure, like any other identity. And if you ultimately find out that this is not the case, nothing happens. There are those who say that we would agree with those who claim that bisexuality is a phase, well, look, nothing happens, we can’t live with that level of demands on ourselves. ”
For Belén, the most damaging effect is “having left aside a part of me that is very important.” “For me, I have always evolved in environments hetero“It was easier to focus on relationships with men and not explore anything else, but of course it was easier at the cost of ignoring how I felt and my own identity,” the woman points out. who comes out. out of the closet for two years, after a breakup full of biphobia: “I was going to marry him and I thought I should tell him that I was also attracted to women, but he reacted by calling me degenerate and perverted . “It took me a long time to recover, but here I am, returning to the world as I am.”
Belén looks back to how she got here, but she mostly looks forward. “I have a four-year-old niece and when she says to me, ‘I can have a girlfriend or a boyfriend,’ tears come to my eyes. It is very important to be able to feel free without being judged. I wish I could have had that because maybe this girl I admired so much in my class would have been something else.
