Bi pride & healing in community
Did you know bisexual women have the worst health outcomes and yet we make up the biggest subset of the queer community?
On the first day of Pride month, I was invited to speak at Austin’s biggest non-corporate community Pride event — Queerbomb. This is an honor I can hardly fathom, especially since I didn’t believe I was “allowed” to be queer for the first half of my life, and then I struggled to feel queer “enough.”
I wanted to share my speech here, with some updates and observations.
Queerbomb 2024 Remarks
I’m Becky Bullard, the founder of Democrasexy, an organization that’s all about making democracy sexy so more people do it. So usually I talk about civic engagement and pleasure activism but I’m not gonna talk about that tonight.
Before I get started, where are my bisexuals and pansexuals at?? [At this point an ENORMOUS cheer went up from the crowd, which genuinely shocked me. Bi invisibility is so real but we are LEGION!]
Okay, I have bad news for us and I have good news for us. I’m gonna start with the bad news.
But first, who has re-watched Sex and the City lately? I have been binge-watching it, and I recently saw the episode where they just shit on bisexuals for 30 minutes. It made me so mad. But it also made some things make sense.
That episode came out the year after I came out to myself as bisexual. It’s hard to overstate the impact that Sex and the City had on the culture at that time – for example, vibrator sales jumped 700% after the vibrator episode.
So as a 20-year-old baby queer, I was really absorbing Carrie Bradshaw’s opinion that bisexuals don’t exist… and I couldn’t help but wonder… did *I* not exist?
Fast forward to a study that came out recently. After following straight, lesbian, and bisexual women for decades, they found that the bisexual women had the worst health outcomes of all three groups. Lesbian women died 20% sooner than straight women, but bisexual women die 37% sooner than straight women. And this study disproportionately consisted of white and cisgender women, so we can imagine how much worse these statistics are for BIPOC and trans and intersex people.
There is an entire field of medicine, called psychoneuroimmunology, that studies the way psychological stress, including lying and keeping secrets and hiding parts of ourselves, makes people sick.
I spent 17 years married to a cisgender man. I hid my bisexuality from my family and from most people I knew for most of that time. Also, I am very straight-passing, so most people assume I am straight. This made it really difficult for me to feel connected to my bisexuality most of the time, and I also felt like I wasn’t truly known as my full self. Not queer enough for queer spaces, hiding in plain sight in straight spaces.
Two years ago this week, I woke up one morning and my body was numb from the waist down. I could still walk and, like, cum (I made sure to check on that right away. Shout out to the Sex and the City vibrator episode!). But it felt kind of like I was wearing invisible tights all the time — everything was muted.
After many MRIs and doctor visits, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. (Where are my other chronically ill and disabled hotties at??)
MS is an auto-immune disease, which means my body is attacking itself. I would never blame myself for getting sick, but I wonder if decades of not being able to exist as my full self outwardly caused my body to turn against me inwardly, too.
So if hiding and lying and contorting ourselves to fit into spaces that weren’t built for us makes us sick, I believe spaces where we can exist as our full selves – like Queerbomb – will heal us.
I have a hunch that one of the reasons lesbians have better health outcomes than bisexual women is… well probably because they have more orgasms, for starters… but also because lesbians are really good at building community — creating their own spaces to be fully themselves.
I have not found good bisexual community, so I want to create it. I’m excited to announce the first meet-up of a new group just for bisexuals and pansexuals. I’m calling it “Bi for Now.” Come hang out with me and other bisexuals on Friday, June 21 for happy hour. Do it for your health.
Follow me on Instagram @democrasexy and send me a DM saying “bi for now” if you want an invite. Or go to democrasexy.com to sign up for my email list.
I love you, bisexual and pansexual babes, and I’m excited to heal together.
Update!
This past Friday was the first ever Bi for Now meet-up, and I was overwhelmed by the response. The room I rented had a capacity of 65, so I set up an RSVP link and we ended up on a waitlist! I couldn’t believe it.
We had folks of all genders and ages and races, but one thing everyone had in common was a deep appreciation for being in a space where they truly belonged. I heard from several folks who came to their sexuality late in life, had never before felt like they had a safe place to exist as their full selves, had never encountered a space that felt like it was really for them.
I heard from a woman who had been to meet-ups for lesbians where bisexuals were openly disparaged and mocked, and it had made her feel so othered. She was grateful to belong.
I heard from a woman who was also chronically ill, but she’d begun feeling better ever since she started being more open about her sexuality.
I heard from folks who were experiencing Bi for Now as their first-ever queer event, and their giddy energy was so sweet and enlivening.
As an event host, there is a lot you can do to set the tone and intention, but once folks start showing up it becomes a co-creation and it’s a little bit out of your hands. The open-heartedness that I witnessed in that room was truly beautiful — I think everyone recognized what a vulnerable thing it could be to show up to something like this, and everyone worked together to create a safe and welcoming environment.
Different tables even developed their own conversation prompts for whenever newcomers arrived, like, “Do you identify as bisexual or pansexual and what was your journey to that identity?” or even the very wholesome “What is your favorite HEB?” (a very Texan conversation-starter).
On the topic of bisexual vs. pansexual identity… I have gone back and forth over the past several years on which to call myself. After many an internet rabbit hole on the meanings of each of these words, I ultimately decided that they pretty much mean the same thing to me and so I use them interchangeably for myself. Not everyone agrees with this! Which is fine. My only fear with using the word “bisexual” instead of “pansexual” is that people might think I’m excluding trans or non-binary people, but that isn’t the case.
As this book I’m reading explains, a gay rights activist in 1869 came up with the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual”:
In the etymology of [Karl-Maria] Kertbeny’s “heterosexual,” “hetero” comes from the Greek heteros which means another, while homos means same, and both are melded with the Latin word sexus. Not long after this, bi, or two, started to be used to refer to people who had both homosexual and heterosexual desires. A way that bisexual researchers often talk about this is that the bi in bisexual means two, but the two are not men and women, they are same and other. (emphasis is mine)
So when I say I’m bisexual, I mean I’m attracted to my same gender as well as other genders.
I’ve had lots of discussions about the bi-pan debate over the last several weeks. One thing we all seem to agree on is that no matter what word you choose, the fact that the language of identity is constantly changing prompts us to be in a perpetual state of self-examination, and that’s a good thing.
It’s why I wanted to name my little bi/pan group “Bi for Now” — as a nod to the idea that our perceptions of ourselves and our cultural definitions are always evolving. That and I love a good play on words.
Something else I’ve learned in my research is that bisexuals make up the biggest part of the queer community BY FAR. We are nearly 3/5 of the LGBTQIA+ population!
So as Pride month winds down, I want all my fellow bisexual and pansexual baddies to know that not only are you not alone, you are part of an “invisible majority” in the queer community, and you absolutely deserve to claim your identity and take up space. YOU BELONG.
Stay tuned for future Bi for Now meet-ups — I will even be doing some virtual ones for folks who have a hard time leaving the house or who aren’t in Austin. Sign up for my email list at Democrasexy.com or send me a DM on Instagram if you want to be notified of the next meet-up!
I did not know that bi people are such a large part of the LGBTQIA+ population! I love you and all of them! 🌈🌈🌈