Marrying Bi

Both Jack and I are bisexual. Briefly put, this means that both Jack and I are queer people who find ourselves attracted to both our and other genders. It just so happened that one of our party is a guy and the other is a girl.

The privilege of passing for a straight couple is a strange, strange thing. I look at Jack and myself and I see two bisexual people in a relationship, a relationship between two queer people. Our genders mean, though, that we all too often get read as a straight couple.

I remember walking through the mall hand-in-hand with my girlfriend years ago: the stares, the frowns, the double-takes. Factor Jack into the equation, and now people barely look twice. If they comment at all, it's not "Whoo! Lesbians!" or "Ugh, that's not right." It's "You two look so cute together." There's definitely a tremendous amount of privilege that accompanies that reading, but there's also a huge sense of negation. It puts me in the place of being caught between the invalidation of bisexual erasure and the unasked-for but given safety net of privilege given to people assumed to be straight. Even now, I find myself feeling unsure of how to think about us.

Is a relationship between two queer people a queer relationship if it can be read as straight and given straight privilege? What defines queer relationships, the people in them or the assumptions made about them by others?

But since gender and sex are both socially created systems of classification, and my bisexual identity is reliant on these social constructs, this all begins to feel like a struggle between a multitude of phantoms.

I wrote about this earlier this month and received some commentary. One person wrote,

• idk if folks mistake you for straight and then bestow privilege upon you for that mistake like it's not your fault they can't rationalize us except as exceptions tho i think it's important to recognize that privilege when it's given to us because it necessarily changes our perspectives relative to other queer fol y'all's queer as rainbows and no het jerk can take that from you

Another wrote,

• You two are a secret weapon... lure in non-allies with the outward appearance of heteronormativity, and then after they've drank tea with you and started to love you, blow their minds and open their hearts with the fact that you're queer. That's some jedi-level-sh@t you've got going on there

So those are some things to think about.

#wedding #bi #Jack