autismserenity

if you want to see what bi erasure looks like, i found a most excellent example while googling whether Alan Rickman was bi. 

https://www.datalounge.com/thread/5689098–i-ve-heard-conflicting-stories-about-rickman.-

it is a thread, from 2007, on a gay men’s bulletin board, in which people try to determine what his sexuality is, and particularly, whether or not he’s gay. 

it’s such a beautiful illustration of how this works. 

how bi erasure works is that there’s simply not a space in your head for what bi people look like. for our experiences. for the possibility that someone is bi at all. 

and thus, when you talk about things like… celebrities, history, politics, your new co-worker, your own sexuality, anything… there’s simply no space for the possibility of bisexuality. 

which then snowballs, because it means that everybody reading it or hearing it gets the same picture, a picture in which bisexuality simply does not exist. no matter whether we intellectually know better or not. 

i said in the tags on my last post that my fantasy had been to get rich and pay alan rickman to read the entirety of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Stephenson also has a (related) book called Anathem. in it, he talks about how we all have certain “cards” in our heads, with images of what the world is like. those cards determine what we can think about, what conclusions we can form about the world around us. 

this is part of why media representation is so incredibly important: if the images in your head of young Black men are always of criminals, or the images of lesbians are always of white femmes, it shapes what you can believe about yourself, how you feel about yourself, what you can assume about the people around you, your politics, just everything about how you interact in the world. 

so, bi erasure is important. especially in the queer community, because this is where us bisexuals belong and where we go for support, and it is really psychologically damaging to instead go to magazines or message boards or books or tv shows or movies or people that are supposed to be part of our “family”, and find that we still don’t exist. 

anyway. here are some of the highlights: 

they mention every single possibility, including asexuality very briefly, except for bisexuality. it is amazing, to watch people essentially debate whether he’s into men or women, and never even register the possibility that those are not the only options. 
“He’s messing with my gaydar because he pings, then he doesn’t, then he does again.” gee i don’t know what that could POSSIBLY be….

 also notable: despite the lip service to asexuality, there’s a constant assumption that he has to be having sex with somebody. “Girls or boys, whomever he’s fucking, he’s discreet.” 
just like bisexuals, genderqueers don’t exist. in case you were wondering.

“If somebody cornered me in an alley and held a knife to my throat demanding to know whether Rickman was straight or gay, I would say gay just to be on the safe side”… 
“he’s straight… he has a long-term female partner.” OH OK MYSTERY SOLVED.

TL;DR if you are gay, and especially if you are straight, and the question of whether someone else is gay or straight comes up, please do us a solid and say two little words: “or bisexual!”