Bisexual Identity and Heterocommitment

img borrowed from: http://www.indypendent.org/

I have a very lovely friend named Erin that I was able to meet face to face recently. I actually met her through my partner who had been friends with her through the internet for years and years. My partner had been trying to get me to become friends with Erin for some time because she insisted we had a lot in common, especially feminism and our views on the topic. There was no reason other than laziness that kept me from doing so for so long. When we did become friends, I realized my partner had been right. This girl is amazing. Erin is a bisexual woman who recently married her male partner. She wrote this amazing article about bisexual identity and heterocommitment which is something I've been questioning for some time now. What does happen to your bisexuality when you are in a committed relationship? Do you still have yearnings for someone of the same sex or opposite sex and how do you deal with that if so? I'm going to repost her article below - I highly suggest reading the rest of her blog too as she is an extremely intelligent person, and she brings up some excellent points about being a bisexual woman trying to stay true to her identity.

"Bisexual identity and heterocommitment

My last entry, about marriage and straight privilege, garnered two nice comments, both of which employed the term “straight ally” and implied that I am one. This is in spite of the fact that I spent a whole paragraph discussing the fact that I am not straight. I don’t think that this is because my commenters lack reading comprehension skills, but because sexual orientation somehow aside, “straight ally” seems to be the role I’ve stepped into. Is there really another term for a woman who believes in marriage equality and is married to a man?

When I was finishing my MA in Women’s and Gender Studies, I wrote my master’s project on feminist approaches to substance abuse treatment, which was interesting enough, but which was not really a research interest of mine; I chose that topic because it was relevant to a job I was applying for (and didn’t get). If I had it to do all over again, I would most definitely do my project – or maybe an entire thesis – on bisexual women who marry or otherwise commit to men, and what becomes of their queer identity. I know a LOT of women (and some men) who used to identify as bisexual but who now, in heterocommitted relationships, identify as straight. I suppose it’s easy enough to chalk this up to the bisexual until graduation phenomenon; although the article I linked to there is about a study that debunked that myth, it doesn’t seem like a myth to me at all.

I went through a period of being intensely angry about bisexuals renouncing their queer identity. “If my family were sucked off the face of the earth, I would never date men again,” one woman told me, only to say a few years later, after she’d met the man that she would marry, “I’m done with that part of my life.” How dare these people sell out this way! How dare they prove right all the bisexuality deniers – both straight and gay – who insist that bisexuality is just a phase or period of confusion! I’ve mellowed since then, allowing both for the fact that sexual orientation can be fluid over time and that, really, it’s none of my goddamned business how people identify. But I remain fascinated by this transition, and curious about how people negotiate it. For many of them, it doesn’t seem like a negotiation at all, just something that gradually shifts. But it hasn’t shifted for me, not a bit, and I don’t think it will. So I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be married to a man and to still identify as bi.

Why is it even important to me, when I just stood up in front of almost 100 people and announced that I planned to happily spend the rest of my life in a heterosexual relationship? It’s important because even though I am in a long-term hetero relationship, I refuse to erase that part of my life. I came out – repeatedly, because it’s easy for people to conveniently “forget” that you’re bi during the times that you’re in in a hetero relationship – and it sucked. I came out to parents, friends, employers, and classrooms of fellow students. And I have loved women. And if someday I find myself single again – hopefully at a very old age, after a long and wonderful marriage – it’s entirely possible that I will love a woman again. So I can’t bring myself to say that I’m straight, when I am so very definitely not.

So, I am married and I am bi. And I feel that it is important that I not allow that part of my identity to be erased, that I not let people assume that because I have married a man, I have become straight. I feel the need to keep waving my little queer flag, to be living proof that for some of us, bisexuality is permanent. It was not an experiment, I did not just need to “meet the right man” to straighten me out. But even as I continue to embrace this identity, there is a sad sense of separateness and disconnectedness from the LGBT community; is there even a place for me there, other than as a “straight ally”? I like this quote from an Utne Reader article about postmodern queer identity:

Still, being a married bisexual person “does put you in a position of privilege,” write Marshall Miller and Dorian Solot in Anything That Moves (No. 20, 1999). “Now what are you going to do about everybody else?” they ask. “How can you practice responsible ownership of that privilege?” They offer four ideas: Stay visible; fight for all relationships and families to be treated equally in your workplace; practice good marital status etiquette—be sensitive to the fact that not everyone else can get married; and see yourself as part of the family diversity movement.

I find that incredibly affirming, especially the part about staying visible. What my issue is, really, is that I feel unsure as to whether or not I’m even entitled to consider myself queer anymore. Never mind who I’m attracted to (I’m definitely bi by that metric); can I be married and queer at the same time? Because I’ve known a whoooooole lot of queer folks who’ve gotten straight-married, and nobody is still identifying this way — or if they are, they aren’t talking about it. They have quite happily embraced the straight ally role. And I am still trying to find some space – in the LGBT community, and in my own mind – where I can be out and proud and married to a dude and living a life steeped in hetero privilege. It is a strange no-person’s land, seemingly, and I wish I didn’t feel quite so alone here."

-http://volvita.wordpress.com/