It’s something that I’ve been aware of since I became aware of my bisexuality: Bi erasure. That thing going around today where people are poo-pooing bisexuality and bisexuals as not being real, i.e., we didn’t pick a side and like we’re supposed to. Hang with me for a few.
I’d spent an afternoon having very torrid sex with a gay guy and, giving the devil his due, it was some of the best sex I’d with a guy and in a while. So good that, at one point, I had thought that if I hadn’t known that I was in bed with a guy, I could easily believe that there was a girl with me and, um, he was better in bed than some of the girls I’d been having sex with.
A few hours later, we’re both worn out and sated and he says – and in a rather self-deprecating way, “I guess you’re going back to your boyfriend now, huh?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend but I do kinda have a girlfriend,” I said – and it was the truth.
“Oh. What’s his name? Maybe I know him,” he says.
“You mean what’s her name, don’t you?” I asked.
It took about a second for my question to hit his brain; he went from looking like someone had stolen his lunch money to looking like he’d just been shot or something and it took another second for him to be able to say that there was no way that I had a girl as a girlfriend because I had to be gay and like he was. Now, this wasn’t something I hadn’t heard before because I could tell someone that I went both ways and… disbelief on top of great surprise. I had to be gay; why wasn’t I just admitting that I was?
This guy is now having a fit because now he can’t believe that he slept with a guy who wasn’t gay. He’s going off on me and… I’m kinda tickled watching him but when I could get a word in I said, “Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.”
He, um, got over it but this was about the time when I’d really gotten tired of people telling me that I wasn’t what I said I was and knew myself to be. As I’ve said before, you hear this enough and you either let it keep fucking with you or… you ignore it. I hear what you’re saying (because I’ve heard it too many times before) but if you don’t believe me, that’s not my problem. I mean, it used to be: What, are you calling me a liar? Them’s fighting words! I would realize that I was getting into arguments and fights over… nothing, when you get right down to it.
It’s not my fault that you don’t believe that I’m bisexual. Like or hate me, I am what I am and while you might think that I’m in denial of being gay, I can assure you that I’m not because if I was, um, duh, I’d be gay. Seriously, what part of “I like girls and pussy, too” didn’t you hear and are not believing? I knew why, though: It was the ongoing belief that people are either straight or gay and someone who was both, well, who does that and why would someone want both?
Um, ah, because believe it or not, there are people like me who wants both because it works for us. You can stand or sit there and give yourself a very sore throat trying to tell me that I can’t possibly be what I say I am and… it’s not going to change anything because when you get done telling me what you think and don’t believe, I’m going to walk away and still be bisexual.
A lot of bisexuals today are still whining and moaning about bi erasure and how to combat it and the way I learned to do this was realizing what I wrote four paragraphs ago: Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. You’re just upset and feeling some kind of way because it is true and… I just took everything you believed in and shredded it. Yeah, bisexuality tends to do that to some folks and it really is a shame that it does but when you’re made to believe something that, in fact, isn’t true, I understand how it can mess with you.
Not everyone who tried to “erase” me behaved like that.
Oh, wait – you really go both ways?
Yes, I do.
Wow… I didn’t really believe what I heard about that but, damn, it must be true, huh?
Oh, it is… because I am the “thing” you didn’t believe in.
You don’t look like the type!
Yes, I know I don’t and I happen to know that “the type” means gay. Trust me, I’m a lot of things but gay isn’t one of them.
Well, different strokes for different folks, huh?
Yup.
I don’t think I could be like that.
I hear that a lot, too.
The guy I’d spent the afternoon having sex with was… beside himself. He couldn’t seem to get his head around a guy who had a girlfriend being able to have sex with a guy and as we’d done, and I felt this way because… he kept saying that. In the space of a couple of minutes, he went from being all nice, happy, and satisfied to being seriously distraught… and over something that he didn’t believe to be true and now, he’s having a major problem because what he believed, again, just got shredded. I felt badly for him and didn’t so much console him as I let him know that no matter what you’ve were told or believed, yeah – I’m bi. I go both ways. I have been for a while now. We had amazing sex because… we had amazing sex. Nothing can change that. If we were to do it again right now, well, I suspect that it might not be as amazing as it really was because what you think has been trashed.
He was either trying to convince me or convince himself that there was no way that a guy who dealt with, gasp, women could be good in bed with a guy – such a guy had to be gay. Well, no, not really and now you know it. I was saddened to sit there and watch him going through this shakeup – but I felt no guilt over having shook him up: It’s not my fault that you don’t believe that there are guys who go both ways. That’s society’s fault and maybe his own fault but if he didn’t believe it before, he learned the truth. He eventually accepted the truth and. like I said, he, ah, got over it.
Some people don’t. I was, at this point in things, learning how bisexuality was and could fuck with someone and not in a good way. I was learning that when you challenge – and debunk – what someone believes, there’s no telling how they’re going to react to it and, in this, not everyone “behaved well.” I would better see why adults said that you never talk about religion or politics because it challenges beliefs and if you fuck with someone’s beliefs, that’s a bad thing to do. Being bisexual, it seemed to me, was like this and right along about another topic not to be discussed in ‘polite company’: Sex and as a follow-on, sexuality.
When the current clusterfuck over bi erasure blew up, I’d said and maintained that you cannot erase me. You can believe what you want, and you can say whatever you want to say but what remains true is… I’m bisexual. The thing is that I’m not going to allow your disbelief to bother me (and like it used to) and if you have a problem with my bisexuality, it would be in the best interest of both of us that you not try to make it my problem because I don’t have patience like that and more so when I grew up hearing it time and time again. True enough, it wasn’t always bad; a lot of guys and gals thought that it was pretty cool and, well, they were right about that and if I may say so myself.
But folks like this were the exception more than the rule and now I was finding myself having to decide to “make” someone a believer or… just leave it alone. Losing friends and lovers… suck. Some might think that such losses is an indication and proof that I shouldn’t be bisexual and there was a time when I… considered it. But I’m very real with myself and saw that, to put it in today’s terms, if I did that, I… erased myself. I might lie to someone about my sexuality, but I couldn’t lie to myself about it since, hmm, this was me and as a matter of course. My problem wasn’t my sexuality: It was all the people who didn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t believe that I wasn’t really gay and I go both ways. It was all the people who accused me of being in denial about being gay. It was all the people who couldn’t buy into the “fact” that just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean that it’s not true.
Like, this one: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? I have heard people insist and, often, vehemently so, that it does not make a sound. Why? Because no one heard it. Well, hmm, that’s not true because whether you were standing there to hear it or not, when the tree fell, it made a sound, from its branches swishing as they cut through the air and definitely if it hit the ground. I found that even when I hit them with this, they refused to believe it but, yeah, just because they wouldn’t believe didn’t still mean that it wasn’t true.
You can’t really look at me and see, with your eyes, that I’m bisexual. I would theorize that one of the reasons why bi erasure exploded the way it did was because of what I just said: You can’t look at someone and tell if they’re bisexual. We look like… everyone. Anyone. Yes, if you ask one of us if we’re bi, we just might lie to you because we know how badly people can react to the truth and… you get tired of that, too. Still, regardless to what you think you know or what you care to believe, bisexuals are real and the proof is that I’m bisexual and if you require more proof, well, you might want to sit down because it’s going to take a long time for me to go over my sexual history with you. Yes, I could be lying about that but at this point, I have no reason to lie and, yeah, no, if you want some proof that your eyes are going to accept, okay, if you wanna go there, let’s go there but if you’re, ah, opposed to that level of truth, well, it could be in our joint best interest for you to believe that I am bisexual.
And if you don’t, that’s… sad and not my problem. You can tell me that I shouldn’t be – heard this too much, too – and considering what we think about sex and sexuality, you’re right: I shouldn’t be. Yet, I am. I don’t really know what to tell you at this point since I have long since learned that you’re either going to believe me or you aren’t and if you don’t, I will still be very much bisexual. Your disbelief… changes nothing other than your opinion of me. I would often find it to be extremely odd that someone would be more “accepting” of me being really gay than they’d accept that I’m bi.
Just more lessons on how bisexuality just doesn’t upset apple carts: It obliterates them and the apples, too. I hope you like applesauce. More and greater lessons in the power of belief. Like this one time? I’d had sex with a guy and a gal and, yeah, we were all pretty lit and the three of us having sex sounded like the best idea ever. We had it in a way that, as a bisexual male, is the ultimate expression: I had sex with both of them and they with me. Shit yeah. Does not ever get any better than this. A couple of days later, a guy who knew all three of us obviously heard that we had “mad crazy sex with each other” and asked, “I don’t understand how you could have had sex with her if you’re gay.”
I wanted to laugh but I didn’t. I did say, “Well, I could have sex with her because I’m not gay.”
A sort of footnote at this point and a relevant one: This was at a time where it was deemed to be impossible that a gay man would even think about having sex with a woman, let alone actually have sex with her. We didn’t believe it. I didn’t. I got disabused of it.
He kept insisting that if me and homeboy were getting it on with each other, that meant that I was gay. He believed this to be true. I allowed that, nope, not really. He then insisted and implied that I had sex with her to hide the fact that I was gay. Nope, I had sex with her because having sex with women was a part of my deal, too. And might I add that the pussy was pretty damned good? We’re having this conversation but given what I now knew, I was watching his belief system getting destroyed. Did I have sex with him because we were both high? I ain’t gonna lie: That probably was part of it but here’s the thing: I would have had sex with him even if I hadn’t been high, but I don’t know about him.
This guy’s belief system was crumbling right before my eyes. He didn’t want it to be true. Yeah, it’s true and I wasn’t going to tell him that the three of us were getting together later so we could do what we did the other day – and we weren’t going to be high which said something about the other guy. But, right now, I have someone who knew us having a problem with me being something that he didn’t believe in – and I wasn’t what he did believe in and as such as that might have been. He’s having quite the fit telling me that he doesn’t believe that I’m one of those freaks who goes both ways.
“Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean that it’s not true,” I said. Did I make a believer out of him? No. I understood, at this point in time, that if one person tells you this, eh, it might not be true, or it can be perceived as an untruth. However, if more than one person tells you this, what are the chances and odds that all of them are wrong? The exception, of course, is the disbelief that bisexuality and bisexual are real because there are an untold number of people who don’t believe it and they do share their disbelief with others. I found this to be pretty damned interesting but, okay, I’m sure that one of both of them told you what went down between us and if they told you, why would they both lie about it? If you’re asking me if what they told you was true and I say that it most certainly was, well, yeah. This. Thrice confirmed.
He went with me to meet my partners of the other day. He got to watch us going at each other and like he wasn’t even there. He was asked if he wanted to get in on this and he said no (even though he was obviously sporting a seriously huge bulge in his pants and complete with a big wet spot. Why not? Because what we were doing wasn’t something he believed in. Do you think that seeing the three of us having sex – and me and the other guy giving each other da bizness – changed what he believed?
It didn’t. His beliefs continued to disintegrate because we were just putting on a show for his benefit. He left. We didn’t care that he did but the three of us did agree that it wasn’t our fault that he couldn’t and didn’t believe what he was seeing. There was – and might still be – this saying: Believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. In this case, though, I had a hard time understanding why he couldn’t believe all of what he was seeing. It would a lot of years before I would fully understand that belief, and like perception, always trumps the truth… until one becomes disabused of that belief.
What did make him a believer was that my two partners… did him. From what they told me, he protested mightily but took to it like a duck to water. All of it. I saw him a few days after I was told this and when he saw me, he must’ve known I was going to say something because he said, “Don’t. Don’t say shit, okay?”
He learned that just because he didn’t believe meant that it wasn’t true. I’d had a talk with him about it because he was greatly bothered by his actions and learning the truth in a way that is, in my opinion at the time, undeniable. You can have sex with a guy and not be gay. It’s okay even though everyone believes that it isn’t. Bisexuality is like that, too. It’s quite okay even though there are still a lot of people who says that it isn’t.
And my contention and position that if bisexuality isn’t real, what is everyone fussing about? I was seeing belief being chipped away as people were insisting that this was a phase or something “trendy” and like it was hip and cool to say that you’re bi – and even if you really weren’t. Bi women get slapped with this one, by the way and, yeah, if there’s a truth with them, they’re either lying about being bi or in denial of being a lesbian. Oh, and there are lesbians who have sex with guys. I know that one for a fact, too. Even in this, just because you don’t believe that it’s true doesn’t mean that it isn’t. I will never say that what someone believes in this doesn’t have meaning or stuff like that but, hmm, I hate to tell you that if you don’t believe that bisexuality and bisexuals are real, you’re about to get one hell of a wakeup call… because we are very damned real.
No such thing as a Black, male bisexual? Truly you jest! Or, seriously, that’s what a lot of people believe, and I know why they do but, yeah, we are real because, duh, right? I’ve felt that the plight that homosexuals had to deal with… didn’t do bisexuals any favors. Yeah, we’ll lie about our sexuality because we know how people can react to homosexuality and, yeah, it can mess with someone’s head to find out that, um, uh, no – we aren’t homosexual. Not quite all that heterosexual, either, but this… varies. It’s fluid and, I think, a lot more fluid than we’re ready to believe at this point in things.
Your disbelief in bisexuality cannot erase it. Nothing you can say to this end can erase it. It’s like playing peek-a-boo with a child who covers their eyes and says that you can’t see them when, okay, honey – I’m still looking right at you. What do you mean that I can’t see you? You can’t see me because your eyes are closed but mine are open and… I see you. But if you were to open your eyes, you can see me, too. It’s just that in this, you can see me just fine, but I am something that you might not believe in… and that can never mean that that I’m not what I say I am.
And it’s still being said that bisexuals are in denial? I beg to differ. You can go on believing that none of this is real and we’re faking at being straight and, again, in denial of really being gay and… it changes nothing. I am bisexual and no matter what I’m doing because, as I’ve said repeatedly, this isn’t just a thing to do: It’s a way to be. I’ll never lie about the sex: It can be all that and then some because sex is supposed to be like that… right? Bisexuality is being “faced with erasure” because of… relationships. Okay, relationships are nice or whatever they’re going to be. However, relationships cannot define, qualify, or quantity sexuality because, well, that doesn’t make any sense. If you were around and saw me with my boyfriend – and there was no mistaking the fact that he was very gay – sure: You’d assume that we both were gay… and you would have been quite wrong. You can see me with my lady and assume that we’re both straight and, well, you’d be wrong about that, too.
It is, however, unadulterated bullshit that if you’re not in a same-sex relationship with someone, that erases the fact that you’re bisexual. And it’s… insane that there are people who believe this but, in my eyes, this is their belief… being systematically destroyed because they’re coming up with every “excuse” they can think of to not believe that bisexuality and bisexuals are just as real as everyone else is. It’s pretty sad to hear people believing in this and even sadder to know that there are bisexuals who are scared to death of… being erased and losing their shit because they believe that they’re being erased.
Are you really fucking kidding me? Okay. On the real. The truth is… you don’t have to believe that bisexuality and bisexuals are both real things. What you don’t believe… changes nothing. You cannot erase this because this has been a part of humanity since forever. You might not like it and you have the right to not like it but your dislike, like your disbelief, changes nothing. If you’re bisexual and you’re buying into this erasure bullshit?
Stop. Just stop. Because you’re believing in something that isn’t true or even possible. Know that we have been trying to erase and even eradicate homosexuality… and it’s very much alive and well, isn’t it? It cannot be done. Your sexuality cannot be erased but, sure, you can change it and we believe that it can’t be changed, too. There are those who try to erase us with meaningless words and that should tell you something about them and more than what it says about us as bisexuals.
Bisexuality isn’t the problem. It’s all the people who don’t believe in it. It’s all the people who think this can be erased. It’s their right not to believe but trying to erase bisexuality? Bisexuals are still real.
Just because you don’t believe it doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.
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