"I’m Bisexual And You Treated Me Like Crap"

Dear Lesbians And Gays — I’m Bisexual And You Treated Me Like Crap. I’m done with you.

Beth Sherouse, Ph.D., Activist and writer
03/09/2017 02:13 pm ET

My dearest gays and lesbians —

I’ve loved you since before I even knew you. From a young age, I was drawn to your transgressive sexuality and gender expression, your courage to be yourselves in the face of oppression, your fabulous rainbows and your sensible shoes.

I’ve marched in your parades, joined and organized protests for your rights, volunteered with your local groups and worked for your most prominent national organization.

I’ve loved you fiercely and advocated for you tirelessly. But I’ve finally accepted the fact that you will never love me back because I’m a bisexual woman, and you have shown me time and again that you are not here for me or my community, despite the numerous disparities we face in comparison to you and the non-LGBTQ community.

You have shown me time and again that you are not here for me or my community.

When I was a newly out baby bi, I co-founded the first ever LGBT student organization at my Southern Baptist university with this beautiful and charming lesbian classmate with whom I fell madly and angstily in love. She was the first of many who told me I should just “choose” to be a lesbian.

Then there was the time I was at a drag show and the performer came up to me and asked me why I was at a gay bar. I said “I’m bisexual” into her microphone, and she cackled wildly and said, “Oh honey, we all know that’s just a stop on the way to gay town.”

In grad school, a “straight” female friend repeatedly called me greedy and suggested I was promiscuous whenever I mentioned my bisexuality, even though we slept together several times. But she wasn’t gay, and apparently bisexuality wasn’t a valid option.

Then there were the countless times one of you told me my identity wasn’t real, was just a phase, or that I wasn’t committed to the cause because I could choose to pass as straight.

There were the countless times one of you told me my identity wasn’t real.

Too many times, I thought you might be right, that my identity was something strange, that maybe I was fooling myself about my lifetime of attraction to people across the gender spectrum. And I sincerely thought if I just kept fighting for you, for all of us, that I would prove myself worthy of your love and acceptance.

Then I took a two-year fellowship working at the nation’s largest LGBT civil rights nonprofit. I knew going in that, like any large movement organization, they had a rocky past with both trans and bi communities, and a tendency toward centrist politics. But I thought maybe I could effect change from within. What a silly, naive bisexual I was.

By far, the most pervasive biphobia I have ever experienced was during my two years working at the Human Rights Campaign. When I started in 2014, the Human Rights Campaign website didn’t have a single bi-specific resource, much less a topics page about one of the four identities it claimed to represent.

The staff who identified as bisexual were rarely empowered or allowed to do bi-specific programmatic work, if they were even out to their gay and lesbian colleagues.

I met bi community leaders, and tried desperately to heal the deep rifts and end the organization’s longstanding neglect. I believed HRC could do better for a group that constituted half of the LGBTQ community.

In my two-year tenure, with the support and feedback of a small crew of wonderful coworkers, I created the content for a bisexual page on the HRC website, wrote three of the five publications for the page and edited a fourth, all co-branded with national bi advocacy organizations, wrote nearly all of the bi-related blog content and op-eds, organized an employee resource group for bi, queer, pansexual and fluid (bi+) coworkers, worked with the diversity staff to bring in bi community leaders to do trainings, developed and conducted my own bi community cultural competency trainings for board members, staff, and volunteers and coordinated all of HRC’s programming for Bisexual Awareness Week.

When bi community leader Robyn Ochs came to do a training with HRC staff, a cis white gay man who directed the organization’s entire field operation said, “You know, I just never think about bisexual people.” No shit you don’t.

Six months have passed since I left HRC, and it seems that a handful of blog and social media posts during Bisexual Awareness Week last September is the only thing the organization could muster in my absence. Half of my out bi+ coworkers (love y’all!) have left and the others don’t have positions that allow them to do the kind of work I was able to do.

It seems clear that what started with one angry bisexual attempting to effect change from within also ended when that same angry bisexual left.

To be fair, HRC isn’t by any means the only national LGBTQ organization with this problem. Several national groups have a habit of using “gay and transgender” as shorthand for the LGBTQ community, completely erasing us. Although a few of our national LGBTQ organizations have openly bi+ staff who are doing amazing bi-specific advocacy, our numbers are dwindling and virtually no one else is doing bi work in these organizations except for those few brave souls.

To put it bluntly, when bisexual people aren’t around to advocate for ourselves and push for change from within, that work simply doesn’t get done, because the vast majority of y’all lesbians and gay men don’t give a shit about us. And yet, we still fight for you and with you.

When Amber Heard got the shit beat out of her by Johnny Depp and the media blamed her bisexuality, you were silent. When right-wing weirdos launched a public attack on a native bi+ leader who spoke at a White House event, more silence. When gay icon Boy George went on a blatantly biphobic Twitter rant, still nothing.

In the words of esteemed and dedicated bi+ leader Faith Cheltenham, former president of BiNet USA and a personal mentor:

Until bisexuals stop being the unmentionables of the LGBTQIA community we will continue to be the punching bags of both gay and straight, with respite nowhere to be found. If bisexuals believe there are circles of influence that they are systematically prevented from accessing to their detriment, they believe correctly.

Until bisexuals find equitable representations of their organizations in litigator roundtables, national and state policy roundtables, legal policy teams, national and state transgender policy roundtables, rapid response communications groups or faith working groups, we should protest our exclusion.

Lesbians and gay men, this angry bisexual is tired of being your afterthought. I’m exhausted by showing up for you, time and again, with no reciprocity. I’m tired of facing more biphobia from organizations that claim to represent bi+ people than I do in the straight cis world.

Lesbians and gay men, this angry bisexual is tired of being your afterthought.

I’m tired of trying to prove that I’m worthy of your love while you seem to forget or deny that I exist.

Bisexual people are tired of being told that our voices, our needs, our lives are a distraction from the “real” issues, when we constitute half of what you claim as your LGBT community.

And more than anything, I am tired of watching my fellow bi+ advocates — beautiful, talented and resilient people — burn out, break down, get fired for standing our ground and take our own lives because you make it so fucking hard for us to feel safe and affirmed.

Even after 15 years of being out, my voice still shakes sometimes when I say the word “bisexual” aloud to one of you, and I get a little jolt of adrenaline, bracing for the snarky comment, the rolled eyes, the dismissal of my existence.

I’m exhausted by showing up for you, time and again, with no reciprocity.

Let me be clear about what is at stake here, lesbians and gays. Bisexual people are literally dying because of your neglect, erasure and exclusion. We are sicker, both physically and mentally, than you are because more of us are closeted from our communities and our healthcare providers.

Our youth face more bullying and harassment and higher risk of suicide than their gay and lesbian peers do, and we all have less social support.

Sixty-one percent of bisexual women such as myself will be raped, beaten or stalked by our intimate partners — and as Heard’s experience shows, our identities will likely be blamed for our own abuse. For the numerous bi+ community members who are also transgender, disabled and/or people of color, these staggering disparities are compounded.

I watched HRC make its own bed in 2016, once again ignoring the voices of the LGBTQ community’s most marginalized members, and dumping its resources into mind bogglingly ill-conceived endorsements, most notably the political campaign of a candidate who waited until the last possible moment to “evolve” on marriage equality (sorry that job didn’t pan out for you, Chad).

I knew the time was coming when bisexuals, queers, transgender people, people of color, undocumented and other marginalized groups within the LGBTQ community would be asked to once again push aside our needs, close ranks with white cis gays and lesbians, and overlook our differences — you know, for the sake of preserving marriage equality.

And sure enough, here we are, fighting for scraps from a table at which we have never been welcome, and once again being told that our needs — our very survival — don’t warrant attention, visibility, funding or resources.

As the LGBTQ community faces an uncertain future under Donald Trump’s presidency, I’m giving up on you, gays and lesbians. I don’t love you the same way anymore. You broke my heart too many times. I will no longer fight for the liberation of people who actively perpetuate my community’s oppression.

I’m too busy just trying to survive.

# # #

O THANK GOD – SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE AT LAST

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1173028/How-night-owls-cleverer-richer-people-rise-early.html

How night owls are cleverer and richer than people who rise early

By FIONA MACRAE

UPDATED: 20:56 EST, 23 April 2009

It has long been held that the early bird catches the worm. But it is the night owl that lasts the distance, research shows.

It found that late risers tire less quickly than those who make a point of getting up at the crack of dawn.

The study is likely to be embraced by anyone tired of being branded lazy for their love of a lie-in.

And it adds to growing evidence that it is night owls that rule the roost.

Previous studies have found that those who rise later tend to be both cleverer and richer than early birds.

For the latest study, scientists pitted morning larks against night owls in a task designed to measure their reaction and attention times.

During the experiment, the volunteers got up and went to bed at their usual times, with the larks tending to turn in four hours earlier than the owls.

Both did similarly well at the task shortly after getting up. But ten hours into their day, it was the night owls that shone, being both quicker and more alert at the task, the journal Science reports.

Despite being awake for the same length of time, the larks felt sleepier, with scans showing that the parts of their brains linked to attention were less active. 

Dr Philippe Peigneux, of the University of Liege in Belgium, said: 'During the evening session, evening types were less sleepy and tended to perform faster than morning types.'

Previous studies have shown that getting up late appears to be in our DNA, with our body clock regulated by a series of genes which determine whether we are larks or owls.

Other studies have debunked the popular saying 'early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise'.

Night owls have been shown to be cleverer than larks, with quicker minds and better memories. They also earn more.

Famous night owls include Charles Darwin, Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, who regularly went to bed at 4am and rose late. Due to his sleeping patterns, he often hosted War Cabinet meetings in his bath.

It is thought that the division into larks and owls has its roots in evolution, with early risers in the Stone Age taking the initiative in food gathering, while owls stood guard late into the night.

Those who fell into neither category could sleep safely in the knowledge that their needs were being taken care of.

When humans moved towards tending animals and harvesting crops, larks came in demand for the early starts, while owls started to be thought of as less industrious.

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Interesting Find

http://www.salon.com/2011/10/05/straight_male_friendship_now_with_more_cuddling/ 

Salon.com

TUESDAY, OCT 4, 2011 08:00 PM EDT 

Straight male friendship, now with more cuddling
As homophobia declines, some heterosexual boys are getting cozier and telling each other,

"I love you, dude"

BY TRACY CLARK-FLORY


It starts with “John” hugging “Leo” tightly. Then, a few snapshots into the Facebook photo album, the baby-faced 16-year-old softly kisses his friend on the cheek. It culminates with a shot of the British teens holding up their shirts to reveal their tanned, washboard stomachs and the elastic waistbands of their designer underwear. On the boys’ respective profiles they leave each other comments reading, “I love you,” sometimes in all-caps, along with teeny-tiny heart icons.

These may seem like startling displays of same-sex affection and innuendo for a pair of heterosexual teenage boys — even despite their blow-dried Justin Bieber bangs — but Eric Anderson, an American sociologist, says it’s part of a larger trend among teens and young adults.

“It is normal in the United Kingdom for young straight boys to sleep in the same bed, frequently, and to cuddle,” says Anderson, who has primarily focused his research on white males living above the poverty line. In a recent study, he found that 90 percent of heterosexual undergraduate men in the U.K. had at least once kissed a straight male friend on the lips. Things are not so fluid in the U.S. — he found 7 percent of heterosexual college guys had smooched a straight male pal — but his in-depth studies of American jocks and frat boys, those expected to be the most homophobic, have revealed them to be increasingly comfortable with same-sex physical and emotional intimacy, he says.

His hypothesis runs counter to a New York Times piece just over a week ago about how boys are discouraged from having intimate friendships. It also seems to blatantly contradict recent headlines about bullied gay teens committing suicide. Anderson, author of “Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities” along with two other academic books about male sexuality, says it’s remarkable that these news stories even exist — it used to be that families would be too ashamed to admit that their child was a homosexual. Nowadays, it’s typically “extreme femininity” that’s being targeted: “It’s more femme-phobia than it is homophobia,” he claims. As homophobia continues to decrease at a rapid rate, “boys don’t have to align their behavior with extreme masculinity — they can move much closer toward femininity.”

It’s certainly true that the concept of “metrosexuality” loosened up mainstream understandings of male straightness in the ’90s, and the past decade introduced the “bromance” into our cultural lexicon with movies like “I Love You, Man.” These are signs of progress, to be sure, but they still reek of defensive heterosexuality. Take the “no homo” meme where guys say something “gay” like, “Hey man, nice shoes,” followed by the caveat “no homo.”

Anderson tells me that no stats will convince me of this trend better than talking to some of these boys myself, so he introduces me to John, the British 16-year-old. He gamely tells me via Facebook chat about his relationship with Leo: “i’ll hug him, kiss on the cheek; anything! we’re so close, we genuinely don’t care what other people think,” he writes. “i’m very confident and comfortable with my sexuality.” So much so that he almost seems baffled by my questions about further sexual experimentation with Leo: “nope, never happened haha!” It isn’t about sex, he says. They just love each other as friends and aren’t afraid to show it. As John writes on Leo’s profile, “I genuinely love you an extraordinary amount, for a straight sixteen year old male. In conclusion, you are also my best friend.”

Now, lest you think these boys are all sugar and spice, they also call each other “cunts” and “wankers.” They are football fanatics and hardcore fans of Lil’ Wayne (who can hardly expect any awards from GLAAD after penning lyrics like, “You homo niggas getting AIDS in the ass”); Leo even fancies himself a white rapper. A Facebook status update from John reads, “love walking down the road to college with your trousers round your ankles, just to gain man points.” So they don’t lack stereotypically masculine credentials, and their declarations of love sometimes seem so over the top as to be tongue-in-cheek, maybe even a way to preempt being attacked as gay. Still, formerly strict boundaries are being crossed — and frequently, playfully.

Things are much different stateside. In yearly surveys of young men on either side of the pond, Anderson has consistently found that the U.S. ranks 25 percentage points higher on homophobia. Why the difference? “The primary reason for a lag between what occurs in the U.K. versus the U.S. is American religious fundamentalism,” Anderson explains. “The U.K. has long-divorced themselves of this.” Aside from religious fundamentalism, there is also the fact that “we shelter our teenagers in America from sex, drugs and alcohol until they’re 18 or 21,” he says. “In the United Kingdom, it’s legal to drink at 18, but 15- and 16-year-olds are going to parties and getting smashed and nobody cares.”

Anderson puts me in touch with Jordan, a straight 17-year-old cross-country runner from Southern California who paints a subtler portrait of change. He’s never seen someone at his high school called “gay” for actually being gay — but it’s still used as slang for “lame.” (Anderson says, “Adolescents are just as adept in knowing whether one means ‘gay’ or ‘gay,’ just as they do ‘duck’ or ‘duck.’”) Jordan has told his best friends “I love you, dude” before and his teammates horse around in familiar sportsman fashion (hugs and ass-slaps are common) – but it stops there. “We don’t ever kiss. I think that would be weird, to be honest.” The craziest things Jordan reports are the time his team had a pillow fight — “a whole 15 guys having a pillow fight, that would seem pretty gay to me” — and when they stayed in a hotel for a competition and “had a huge jacuzzi tub and we all went in together.”

In junior high, he worried a lot about people thinking he was gay because he liked to dress nicely; he was the first guy to wear a v-neck to his school. “I am metro, I guess. I care about what I wear, what I look like and it seems nowadays it’s more acceptable to be like that,” says Jordon, who has the angular bone structure of a leading man and recently got into modeling. His Facebook profile is strewn with glossy head shots from professional photo shoots and some of his guy friends even weigh in to tell him that he’s looking good. “I’m sure people still think I’m gay, but to be honest it doesn’t bother me anymore ’cause I know who I am.”

Anderson says his findings should be taken as tremendously positive news, and “not just because they indicate a better lived experience for male sexual minorities.” He explains, “It used to be that male adolescents — too old to cuddle or emote with their parents but without having a girlfriend — were alienated from this type of human affection and interaction.” Now, a single 16-year-old “receives cuddles and love from his mate, drunk or sober,” at least in the U.K., and can “open up about his fears and anxieties, his weaknesses and failures in a way that men from my generation” — he’s in his 40s — “will read and absolutely disbelieve.”

It’s hard to believe even for someone like myself who is just a decade older than John and Jordan and grew up in one of the most liberal, gay-friendly cities in America. There is no question that homophobia has decreased dramatically — support for same-sex marriage is skyrocketing, even among fundamentalist Christians, and never before have gay celebrities enjoyed such visibility and respect — but these achievements are precarious and certainly not universally enjoyed. Take the suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, a gay teen who was called a “fag” and teased for being an effeminate Lady Gaga fan. He filmed a video for Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign, just months before hanging himself outside of his family home in Buffalo, N.Y. He looked into the camera and said: “It gets better — I mean, look at me, I’m doing fine!”

It’s true, it does gets better, and as a society we’re getting better — but we aren’t there yet.

# # #

Here’s somethin’ u don’t read evryday...

Ritualized Homosocial Nipple Sucking In Pagan Ireland

http://cernunnoscircle.blogspot.com/2011/04/sughaim-sine-homosocial-nipple-sucking.html

Article of the Evening

A Soldier and a Cadet

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/11/a-soldier-and-a-cadet-quietly-together-under-dadt-survive-a-sexual-assault.html

Article of the Evening

A Soldier and a Cadet

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/11/a-soldier-and-a-cadet-quietly-together-under-dadt-survive-a-sexual-assault.html