Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much

PART I

I WANT A WORD FOR THIS

CUFFED JEANS AND FEELING SEEN

SINCE THERE WASN’T much to do in 2020 besides fixate on the future, I’ve already played out an exchange I’ll someday have with my kids. When these children inevitably climb onto my lap and ask how I spent quarantine, I’ll respond: "Kids, it was a trying time. While health care and essential workers fought tirelessly, Mommy became a grand master playing the app version of Hasbro’s Risk.I

She got drunk exactly once when the United States elected a mediocre Democrat. And she had a mental health crisis trying to find purpose under capitalism, which drove her to domesticity and inspired her to have you."

There was one high point of my pandemic that I probably won’t mention to my kids (mostly because it involved Twitter, and I’m sure future parenting books will advise against bringing up the internet whatsoever). But between you and me, I did smile for a few hours that year after seeing a viral tweet by @thecherryghoul.

The tweet read, Bisexuals will be 20 mins into a movie and type in ‘cast of’ on google, and it shook me to my core. That might seem dramatic until you hear the context: I saw this tweet while Netflix’s The Lovebirds played in the background, moments after I’d googled the film’s entire cast. In disbelief, I double-checked Chrome and sure enough found my browser still open to Kumail Nanjiani’s IMDb. Then I glanced at the TV and noticed the film was exactly twenty minutes in.

Reader, I gasped.

Logically, I understood that looking up the cast of a movie was part of the modern human condition. Rationally, I knew that many people went down trivia rabbit holes, no matter who they liked to sleep with.

But emotionally, I was swept away. I felt seen, as if this tweet had been written just for me.

This was not the first random trait ascribed to bisexuals, nor was it the first that we’d accepted with open arms.

Somewhere in the 2010s, an idea took off that bi people wore cuffed jeans. In 2019, on a particularly nasty winter day, @sianvconway tweeted a request to pray for all bisexuals’ exposed ankles in this bitterly cold time. By the end of that year, the internet had so embraced cuffed jeans as a marker of bisexuality that many teens actually used their pants legs as a method of coming out. This usually came to life through TikToks that felt like low-budget dating shows (the formula: call your crush, cuff your jeans, make out, go viral).

Cuffed jeans are bi culture. But that’s not all: Finger guns? Bi culture. Bob haircuts? Bi culture. Lemon bars? Bi culture. Sitting in chairs wrong? Some say it’s gay culture, but according to Reddit (and my lower back), it’s bi culture.

To understand how this bi culture phenomenon began, we have to look at theory—not queer theory (we’ll get there) but the theory of memes. Richard Dawkins says the word meme derives from memetic, a term that compares the spread of information to theories of Darwinian evolution.II

This is probably best explained by him but unfortunately for you, it will be explained by me, in a reductive excerpt from my 2010 college newspaper column, The Memeing of Life:

A meme is generally defined as a cultural idea spread by imitation and repetition.… It is easy to look at [memes] and renounce them as stupid, beneath you, or devoid of cultural significance. And true, a banana singing Peanut Butter Jelly Time should probably not be compared to Faulkner. However, the fact is that millions of people are out there videotaping their reactions to 2 Girls 1 Cup. And if participation doesn’t constitute culture, then what does?

Every piece of bi culture was born out of the same concept: If you say something is bi culture, it automatically becomes bi culture. In this case, participation isn’t just part of the meme—it’s the entirety of it: For an object or behavior to constitute bi culture, all you need is someone willing to proclaim it as such.

Bi culture is everything. Which means bi culture is nothing. As annoying as this logic loop might be, it reflects exactly what it’s like to be bisexual: to be told simultaneously that you are asking for too much and that you don’t exist.

The meme format has worked well thus far, given that there haven’t been any real-world forms of bi culture to invalidate the internet’s claims. Growing up in southern Indiana, I felt that lack firsthand—amid the cornfields, I found no queer community, no sexually fluid role models, and no context for the term bisexual (though I knew it had the word sex in it, which meant I couldn’t ask an adult). In middle school, I swooned over a boy on my swim team but got butterflies around a girl who rode my bus. Yet even at twelve, I knew life would be easier if I squished down the gay stuff and pretended to be straight.

As a result, I became performatively boy crazy, obsessing over cookie-cutter hunks like Josh Hartnett and Sean Faris.III

I dove headfirst into straight culture, which basically meant I wore Hard Tail pants, pretended to like South Park, and only came from penetrative sex 10 percent of the time. I wasn’t faking my interest in guys, but I did know I was hiding something. Whenever I heard that a female celebrity was gay, I felt a pang of envy—like when someone on TV starts eating and you realize your own mouth is watering. Any mention of queer women filled me with desperation to shout my truth—I longed to yell, I want that too!

But I didn’t. The media told me there were only two viable options: gay or straight (preferably straight). I can still hear Phoebe Buffay singing in Central Perk: Sometimes men love women / and sometimes men love men / and then there are bisexuals / though some just say they’re kidding themselves! La-la-la-la-la! When bi people were shown onscreen, they were always hot messes, emphasis on the hot. Common tropes that persist to this day include cheating (Piper Chapman on Orange Is the New Black), being rebellious (Marissa on The O.C.), and generally ruining lives (Kalinda Sharma on The Good Wife—a personal fave).IV

Characters rarely identified themselves as bisexual out loud—instead they behaved their bisexuality, usually through an illicit queer hookup (followed by a breakdown because they’re so confused). This taught me that bisexuality was something you do, rather than something you are. And since I hadn’t done it yet, I figured I was straight.

I showed up at college with an overpacked suitcase (okay, four) and a sexual history that, save for a few drunken make-outs, only included men. Desperate to seem normal, I mimicked the preppy girls in my dorm: I drank Smirnoff Ice, biked on a beach cruiser, and, after saving up, bought myself a Longchamp bag. Proximity to sororitiesV

and their heteronormativity rubbed off on me, so instead of using my college years to experiment with queerness, I became laser-focused on getting a boyfriend. Junior year I finally fell in love (this relationship was generally boring because we were happy, which is why you’ll find little about it in this book). We broke up due to wanting different things (rational decisions—also boring), and I thought, Maybe I can finally date women!

This, however, was easier said than done. I expanded my gender preferences on apps but struggled to gain momentum—every time I messaged a woman, I panicked and frantically switched back to guys. I felt comfortable dating men—they were my regular commute, my status quo. Flirting with other genders took effort, and so dealing with my queerness became just another item on my perpetual to-do list, sandwiched between other things I’d never accomplish: meditate, dust, fix printer, come out, pay that one bill that won’t let you do it online.

When I did decide I wanted to come out, I literally couldn’t find the words. Was bisexual the right one? How could I explain my identity without making people think of sex? Announcing myself as bi seemed like oversharing, and potentially an HR violation—unless I was already naked, stating my sexual preferences would feel out of place. My mirror affirmations turned into anxiety spirals:

Okay, you beautiful bitch—let’s think. What if you start dating someone? Guess that won’t work since no singular romantic partner can convey that you’re attracted to everyone. And how adorable that you would even consider this option since you can’t hold down a relationship to save your life!

Guess you’ll have to actually talk to people. But you can’t do that at work! When anyone thinks of bi women, they think of threesomes—that means your colleagues who once respected you will now see you as a slut. Not that you’re not a slut—just that you don’t want your coworkers to know it. Unless… maybe that cool lesbian creative director? Pfft—even she’s not worth it. If you tell people at work, they’ll inevitably wonder how you figured it out, and your imagined sex scenes will live in their heads rent-free.

Don’t even get me started on your parents. They love you. If you love them, why would you force them to think about your sex life? You’d call and say: ‘Mom, Dad, remember my Barbies? FYI, I made them scissor.’ Besides, you bought so much porn on the cable box that your parents probably already know—just leave them alone.

Though how can you even dream of talking to your parents when you can barely talk to your friends? They know you haven’t had many (any) queer experiences, which must mean they think you’re a fraud. On second thought, why are you considering any of this? You’re obviously just straight."

Coming out never seemed worth it. I was attracted to men, so why ruffle feathers when I could just… not? It didn’t help that hardly anyone seemed to relate—I knew a few people who’d toyed with the idea of bisexuality, but none had actually claimed the term (gee, I wonder why).VI

The sense of isolation made coming out feel even more high-stakes—if it didn’t go well and I needed to find some new bi peers, I wouldn’t even have known where to look.

Coming out doesn’t promise to heal everything, but it does promise community. After revealing your true self, you’re supposed to be rewarded with a support system—fellow queers who can do your makeup, administer your stick-and-pokes, and hold you accountable for misquoting Notes on Camp. But that support system doesn’t just magically appear—you have to seek it out. And if you’re bi, it can be very hard to find.

Most LGBTQ+ peopleVII

go through a process of making queer friends, and the later in life you come out, the more intentional you have to be. But friend-dating can feel even more pathetic than dating-dating, which might explain queer people’s tried-and-true strategy: hook up first, then regress into a platonic bond.VIII

It sounds fun, but the awkwardness is not for the faint of heart—if you’re seeking a non-Grindr friendship origin story, it’s probably easiest to grab a drink.

I’m far from the first person to suggest that gay bars play an important role in queer culture, but I recently learned that their significance goes deeper than I thought. Reading Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin, I was struck by a quote from San Francisco–based activist Harry Britt: When gays are spatially scattered, they are not gay, because they are invisible. In this sense, gay and lesbian bars are responsible for the very existence of gays and lesbians. Queer bars give structure to queer communities, while literally putting those communities on the map.

Given this massive responsibility, it’s no wonder LGBTQ+ people treat these bars like shelters—places where we can shed our comphetIX

tendencies and listen to Robyn in peace. But the queer community is just a microcosm of the larger, problematic world, and so these bars often wind up bringing only certain scattered gays back into view. Bar clientele is usually white and thin. Few establishments are fully accessible. Trans-inclusive practices (such as gender-neutral bathrooms, stating pronouns, and forbidding transphobia outright) remain the exception, not the norm.

And since many of these spaces reflect dominant social systems, monosexism shows up there too. That means for bi people, pan people, and anyone who isn’t a perfect gold star,X

gay and lesbian bars can feel like obstacle courses. Questions about your sexual history are lava—avoid them at all costs.

Unlike Oktoberfest or Fox News, biphobia is not exclusively a straight thing—plenty of it comes from gay and lesbian communities too. One study found that in queer online forums about bisexuality, bi people were more likely to encounter biphobic comments than messages of support. Another study said that only 8 percent of bi people reported feeling included within the LGBTQ+ community, despite the letter B being so prominently featured in the acronym.XI

According to a them article from 2020, even queer activism overlooks us—sexually fluid people tend to get lost in the conversation; there are fewer [LGBTQ+] organizations that specifically exist to advocate for the needs of people who are attracted to more than one gender.

Biphobia has many forms, and one of the most common involves suggesting that bisexuality doesn’t exist. Since many gay and lesbian people come out first as bi, it’s common for gay and lesbian communities to assume that bisexuality is a gateway identity, or that bi people are just passing through. Even if these communities do accept bisexuality as permanent, bi people will still be up against the usual assumptions (e.g., we’re desperate for attention, we’re seeking straight privilege, we’re already planning to cheat on you).

Gay and lesbian bars, safe havens for some, are rarely safe havens for bi people. But where does that leave us to go? It’s like the gay and straight communities are our parents and each thought the other would pick us up from school. We’re left sitting on the curb, moping with our lunch box, until we decide to walk home.

At this point, the bi culture meme transcends the internet, serving as a reflection on bi erasure in the real world. We have to wonder: Why would a community accept lemon bars as iconography unless they were desperate for symbols, representation, or acknowledgment of any kind? Arbitrary tropes like bad at chairs wouldn’t stick to bi people if we weren’t so eager to embrace them.

Sometimes I’m jealous of queer communities whose cultural archetypes seem derived from actual behaviors or ideas. To be reductive (as distilling the idea of culture requires us to be): Lesbians have U-Hauls, cottage core, and Tori Amos, reflective of emotional openness and matriarchal aspirations. Gay men have Janet Jackson, voguing, and a tendency to walk fast, reflective of a generations-long dialogue with femininity and a tendency to have places to be. These may be massive generalizations, but at least they’re relatively neutral ones. Clichés can be harmful, yes, but they can also help our brains process information—they give our gaydar (or in my case, BiFi) something to search for. Growing up, if I’d known anything other than negative bi representation, it would’ve been much easier to figure out where I belonged.

But ironically, I’m now glad that bi culture exists only in meme form—at least an abstract idea can remain an expansive one. For lesbian and gay communities, even the stereotypes tend to align with that microcosm of society thing, influenced by patriarchy and white supremacy. Many tropes associated with lesbian culture (including those mentioned above) primarily represent white lesbian culture, which is notoriously also thin, rich, and cis. Gay culture has a similar history of racism and body dysmorphia, and today, bars and Scruff profiles alike still disenfranchise fats, femmes, and Asians.

As individuals, bi people are not perfect—many of us contribute to the same systemic issues and perpetuate the same harmful ideas. But we don’t really exist as a collective, and while that’s generally infuriating, I’m relieved it makes our spaces almost too invisible to be exclusionary. Picture the meme with the guy tapping his head: Your community can’t be problematic if your community doesn’t exist.XII

But this does bring up another question: If bi culture consists entirely of random nouns, does it have any significance? Without community to enact it, what’s the point? In my eyes, bi culture’s meaning depends on one thing: whether bisexual people can make it meaningful to us.

The bi culture meme reminds me of shitty horoscopes, the kind you might find hung in a coffee shop, torn out of an old USA Today.XIII

These one-liners rely on vague aphorisms (Virgo: Be wary of love this week or Taurus: You deserve to relax today), and they make actual astrologyXIV

look bad. But the watered-down genre’s success does tell us something about human nature: We’re all seeking information about how to act, how to be, or how we already are. It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. It doesn’t matter if it could apply to anyone. If it speaks to us by name, just like that: We feel seen.

I read @thecherryghoul’s tweet during the closest thing to an apocalypse that’s happened in my lifetime, and it gave me a glimmer of hope. Not the kind of hope the masses could’ve used in 2020 (e.g., hope that the murder hornets would die out, or that white people would do more to fight systemic racism than posting black squares on Instagram). Just hope in the form of reassurance that my bisexuality does, in fact, exist. I took a screenshot and felt better knowing I had the tweet on my camera roll. It could serve as a North Star—a tool to help me find my way, just in case I got lost.

HOT AND COOL

THERE ARE MANY things the Midwest thinks they understand, but autumn is one that they actually do. Nowhere else in America can September cloak the streets in such color (except Vermont, but few of us have the money or leftist parents to pull that off).I

Every year, deep reds and burnt yellows paint the parks, skies, and sidewalks, and the majority of residents take this for granted, showing their appreciation the old-fashioned way: by denying that climate change is real. People often mock Indiana for having a flat landscape (that is, when they talk about it at all), but growing up there, these views never struck me as dull—they were the best I could get.

In 2004, the first night of fall brought with it two other milestones: It was the night before my first day of high school and the night I first smoked weed. The daytime still clung to summer: The humid air felt thick and the temperature hovered above eighty degrees. Even my family’s dogs were lethargic, strewn around the kitchen like discarded fur coats. They barely stirred when the phone rang—I skipped over them to pick it up.

Hello? My voice lifted, as if there were any question as to who it might be.

Laney’s on the line, Sloane said, but she’s calling Erin. I knew what that meant—it was my job to three-way-call Becca; to not slow anything down with questions.

I dialed. Becca answered after half a ring. I clicked the flash button to join the group again—and then there were five.

As you might have noticed, it’s hot. Sloane’s voice always commanded my attention—it was deep, especially for a fourteen-year-old girl, and made me want to do whatever she said. This is an emergency call to talk dress code for tonight.

Two minutes of discussion led to a unanimous vote: We would stick with the plan to wear cute loungewear, but instead of doing sweatshirts with jeans, we would pivot to Soffe shorts, rolled at the waist a maximum of twice. Ideally this would help us seem spontaneous—high school started the next morning, and we wanted to look like serious students who’d snuck out on a whim.

Can I sleep at Laney’s? I asked my parents. Tomorrow’s a big day—I’ll feel better if I show up with friends.

My dad jumped at the idea. As a mathematician he hadn’t grown up with a robust social life,II

so he reacted to each of my sleepover invitations like they were guest-list spots at the Met Gala (as if he even knew what that was). He taught decision sciences at the local university, and whenever we ran into one of his students around town, they would inevitably kneel to my eye level and ask me if I knew that my dad was a genius. I said I did but felt confused by this, as to me, Wayne Winston seemed quite obtuse: He pronounced Nissan as niss-ahn no matter how many times I corrected him; he often left his backpack wide open or tucked one sweatpant leg into a sock. Quirks of this magnitude require a sense of humor, and thankfully he’s always had one—loves telling jokes but loves being the butt of them even more. I admired him, but knew I didn’t want to follow in his footsteps. I wasn’t strong enough to make my way through life as a punch line—I longed to fit in, to even be cool if I could. My genes made it clear that I’d only achieve social success by way of a calculated pursuit, though getting caught trying too hard would be a dire fate. My safest bet was to go all in on conformity, so that night I put on my best Hollister sweatshirt and begged my dad to give me a ride. Thrilled for me, he agreed, then dropped me off at the end of my childhood, pulling away with a wave and a smile.

I was last to arrive. My four best friends were upstairs, doing their makeup and waiting for the adults to go to sleep. Laney’s room was an early-aughts dreamland, complete with an inflatable chair, Backstreet Boys posters, and several white grommet belts from PacSun (for all your styling needs). I sat on her tie-dye comforter and picked at my cuticles, trying not to seem as anxious as I was.

Who all’s gonna be there? Sloane stood in front of the mirror, applying the coffee-colored Bonne Bell lip gloss we all swore by. Her brown curls grazed her shoulders and she kept her neck long, which reminded me to sit up straight. I did.

I’m not sure, I admitted. But I do think he has people over a lot.

His parents don’t care? Erin chewed her lip. She was the most nervous, but in her defense, she was also the only one on an Ivy League track—that meant she had the most to lose. Today the notion that a joint could ruin a white girl’s life seems laughable (I’m high as I write this), but back then the fear was real. We believed our parents when they insisted that getting caught with reefer would tarnish our college applications, and we certaintly didn’t want to go to jail. Conversations about legalization stayed confined