Various Bisexual Flag Moodboards ♡

Brainless clogs >:(

Image description: A Twitter thread from @BlizzardAvis that reads,

[Tweet 1] "If your criticism of bi women is 'well sometimes they bring their homophobe boyfriends to gay bars' oh boy do I have news for you about *your* transphobic and racist same sex partner in gay bars."

[Tweet 2] "You don't care about the safety of queer people in gay bars, you are just bimisogynistic."

[Tweet 3] You know what! Let's add to this. Why is your first instinct to blame the bi woman, who is very obviously in an abusive relationship and suffers from his homophobia more than any of you combined? Why aren't you offering her help? An escape? Resources to help her leave her abuser?"

/end ID

Luz Noceda bi meme requested by @pride-cat !

a list of some bi books

(that you can read for free)

Bisexual Politics: theories, queries, and visions, Naomi Tucker, (1995)

Bisexuality: a reader and sourcebook, Thomas Geller, (1990)  

Women and bisexuality, Sue George, (1993)

View From Another Closet: Exploring Bisexuality in Women, Janet Bode (1976)

Bisexuality: The Psychology and Politics of an Invisible Minority, Beth Firestein, (1996)

Closer to Home: Bisexuality & Feminism, Elizabeth Reba Weise, (1992)

Bi Any Other Name: Bisexuals Speak Out, Loraine Hutchins & Lani Ka'ahumanu, (1991)

The Very Inside: An Anthology of Writings By Asian and Pacific Islander Lesbian and Bisexual Women, Sharon Lim-Hing, (1994)

Someone named smatterbrain on Twitter made this very nice bi flag redesign, which kind of looks like a sunset!

Luna camellian icons 🩷🌸💜💙

Bi women aren’t secretly straight. Bi men aren’t secretly gay.

(This used to be a part of this post, but I figured it wasn’t especially relevant to the topic at hand, so now it’s here.)

Many books discussing butch/fem(me) history point out that a number of women in the scene, particularly fems, were behaviorally bisexual. Due to this—as well as their femininity—fems and fish (a black fem identity) struggled in lesbian communities to be considered “true” lesbians as they were often stereotyped as bisexual. Many butches/studs assumed they were more likely to leave the “lesbian life” because they could “pass” for straight, which, y’know, totally doesn’t sound like how people talk about bi women today whatsoever.

While I’m not necessarily equipped to provide a full MLA-cited deep-dive analysis on butch/femme identity, here are a few quotes (and a very long paper about femme bisexuality if you’re especially curious).

From Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (1994):

Fems, who never ceased to act on their own initiative, in some contexts were defined as other, as not really lesbian, because of their traditional feminine looks or their active heterosexual pasts.

In keeping with narrators’ varied experiences in finding their identities, the community did not have—nor does it now have—a hegemonic view about how to draw the line between the homosexual and the heterosexual. Many narrators see the butch lesbian as the true lesbian. Other narrators consider anyone who stays with women and is part of the community a lesbian.

The boundaries between heterosexual and homosexual have always been difficult to draw… The gay liberation model made the boundary clear by categorically including every woman who is attracted to a woman. But throughout the twentieth century there have been women who have spent some time in the heterosexual world and some in the homosexual world… Most narrators were aware of these ambiguities and took them into account by speaking in terms of bisexuality, or the pure versus the less-pure lesbian.

It may be important to note that even up until—and during—the 90s, “lesbian” was sometimes defined as “any woman who has at some time in her life loved another woman” (see pg. 11).

Bi butches have been around for a while, too. 

From the 1995 essay “Too Butch to Be Bi”:

But being a butch woman who is also bisexual can be difficult. It feels sometimes that the the idea is so challenging—since the assumptions in our communities are that all butch women are lesbian women and all femme women are bisexual women—that often a butch woman trying to come to terms with being bisexual is stuck. 

[…] But once we find a community that is accepting of our same-sex interests, we run into an entirely different series of messages. A number of these are about appearances and what they are supposed to say about who we are. The ideas about femmes (femme women aren’t really interested in other women, and femme men aren’t really interested in women at all) and butches (butches are always the aggressors in sex, whether they are men or women) permeate our queer culture. These ideas make it difficult for us to explore who we are and who we want to be. Many people feel too threatened to challenge the status quo of an already fringe community, for fear of being outcast from the one place where they have struggled to belong.

From a 1996 interview with Leslie Feinberg:

And I would say that people who were referred to as drag queens, [sh*m*les], female impersonators, drag kings, diesel [d-slur]s, butches, et cetera, uh… Nowadays we think of them sometimes as just being synonymous with a certain kind of sexuality, but in fact there’s a lot of butch women who sleep with other butches, or who are bisexual, and the same thing is true with feminine men.

From the 1997 book Femme: Feminists, Lesbians and Bad Girls:

[Heather Findlay]: Negative Message number three: ‘Don’t date a femme, because she’ll leave you for a man.’ […] I know tons of butches who have slept with guys, and for some reason there’s not some big stigma attached to that. That doesn’t threaten their membership in the lesbian community, but with us [femmes] it does.

From a 2000 issue of Bi Women: The Newsletter of the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network:

But I also think bi women like to experiment with the wide range of possibilities along the butch/femme continuum without feeling confined by them. And that’s fun to watch! And I think many people assume that because bi women are also interested in men that they all would be femmes. Oh, how wrong they are—hallelujah for butch bi women!

Femme/butch identities are not static and they are not necessarily constricting, but they can be. Femme/butch arose out of a historical context where woman to woman love was not safely or openly acknowledged… As queer people have established a safer, more visible place in the world, femme/butch have become much more fluid (and perhaps diluted) identities or presentations. 

bisexual sapphics are allowed to be assigned lesbianism, but never may they have autonomy to label themselves.

The thing is, radfems (and other biphobic lesbians) DON'T have a problem with bisexual women using "lesbian terms". Not really.

They see a woman talking about her attraction to women, and call her a lesbian with no further thought. They see a masc woman, and they call her a butch, or the d-slur (affectionately). They see a pair of women in a relationship, they call them a "lesbian couple". They see no issue with these things. If you have a problem with it, maybe you should figure out why you have such a big problem with the word "lesbian"!

It's good, when it's used for bisexual erasure. Thus, the only conclusion we can draw is that their real problem lies in bisexual women having the autonomy to call themselves these terms.

September is...

Bisexual Visibility Month!

So maybe save any stealth missions for later...

(I planned this silly edit three years ago and only finally got a chance to make it, let me have this.)