Bisexual Visibility Day
Sept.23 is recognized as Bisexual Visibility Day, aka Celebrate Bisexuality Day.
About ten years ago, when I was less aware than I am now, I heard about Bi Visibility Day and I thought, why do their bicycle lights need to be brighter than anybody else's? And I meant it. What a maroon.
So, the flag has a myth and a practical story. The story goes: There's people that like girls (pink), there's people that like boys (blue), and there's people that like boys and girls (purple). And that's me, I'm the purple in the flag.
What's interesting in the flag symbolism is that the Pink represents both men who like women and women who like women; the Blue represents both women who like men and men who like men.
These curious alliances are groups that align according to their desires along the structure of the gender binary; you either like boys or girls, not both. Pick a column; no substitutions. We have come to call these friends monosexuals.
The fastest way to get gay men to agree with straight women is to bring up bisexuality. Straight people often say that bisexuals are greedy and promiscuous. Gay people sometimes say that bisexuals are homosexuals unwilling to commit to the truth. The remarkable thing is: both heterosexuals and homosexuals (ie, monosexuals) have common cause in decrying bisexuals
Then we see an internal enlightment: Bisexuality as a word, and as a group, is based on the notion that there are only-men-and-women; that these are discrete and unmixable polarities, not to be mixed. This is a capricious and arbitrary classification.
So the Bisexuals have loosened up their verbiage a bit, re-phrasing their attraction to "more than one gender". There's also a nascent term, Pansexual which explicitly sees gender as a spectrum and whose people are attracted to the spectrum, to the genderqueer, to the agender community.
I think Pansexual is a better term. And I guess I'm a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but Bisexual was the term in vogue when I came to terms with who I am, and I'm inclined to stick with Bi. Here's a pretty good read about it.
I have a lot more in common with pansexuals than any monosexuals.
Sure, we put the B in LGBTQIA+. But let's talk about Bisexual Erasure. You see a man with a woman, you think: a hetero couple. You see two men and you think: a gay couple. You see two women and you think: a lesbian couple. When in actuality, you may see three couples with at least one bisexual in each relationship. The filter of monosexuality produces a lot of quirky outcomes, chief among them the notion that bisexuality is quite rare.
It may be that there are more bisexuals than either mono-hetero or mono-homosexual.