Can we talk about bisexuality?

[Pluvia]

Just that really. I'm a lesbian, one of a number seeking to rebuild new lesbian and LGB networks after our established communities and events and hang-outs and culture have been trashed by the TQIA+ brigade.

Lesbians and gay men are feeling really beleaguered. We've seen almost every sphere of gay and lesbian life infiltrated by 'queer', trans and spicy straight people all using the events and groups we've founded for their own purposes — mainly of validation. Pride has been taken over by the T. Our cafes, pubs, bars, all gone.

I think a significant number of gay and lesbian activists are finding it increasingly difficult to work out where bisexuality fits into all this. I'm in a number of different LGB groups and this issue has started to crop up in them. People who join describing themselves as bisexual and wanting to get involved in helping rebuild their local LGB communities turn out to be in long-term, stable heterosexual relationships. Some of them for 20+ years. Some bi people in such relationships want to involve their straight partners on the basis that although the partner is straight, they are in relationship with a bi person who isn't — but who, to the outside world, looks straight.

Does it matter? Well, if you're in a heterosexual relationship you're unlikely to experience the everyday (usually minor) moments that most of us who are out still encounter. Things like the need to come out regularly to people who assume that we're in straight relationships, the slight but still palpable 'othering' that sometimes comes when people realise they're talking to someone who isn't just like them. Sometimes it's much more pointed. And if we hold, say, an LGB club night, so that LGB people can associate without the straight gaze, should we allow bisexuals to bring their straight partners? Doesn't that negate the intention of the event?

Bisexual people who are living in a heterosexual relationship have the security of being undercover. They may not see it like that, of course, but they pass as straight. I'm pretty sure that one of the bi women who's involved in one of the groups I'm in is a straight woman who bases her bisexual identity on the fact that she had a relationship with a woman while at university, many years ago.

I don't know if there's a solution to this. I think lesbians and gay men are much more cautious around the dangers of self-ID and identity politics than they ever were. How are other groups handling this?

I'd love to meet others who understand it too. I'm super happy with my DP, he's amazing. But that doesn't mean I don't want to connect with people like me. I'd love to meet people who 'get it'. I have incredible friends, but they can only ever understand it to a certain extent because they haven't experienced it.

For some, it's about community. Being with other lesbians sometimes, we have experiences in common, it's different to anything else. Just because your lesbian cousin doesn't need or want it, doesn't mean others don't.

Why does one need LB knitting clubs? If I wanted to go to a knitting club, I want people who can show me how to use a cable needle or knit a lace shawl or something. My L cousin refused to join a local LGB gardening club, because she wasn't the allotment for her vegetables not her sexuality. It isn't relevant there, or shouldn't be, what anyone's sexuality is. I haven't asked if this is something she thinks about only now she's older, or if she always thought it back in her 2nd wave, politically active youth. (She's still politically activein retirement, to be fair.)
I can understand single sex sports clubs, where it's about physical difference, but that's single sex, not single sexuality.

All sorts of perfectly good reasons. (And why do you assume that LGB can't know? Is knitting the preserve of straight folk?) A lot of LGB people end up being a bit isolated. The world is still very heterosexual, which you only notice if you're not. I'm an older lesbian without children and grandchildren and I find many women of my age have very little to talk about beyond their families. And even though we have nice neighbours, I know that my partner and I are regarded as different by many households in the street and held at arms length. You don't get that with an LGB group. Your sexuality isn't an issue. And because you've probably had similar experiences, you have those in common. Whereas I have very little in common with an awful lot of straight women.

And why do you assume that LGB can't know? Is knitting the preserve of straight folk?

I'm not assuming that at all, but it's their knitting knowledge which is pertinent in that context, not their sexuality. I've been involved with various groups (not knitting, though,) over the years, and I often haven't known whether people are in relationships at all, and if they are, what sort of relationship, because it's generally not relevant.

The world is still very heterosexual, which you only notice if you're not.

It's very coupley, and as someone who's been single most of my life, that's very noticeable. But as you say, people only notice if they're not part of it.

@EBearhug you've picked the most irrelevant sentence in the OP's reply to you. She's given you some insight which has completely gone over your head.

All the posters saying perhaps there needs to be spaces for bi women, nothing is stopping you setting that up. If you’re a bi woman in a heterosexual relationship and want to meet others and discuss your invisibility and missing women, then do so.

I find it interesting because my bisexuality is also hidden by being in a long term same sex relationship, but I don’t recognise the longing for a man or the need to let everyone know my sexuality is different to what they assume.

You don't get it. Thank you for helping to show other readers what lesbians are up against. Yours is the kind of reaction that makes lesbian-only or even LGB only events and groups such a relief, because no one in a same-sex relationship would say it.

What she demonstrated by crying after sex and asking me if she'd made a mistake leaving her husband was that she was straight — or if not entirely straight, still straight-inclined and definitely straight-thinking. And that's not what a woman seeking relationships with women-centred women is looking for. And not what I was expecting when I met her in an exclusively lesbian venue.

No, I just haven't anything to say to it. There are plenty of posts in MN where I don't respond to every single point. It doesn't mean it's gone over my head.

Is it not more accurate to say that you don't have an awful lot in common with hetero-married women with children and grandchildren?

The gap in experiences is the meaningful dividing line - not the gap in what kind of attraction you may or may not hypothetically feel.

Well said!

Exactamundo.

A lesbian has a reasonable expectation that pillow talk will pass the Bechdel Test.

Do the lesbians on here feel they have more in common / would be happier to be in a group with gay men than with bisexual women? E.g if you were going to loose one letter from the LGB why would it be the B? For the purposes of this question please assume that B is a real thing and not just a label used by LG people as a mask or trendy people (who for the record would now be much more likely to use Q or Pan saying you are bi is now actually frowned on by trendy people as they thing it means you are gender critical)

My own personal perspective on this - I’ve found more sympatico / overlap in experiences and discrimination and history between bisexual women and lesbians than with gay men.

Gay men had / have a set of challenges and a history, some of which is very different. Sex between men being a criminal act, aids, GPs not prescribing prep, toxic masculinity, somewhat different attitudes to sex and settling down (at a very general level, lots of exceptions obviously) etc. There can also be misogyny within the gay male community, one example that sticks in the mind was a group of gay guys, two of them friends, asking a group of women loudly why anyone would want to put their mouth on a bloody, hairy, smelly axe wound instead of a nice clean cock and that at least straight women understood this too.

I’m happy to be under the LGB umbrella with gay men for political / legislative purposes, because we all experience same sex attraction and all have the potential to be discriminated against because of it.

That's the thing... as a lesbian who is ki g in the tooth... some people are genuinely bi, some people aren't, or prefer men and women are a bit of a phase or a toy.

So it is dependent on integrity of the person who is bisexual.

If might not be to everyone's taste but I'm being honest.

Long* in the tooth.

I have had genuine connections with genuine bi women, I have had conversations with women who have been married for decades who state they would dabble buy are primarily straight and lead hetero lives, then have had people literally use me but have been in relationships with men, or had no intention of not being with a woman in a relationship ans just a bit of fun.

As a femme lesbian I've experienced the whole spectrum of bi women.

I think that's why there is so much ambiguity.

It's am minefield for dating. My current partner is bi, but the love of my life. So I'm not being judgemental at all just my experiences.

I think maybe everyone is bi like a scale, no one is completely 100% gay of straight.

I identify as lesbian but still find men attractive sometimes. Just not enough to want to date them, sleep with them or live with them haha.

Here is a true story:
I was at my lesbian social group (BT. before trans) anyway I was chatting with this woman who told me she had been a happily married straight woman whose husband divorced her. She then dated men looking for a partner and hated the men and the scene.. She decided she'd turn to women, she especially liked butch lesbians and was very happy with her decision.
I thought it was great. She made her choice.. .

Lesbians should stay far away from gay men and only ally poltically with women. The next big thing is surrogacy and gay men are all for rent-a-womb.

No it is not as simple as this. It seems to be changing for younger lesbians. But many older lesbians who have been out for many decades, simply do not have the extended family relationships straight people are more likely to have. Until 20 years ago, it would have been a rare family not to have several homophobic members. And the older you are, the more family members who would have been like this.

I think of one friend whose parents who have been homophobic to her and her very long term partner in the past. Her sister is bisexual, although does not tell her parents or wider family, she is married to a man, had children, and is totally accepted by the wider family.

Its homophobia and the sense of othering there can be that is common.

@thatsthewayitis honestly that is not a happy story. Becoming a lesbian should never be about a rejection of men, it should be about embracing women.

Happily married straight woman settles for the closest she can get, a butch lesbian, when she can't find a real man to suit? I'm not sure that's a success story. What did her partner think about it?

I used to know a lesbian who was a plasterer. She eventually got wise to the number of straight women who wanted to be her girlfriend for the length of time it took for her to plaster their flats/ houses/ their mum's houses for free.

Not sure that's a sucess story, it also implies sexual orientation is a choice and something a person has control over.

That gets us into the difficult grey area of political lesbians, who rarely get mentioned these days. But back in the 70s and 80s there were feminists who chose lesbianism as a political, rather than a sexual, choice. They, at least, were woman-positive and female-focussed.

I cannot comprehend forcing yourself to have sex with someone you don't actually fancy, whether for political reasons or otherwise. Surely, you'd buy a good collection of sex toys and stay single?

Who needs sex toys?

I never thought it could be only a political choice. Pretty miserable if it was! And unlikely to last.