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?

Perhaps because they enjoy the company of people who attend LGB events? Not talking about dating events.

You’ve missed understood me quite frankly. My point was merely around the biphobic nonsense that because I fantasise about sex with a woman that I will cheat on my husband.
It’s crap.
Also please don’t co-opt me into your transphobia. I always knew that bi people would be the next target after trans.

To be fair, I wouldn’t go to an LGB event. I have no interest in transphobia.

Why would you though?
LGB people with same sex partners are simply people like anyone else. If you do nit share similar experience, why not just go to another event instead?

Because some bisexual women have been in significant relationships with women and their social connections are with LGB groups @JoyousGreyOrca - do you expect them to just not see their friends anymore?

I’m a bi woman and have long accepted that I’m not welcome in spaces and communities that are promoted as LGB or LGBT. I’m sorry to say that I’ve experienced far and away more biphobia from within the ‘community’ than I have from outside, so my presence in those spaces would not feel like a safe alternative to presence in heteronormative ones anyway. At least the bigotry from straight people tends to be limited to the old ‘fancy a threesome’ chestnut from straight men who think they’re hilarious. In LGB/LGBT spaces it’s misrepresentation and erasure on a whole other level. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that other bisexual people are choosing to avoid these spaces for the same reasons. If so, I’m not convinced that the dilemma OP details is really so widespread as all that.

i fundamentally disagree with the premise of this

bisexual people in hetero relationships do get straight privilege, yes, but lets not pretend that all relationships last. To say that people cant find support networks and friends for other aspects of their lives and past/future relationships BECAUSE they currently have the privileges of straightness feels arbitrary and cruel

Why? Because I have decades of history with these groups. They contain my friends. I like their company and I have a lot in common with them. Similar to most other people who go. We have holidayed in the same area, often in groups.
Do you usually decide that once a bi woman is in a current heterosexual relationship they are no longer welcome to associate with their friends because “straight privilege”? It’s unkind and irrational.

I completely agree with @sadmillenial

Do you usually decide that once a bi woman is in a current heterosexual relationship they are no longer welcome to associate with their friends because “straight privilege”?

That is what happened to me. Socially it has been much worse than any homophobia I faced during the decade of my 20s when I was solely in same sex relationships. It's made my life really disconnected, and I'd say it still affects me to some extent now in my 50s.

But loads of my straight female friends would like to be involved with lesbian groups because they're women-only and there really aren't that many other women-only social options available. My sister has often said she wishes she could come on some of the lesbians events I've organised over the years. The whole point is that those events are for women-focussed women, not women who are going to go home to their husbands or male partners having had a few days of being tourists in Lesbianland.

It is not the point at all. LGB events include the B. It isn’t the same as straight women wishing they could go there. You are trying to exclude bisexual people from events that include them. These events are not “lesbian land” exclusively.

@RocketNan Of course you can go. But women here are complaining they feel less welcome when they start talking about their husband. I think that is inevitable if the vast majority there are in same sex relationships. If you are talking more a queer space then you will be in the majority anyway.