So this woman wrote a wonderful article exploring the competing feelings that she experienced as a bisexual after the Pulse night club massacre. It’s about a two minute read and well worth your time.
https://medium.com/@elledowd/biphobia-and-the-pulse-massacre-add1dd9b27be#.a2fz3vk6n
By contrast: for me this was the first time I felt gay enough. The knot I had in my stomach for the two days after told me that every fiber of my being belonged to the queer community.
http://elitedaily.com/dating/someone-loves-idea-you/1321834/
I can add another sign to tell if someone was in love with the idea of you or the actual you. If they use one of the reasons for their initial attraction as a reason to break up then it’s likely you were idealized to some extent.
I’m pretty sure this happened to me. I had a beautiful relationship, or I think it was, with a pretty dynamic individual for almost three years. Shortly before we started dating she told me that she had always wanted to date a bisexual man. I knew I was being fetishized to some extent and that her urge was built upon what she believed a bisexual guy would be like, but it is important to me that my partner accept my sexuality and on that front this seemed like solid ground.
Fast forward to the end and it was the primary reason given for our breakup. She accepted me being pansexual intellectually, but had a negative visceral reaction to me liking men. Identity issues are a big deal for me so for the person I cared the most about to reject me on a very fundamental level was deeply hurtful to say the least.
I struggled with this for awhile, until I read the article below and it started me thinking that maybe this is what had happened to us. The idea of dating a bisexual guy was a romanticized one. The actual experience was apparently drastically different for her and it was too much to handle.
I want to leave you with a slightly different approach to handling the reality of who a person is. For me learning the ways someone violates my expectations is one of the exciting things about getting to know them. In the television series Firefly there is a line that has always resonated with me, “It’s my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sommbitch or another.” It’s about nuance and the juxtaposition of the ideal verses reality. It’s what I love about people and eventually it will be one of those things that someone loves about me.
So what about you? Has this ever happened to you and which side of the relationship were you on?
I have to admit that I don’t have the slightest idea of who Gaby Dunn is, but then I live in a box informed only by my specific news interests and fueled by copious amounts of punk rock so this is not surprising to me. However, I don’t have to know her other works to appreciate the wisdom in this one.
What she speaks to here is one of the things I have started doing. I’m out to pretty much anyone. It’s one of the only ways to control my identity and prevent bisexual erasure. If I let people know that I’m pansexual then they won’t necessarily think me straight when with a woman or gay when with a man.
http://www.womenshealthmag.com/sex-and-love/polyamorous-pansexual
I think this article makes some good points. One of the things that most resonated with me was when the author says, “I could not be myself until I could be all of myself at the same time.” This has been so very true in my experience. I didn’t start coming into my own until I started being out about one of my last secrets; that I was pansexual.
I’m a little lucky in that to some extent I’m kind of like her rebellious sister in that I didn’t really give a fuck what other people thought of me. Still, I can feel the pressures that she discusses in this article and I think this is an important discourse to have.
http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/01/bisexuals-mental-health/
I think my title justly sums it up so read this little jewel for some examples of the lies people tell bisexuals.
Okay, I’ll give you one example. Long before I came out or had even dated a guy I stumbled onto a blog with gays and lesbians bashing bisexuals. They had been dating a same-sex person of bisexual orientation and their relationships had ended. Their bisexual partners had gone on to date another person of the opposite sex and they were being lambasted by the gay community on this site for doing so.
Um, we’re bisexual! That means that we can date a man, and if that relationship doesn’t work out then we can date a woman next if we so choose. It’s not even in the fine print, it’s yelling at you from our identity title.
http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/09/lies-tell-you-when-bisexual/
sexloveandire.com 