Requiem for a Jolie...
So AfterEllen.com published my piece about celebrity bi-gones today. As many of you know I mostly write for print publications, so it was a bit exciting to see the insane list of comments after my piece. What’s even more hilarious is that apparently at some point in the day someone posed as me online, pretending to be bitter and angry at the world and suicidal. I’m so sorry I missed that. I would have loved to have seen what the nutbag wrote before AfterEllen took it down. (But many thanks for taking it down.)
I am grateful for those of you who seemed to understand where I was coming from and were brave enough to defend my article. For the most part, I just feel pleased that something I wrote inspired so many emotions.
It makes sense that people have so many emotions about this because frankly there are so many different types of bisexuals, and thus, so many different attitudes on how vocal people need to be about their bisexuality. Mike and I address this a lot in our book. Basically, there are bisexuals who hate labels and think they should never have to call themselves anything or come out at all. There are bisexuals who have sex but not relationships with members of the same or opposite sex. There are bisexuals who have relationships only with members of the same or opposite sex. There are bisexuals who have relationships and fall in love with both sexes. There are polyamorous bisexuals and single bisexuals, etc.
I wasn’t trying to make a blanket statement about all those types of bisexuals or even for all bisexuals in my article. There was a reason it was a first person piece, people. It was my opinion. My opinion, if it wasn’t clear, is that bisexual people in monogamous relationships inevitably look straight or gay, which poses a problem when a bisexual is a public figure. Why? Because it leads the public to think bisexuality goes away when someone enters into a committed relationship. This doesn’t mean I’m “heterosexist” or require a bisexual to be with both genders at all times in order to always look bisexual. If anyone thought that was my point, you were wrong.
When I wrote the chapter on relationships for our book, I interviewed dozens of bisexuals in relationships and one thing I heard a lot was, “When I was younger, I would correct people all the time when they thought I was straight or gay because of the gender of my partner. Now I’m older and I just don’t have the energy for that. If my neighbors think I’m gay, let them think that.”
I can understand how exhausting it can be for our kind to have to repeatedly come out while in relationships, and I don’t expect everyone to do it. But it would be nice if bisexual celebrities would be seen publicly not just with their opposite sex partners. It would be nice if they would not just talk about their relationships with opposite sex partners. It would be nice if they didn’t give the impression through complicit silence that once they are in relationships that they are now straight.
That would help our almost non-existent community. And that’s the majority of what I was saying. I was saying we need a new public figure if (and the jury’s still out) Jolie is not going to mention her sexuality again, and preferably that someone won’t fulfill the bisexual stereotype so the general public will have the opportunity to change their negative opinions about bisexuality.
What’s heartbreaking to me is that now Jolie has a squeaky clean image, a family, and is undoubtedly a global do-gooder is that she cannot still publicly be bisexual, that the general public can’t point to her and say, “Wow, that’s what a bisexual looks like.”
Clearly I know not all of the women I mentioned in my article are now straight. I’m sure Drew Barrymore is probably still bisexual, but that doesn’t change the fact that she is never seen publicly with women. So though the subhead ruffled a few feathers and seemed contradictory (did I mention that AE wrote the subhead, not me?) I was using hyperbole in my article to make a point—whether the women I named be they Madonna or whomever are straight or not—from their behavior in the media and complicit silence it sure seems that way.
I cannot tell AfterEllen readers or anyone what their sexuality is. But to pose an article in which I did that based on media representations certainly made all of you think, didn’t it?
—Nicole
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
