Bi History - Blog Posts

Bisexual Magazines!!

Hello bisexuals, I have made a carrd archiving a few bisexual magazine series published in the 1990s. If you are interested in bisexual history and want to know more about it then I suggest you check it out 🩷💜💙 (It looks better on PC/desktop site view)

Journal of Bisexuality

Hello bisexuals! I have compiled all of the volumes and articles of Journal of Bisexuality and you can access it for free! Don't worry about paywalls anymore. I will keep updating the drive.

Preserving Bi Women’s History

Bisexual activist and scholar Robyn Ochs just announced the successful conclusion of a project she has been working on for 7 ½ years in collaboration with Amy Benson of Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library.

Back issues of Bi Women (now the Bi Women Quarterly) (1983-2009) and of North Bi Northwest (a publication of the Seattle Bisexual Women’s Network) are now archived and available via Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library. They have been digitized, and are searchable and available to the public.

Here’s the press release from Harvard’s Schlesinger Library:

Boston is home to the longest-lived bisexual women’s periodical in the world. Bi Women Quarterly, a grassroots publication, began in September 1983 as a project of the newly-formed Boston Bisexual Women’s Network.

Staffed entirely by volunteers, and containing essays, poetry, artwork, and short fiction on a wide range of themes, Bi Women Quarterly provides a voice for women who identify as bisexual, pansexual, and other non-binary sexual identities.

Robyn Ochs, editor of Bi Women Quarterly since 2009, donated the only complete collection of this publication to Schlesinger Library several years ago with the agreement that it would be preserved, and digitized in a searchable format. The digitized collection at Schlesinger covers the years 1983 to 2010. We are delighted to announce that this project is complete, and this resource is now available to researchers and to the general public through Harvard’s catalog.

Making the voices of bi women accessible will hopefully provide researchers primary material with which to begin to fill this gap.

Issues of Bi Women Quarterly from 2009 to the present can be found online a BiWomenBoston.org. These more recent issues will be added to the Library’s collection in the near future. 

oh god I got a picture of the moon you tumblr bitches are gonna LOVE

the bisexual pride flag was unvelied for the first time on december 5, 1998

the pink represents same gender attraction

the blue the attraction to different genders

purple, the resulting overlap of the two color, represent bisexuality and its uniqueness and entirety

bisexual people can have overlap experiences and history with other communities but we are also a separate and unique sexuality and identity, we are not “half straight and half gay” and we shouldn’t be perceived or treated as such. just like we see purple as its own color.

it was designed by michael page who took inspiration from the “bi triangles” also called “biangles”, created by liz nania in the 1985

it was important for her emphasizing both bi visibility and its existence outside of binary AND how we have always belonged in the queer community

original thread source

“People are called the d-slur because they reject men! That’s why bi women can’t use it! Lesbian-only word!” 

Nice separatist rhetoric, but that’s not how any of this works.

First, while there are lesbians who are called the d-slur after they say they’re not into men, nobody is going to ask a woman whether or not she likes men, or “make sure” she doesn’t, before they hurl that slur at her. 

Not only is it impossible to know who someone isn’t attracted to unless they tell you, but bigots most often do not give a damn. Gay/bi people experience homophobia and fight for rights on the basis of our attraction to the same gender. No gay man is fighting for the right to not marry women. The idea a lack of attraction is all that homophobes attack people for also implies that they’d be similarly mad at aroace women, which is false. 

(Here’s a post on the whole “lack of attraction” concept, pointing out historical conceptions of women’s [proposed lack of] sexuality.)

Second, there are bi women who only date women and straight women who don’t date anyone—lesbians aren’t the only ones who “reject” men or are punished for not being “available” to them. Insisting that other women are inherently “catering” or even “available” to them just because of their attraction to them is straight-up misogynistic.

Third, it takes about two seconds to learn about the etymology and see that it was originally about women being masculine (which most people associate with same-gender attraction, which bisexual women experience; this connection may also explain the common stereotypes of lesbians being hairy or ugly). At first, it virtually only applied to butches. The solitary d-slur as a pejorative arguably came from the term “bull-[d slur],” which was used to describe masculine women or those who “engaged in lesbian activities” (“lesbian” used to be a synonym for “tribade,” something one did rather than who one was.) A lot of homophobic violence comes from perceived gender-nonconformity. 

Fourth, lesbians and bi women have shared community spaces and terminology including butch/femme and the word “lesbian,” for decades. forever. “Bisexual” wasn’t a (recorded) reclaimed identity term until about the 50s (possibly 40s), and in the 60s, some bisexuals chose to “call [themselves] homosexual, not bisexual” because they saw the “bisexual” label as a cop-out, and they’ll “be gay until everyone has forgotten that [same-sex attraction] is an issue.” Score one for internalized biphobia!

Until the 70/80s or so—when political lesbianism came about and gained popularity, especially among modern-definition lesbians—the word “lesbian” typically (though not exclusively) referred to all woman-loving women (but sometimes, only butches were considered “true” lesbians). The political usage of “lesbian” increased as the gay movement grew in response to its misogyny and power imbalance. We find one clear example of it including bi women from a 1973 issue of the lesbian newspaper, Lavender Woman:

To me, a lesbian is a woman-oriented woman; bisexuals can be lesbians. A lesbian does not have to be exclusively woman oriented, she does not have to prove herself in bed, she does not have to hate men, she does not have to be sexually active at all times, she does not have to be a radical feminist. She does not have to like bars, like gay culture, or like being gay. When lesbians degrade other lesbians for not going to bars, not coming out, being bisexual or not sexually active, and so on, we oppress each other.

Up until even the 90s (and allegedly early 2000s), “lesbian” was sometimes defined as “any woman who has at some time in her life loved another woman.” The woman who said this was Joan Nestle, out lesbian and founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. The term “leather[d-slur]” was (as far as I can tell) coined in the 1996 book The Second Coming: A Leather[d-slur] Reader, co-authored by Robin Sweeney, a butch-identified bisexual woman. A 1996 study, “Ambiguous Identity in an Unambiguous Sex/Gender Structure: The Case of Bisexual Women,” states:

Many women in this study define a [d-slur] as ‘anyone who is not heterosexual,’ and lesbian-aligned bisexual women often use the term to describe themselves. This move allows bisexual women to participate in lesbian contexts without either the onus of deception, since ‘[d-slur]s’ includes bisexuals, or the burden of the bisexual stigma.

There weren’t many organized and independent bi communities until the 80s/90s, which was also when the lesbian community, for the most part, significantly split off from bisexual women (though separatism had been proposed and practiced before then). During this political shift, lesbians deemed bisexual women the “only true heterosexuals” and “parasites attaching themselves to the Lesbian community” even though, for decades, the lesbian community was their community.

Even without this history, many bi women will talk about how they’ve been called the d-slur by strangers, family, friends, and partners in regards to their bisexuality, and people still go “well, sorry, but you’re attracted to men so you can’t say our word,” as if bi women’s attraction to men negates the homophobia they face, as if they can’t be gender-nonconforming in the same way butch lesbians are.

Even by saying that “bi women are only called d-slurs because people assume they’re lesbians,” one acknowledges that bi women can have so much in common with lesbians that they get “mistaken” for each other and attacked for the same reasons: their love for women, and sometimes the gender-nonconformity that comes with that. Speaking of the second thing, do you think homophobic strangers would call a femme lesbian a d-slur more than they would a GNC/butch bi woman?

When bi women argue that they should be able to reclaim the d-slur, it’s not due to them being itching for shiny new ways to be edgy or even wanting to say it—it’s simply because this word targets them for the same reason it targets lesbians. It has always been their word.

Inb4: “Well, cishet guys are called the f-slur sometimes, can they suddenly reclaim it now?” This poor excuse for a counterargument only has a chance of working if you think bi women oppress lesbians. News flash: They don’t. Please cease your obsession with comparing bi people to straight people.

biphobic wlw who insist bi women cant use butch or femme, while giving the reason that bi women dress or present themselves to get the attention of men as their justification, are repeating biphobic stereotypes - bi women are all hyper feminine, are less committed to women, etc - that have a very ironic history considering current discourse, its very strange.

like, in the 90s and further back, it was assumed that femmes were bisexual and butches were lesbians (keep in mind, i am using modern terms here, ‘bisexual’ was not in common use as a sexual identity in the 50s as bisexuality was deemed an impossibility by the medical establishment at the time. bisexuals were seen as switching between the straight world and the gay world). nowadays, thanks to some biphobes who cant read their own history, a lot of ppl think bi women arent allowed to id as femme or butch at all. but, although the word ‘bisexual’ has been erased, bi women’s participation in butch femme bar culture is obvious in the similarities between femme stereoypes and bi women’s stereotypes.

femmes were seen as ‘less committed to the life’, they were distrusted bc they could pass as heterosexual, femmes were assumed to take the passive role, they often struggled to be considered ‘true’ lesbians, and were thought to not truly be interested in other women. bi women on the other hand, will inevitably end up with men, they have straight passing priviledge, are stereotyped as submissive, have their attraction to women dismissed as a phase, and are just straight girls who hook up with other women to get the attention of men.

spot the difference lol. the reason both sets of stereotypes are so similar is bc femmes (while not always bisexual just like butches arent always lesbians), were assumed to be bisexual to the point where a great number of negative attitudes towards femmes at the time are probably due to biphobia, and modern attitudes towards femmes still reflect this history even if bi women themselves are currently being pushed out of iding as butch or femme. considering this, its ironic to see these same biphobic attitudes being repeated as the apparent reason why bi women cant use the terms at all now.

it makes me wonder how much of the misguided effort to push bi women out of these identities was done to have femme become a legitimate lesbian identity with the same complexities as butch. if femme lacks complexity its due to biphobic stereotypes associated with the identity. therefore the solution becomes to state; “bi women are gender conforming and therefore cant be butch or femme, because obviously they cant understand the complexities of either identity and any bi woman who ids as femme must mistakenly view butches as men lite with no real understanding of how femme is a subversion of femininity that deliberately rejects men.” the same biphobic sentiments that discredited femmes before are now used to bolster the identity for some by saying there is a wrong way and right way to be femme (and butch by proximity), then, pushing the ones doing femme wrong out of the community.

but if thats the solution it doesnt solve the underlying problems of biphobia (and misogyny lets be honest here), which has a negative effect on all wlw not just bi women. not to mention basing an identity on a rejection of men alone isnt a stable identity itself bc it means you always have to outwardly perform that action of rejecting men over loving women to be seen as correct in that identity, all wlw will be under scrutiny for their identities until the actual problem of biphobia gets solved.

also here are my sources: [x]  [x]  [x]  [x]  [x]  [x]  [x]  [x]

As Femme As We Want to Be

Tracy Schmidt Reports from the 2nd Annual Femme Gender Conference

—

The Second Annual Femme Gender Conference, sponsored by the Harvey Milk Institute (HMI) this May, gave more than 400 people a chance to explore that question and more – what femme is, how we work it, struggle with it, display it, honor it. HMI put on a huge event, with film screenings, four different performances, an art display, and two days’ worth of panels and workshops.

Just like the term “femme”, this conference covered a lot of territory. The conference organizers aimed to welcome every kind of person with more than a drop of femme in their souls, and to make plenty of space to talk about how we are, perform, or just love femme. Girls, boys, dykes, bi-femmes, fag-femmes, people from communities of color, young femmes, trans-femmes, lesbians, drag-femmes, working class and rich femmes, parents, fat femmes, and a few garden-variety freaks like me crowded the 33 workshops.

Femmes flocked to sessions like Femme As An Evolving Gender Identity; Bisexual Femmes and Femme Bisexuals; Fag and Drag Femme; I’d Love To Ask You Out But I Don’t Know Who You Are; Trans Femme: Beyond the Bedroom; What We’re Rolling Around In Bed With (femmes of color only); Femmes With FtM Partners; Switch Femme; Fem-man-inity; and How To Fuck In High Heels. We spoke with incredible panelists including Kate Bornstein, Lani Ka'ahumanu, Liz Highleyman, JoAnn Loulan, and Karen Bullock-Jordan.

We examined the challenges and joys of claiming femme identity alongside other identities in our lives. We discussed how different communities hold different experiences of femme. We debated whether we should speak of femmes as somehow transgendered. We ranted about inclusion. We argued about community. We laughed at ourselves. And we celebrated the power and range of our femme styles.

Most important, we met each other in a world where it can be hard to even see one another. It was experimental and emotional and challenging and practical and brilliant and contentious and connected all at once – two amazing days of the best of queer culture

—————

Tracy Schmidt was the Conference Coordinator for this year’s Femme Gender Conference. She identifies as a bi and poly femme dyke top whose areas of obsession include gender, motorcycles, S/M, travel, and cleavage. Her current project (with Liz Highleyman) is an anthology focused on newly emerging gender identities.

Anything That moves, issue 17, summer 1998.

(This used to be a part of this post, but I figured it wasn’t especially relevant to the topic at hand, so now it’s here.)

Many books discussing butch/fem(me) history point out that a number of women in the scene, particularly fems, were behaviorally bisexual. Due to this—as well as their femininity—fems and fish (a black fem identity) struggled in lesbian communities to be considered “true” lesbians as they were often stereotyped as bisexual. Many butches/studs assumed they were more likely to leave the “lesbian life” because they could “pass” for straight, which, y’know, totally doesn’t sound like how people talk about bi women today whatsoever.

While I’m not necessarily equipped to provide a full MLA-cited deep-dive analysis on butch/femme identity, here are a few quotes (and a very long paper about femme bisexuality if you’re especially curious).

From Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (1994):

Fems, who never ceased to act on their own initiative, in some contexts were defined as other, as not really lesbian, because of their traditional feminine looks or their active heterosexual pasts.

In keeping with narrators’ varied experiences in finding their identities, the community did not have—nor does it now have—a hegemonic view about how to draw the line between the homosexual and the heterosexual. Many narrators see the butch lesbian as the true lesbian. Other narrators consider anyone who stays with women and is part of the community a lesbian.

The boundaries between heterosexual and homosexual have always been difficult to draw… The gay liberation model made the boundary clear by categorically including every woman who is attracted to a woman. But throughout the twentieth century there have been women who have spent some time in the heterosexual world and some in the homosexual world… Most narrators were aware of these ambiguities and took them into account by speaking in terms of bisexuality, or the pure versus the less-pure lesbian.

It may be important to note that even up until—and during—the 90s, “lesbian” was sometimes defined as “any woman who has at some time in her life loved another woman” (see pg. 11).

Bi butches have been around for a while, too. 

From the 1995 essay “Too Butch to Be Bi”:

But being a butch woman who is also bisexual can be difficult. It feels sometimes that the the idea is so challenging—since the assumptions in our communities are that all butch women are lesbian women and all femme women are bisexual women—that often a butch woman trying to come to terms with being bisexual is stuck. 

[…] But once we find a community that is accepting of our same-sex interests, we run into an entirely different series of messages. A number of these are about appearances and what they are supposed to say about who we are. The ideas about femmes (femme women aren’t really interested in other women, and femme men aren’t really interested in women at all) and butches (butches are always the aggressors in sex, whether they are men or women) permeate our queer culture. These ideas make it difficult for us to explore who we are and who we want to be. Many people feel too threatened to challenge the status quo of an already fringe community, for fear of being outcast from the one place where they have struggled to belong.

From a 1996 interview with Leslie Feinberg:

And I would say that people who were referred to as drag queens, [sh*m*les], female impersonators, drag kings, diesel [d-slur]s, butches, et cetera, uh… Nowadays we think of them sometimes as just being synonymous with a certain kind of sexuality, but in fact there’s a lot of butch women who sleep with other butches, or who are bisexual, and the same thing is true with feminine men.

From the 1997 book Femme: Feminists, Lesbians and Bad Girls:

[Heather Findlay]: Negative Message number three: ‘Don’t date a femme, because she’ll leave you for a man.’ […] I know tons of butches who have slept with guys, and for some reason there’s not some big stigma attached to that. That doesn’t threaten their membership in the lesbian community, but with us [femmes] it does.

From a 2000 issue of Bi Women: The Newsletter of the Boston Bisexual Women’s Network:

But I also think bi women like to experiment with the wide range of possibilities along the butch/femme continuum without feeling confined by them. And that’s fun to watch! And I think many people assume that because bi women are also interested in men that they all would be femmes. Oh, how wrong they are—hallelujah for butch bi women!

Femme/butch identities are not static and they are not necessarily constricting, but they can be. Femme/butch arose out of a historical context where woman to woman love was not safely or openly acknowledged… As queer people have established a safer, more visible place in the world, femme/butch have become much more fluid (and perhaps diluted) identities or presentations. 

actually here’s some nifty links discussing butch/femme history and how it’s not lesbian exclusive and never has been

this one includes quotes about butch mlm, who have been using the term butch since at least the 1960s

this one discusses bi women using femme, even when they’re with men

this discusses the history of femme and butch in wlw spaces

this discusses how claiming butch/femme is lesbian exclusive is antiblack and racist

this one talks about femme as a term for all lgbt people (includes the d slur and f slur)

some more discussion of bi femmes

here’s a long article about femme bisexuality

some more quotes about bi femmes and bi butches, including a quote from leslie feinberg about butch bis

this talks about femme as a community wide term

this one is about butch bisexuality (d slur)

this is about femme bis and butch bis

read about polari

this is about butch/fem(me) history

here’s this about ball room culture, and this, and this

aaand here’s butch is a noun

the other bi butches i know do not include it in their bios, and as for myself i tend to lock my accounts if possible. one of my mutuals on twitter (probably yours too, i’d imagine) works way too hard to defend us and it’s really frustrating to witness because people refuse to even read/listen.

I wish people talked about how alienating it is to be butch and bisexual.

Almost everyone acts as if it's only lesbians who can be butches and even the lesbians who know that butch is not exclusive to them don't bother educating fellow lesbians. It's up to us and when we do try to educate others, we get harassed by terfs and exclusionists saying that we are "stealing lesbian culture" as if bisexuals weren't right beside yall helping build butch femme culture.

Heck even the butch bisexuals who are vocally active in the butch side of the internet don't call themselves bisexual and butch proudly in fear of getting harassed for being openly themselves. It's so fucking sad. I wish we had more solidarity. From lesbians, other queer people and especially other bisexuals. I wish I wasn't made to feel so isolated from the community that is supposed to be accepting of me.

as a bi person, the bisexual flag brings me infinite joy and always puts a smile on my face, however as a person who has a Passion for Graphic Design, that undersaturated shade of purple infuriates me when it's used digitally

like, on an actual flag - which was its original purpose - it looks great!

those look fine! lovely, even! with the semi-transparent fabric, the way it catches the sunlight, it looks beautiful!

but now look at how it looks digitally

the pink and blue are so vibrant compared to the sad, lonely lavender!

and let's look at this statement from Michael Page, the creator of the bi flag:

(sidenote: he created this flag in 1998, so if his takes on bisexuality is different from yours, it's okay to notice that! a lot has changed since the 90s when it comes to lived experiences and the way we describe them. but, it's also important to respect his thoughts about this and the way he presented them, even if today, we'd probably not say that bi people "blend unnoticeably into both the gay/lesbian and straight communities.")

so in pantone colors, the pink is 226 C, the blue is 286 C, and the purple of the flag is 258 C.

but...here's the deal

Michael talks here about how the key to understanding the symbolism is to know that the purple blends into both the pink and blue. and on a physical flag, I think you can see that!

but digitally, it absolutely does not blend. it clashes badly, and looks oddly separate from the other two colors.

which got me wondering...what purple do you get if you actually blend 226 C and 286 C?

oh! oh, my god.

look at that! look at how nicely it fits between those colors!

look at it next to the original color scheme! look at how much more vibrant the purple is!

and friends. this is just blending through rgb! you get even more purple variations when you use other color spaces!

let's compare all of them:

(top: original, lab. middle: lrgb, lch. bottom: rgb, hsl)

look at all of the different purple options you can get just by combining these two colors!

if you want almost too-vibrant saturation, you can go hsl, if you want something more relaxed that's closer to the original, you can go lab or lrgb. and if you want to split the difference, lch is bright and violet, while rgb is there with its saturated but darker purple.

anyway, I guess I don't really have a point here? this isn't so much an informational post as it is Me Getting Weird About Colors, but I think it is a useful lesson about how colors look very different on screens compared to how they look on objects in real life.

and sometimes, I think it's okay to compensate for that.

out of all of these, this is my favorite bi flag:

it's the one where the colors were blended in lab color space. for me, the lighter, softer purple is close enough to the original bi flag purple, while also feeling like a smoother blend of the blue and pink

but that's just me! and it might not even look the same to you, since every screen is different, because technology is a nightmare!

anyway, thank you for coming with me on this colorful journey! I will now retreat back to inkscape and make pained sounds about inkstitch gradients until something tangible pulls me back into reality

bi femmes with this attitude are so badass and i love you all

~ sincerely, a bi butch

im a bisexual FEMME and im not going to apologize for using a "lesbian exclusive term". I bet u don't remember when we were included in the les community before the separatist movement. it's our birthright as sapphics. I'm not going to say sorry and I'm not going to stop. end this biphobic rhetoric. WE BELONG HERE AND WE ARE NOT LEAVING.

bi flag colorpicked from the original '80s triangle symbol!