Bisexual Erasure

Visibility is important for any minority. It educates people on their culture and can go a long way in the battle towards acceptance. Visibility for any LGBT group isn't the best it could be for various reasons, but it seems for bisexuality there is another hurdle to jump over. +

This hurdle is called bisexual erasure. Bisexual erasure is the tendency of people to ignore or even remove, falsify and reexplain the existence of bisexuality both as a whole as well as in certain people. This causes a lot of misinformation and enforces harmful stereotypes. +

Throughout the years, various ideas have been set up as to why people (both straight and gay) engage in bisexual erasure. According to Kenji Yoshino, there are three reasons, all aimed to maintain a binary that seems to be an integral part of monosexual identities. +

The first reason is to stabilize sexual orientation to two extremes. Many people do this in order to not have their sexuality questioned. This reinforces the belief that bisexuality is simply a phase of indecisiveness between gay and straight and not a true identity on its own. +

The second reason is to maintain the importance of gender. Attraction with a certain gender as focus point is an integral part of monosexual identities yet for most bisexual people this doesn't seem of importance. Therefore it changes the idea and reason of attraction. +

The third reason stems from a different stereotype. Since bisexual people are believed to be inherently non-monogomous, bisexuality is erased in order to strengthen the preference of a relationship between two people. This only further ingrains the stereotype. +

Although all genders suffer from bisexual erasure, gender does seem to play a role in the manner of bisexual erasure. For men, the idea that they need to pick a side is more enforced than on women. The stereotype that bisexual men are actually just closeted gay men still holds. +

For women, bisexuality is often reduced to experimentation. While for guys there seems to be a strict line between gay and straight, for women this is looser. However, women are expected to prove themselves and still often told they're doing it just for attention from men. +

Bisexuality is also often erased due to internalised biphobia. Since there are a lot of harmful stereotypes out in the world and pressure is placed on people to pick a side, many do just that without question. It's also easier to be seen as straight instead of in the minority. +

In media bisexual erasure often gets reinforced. One way this happens is by rewriting bisexual history as gay history. An example of this is making the Greek pederasty or the Native American Two-Spirit culture about gay acceptance rather than possible bisexual acceptance. +

Another way in which this is done, is by portraying famous bisexual people as gay instead. Examples of this are Madonna, Lady Gaga and Freddie Mercury, who have all dubbed themselves bisexual yet are commonly presented as gay instead. A different example is Anne Frank. +

She often wrote in her diary about her attraction to both boys and girls, but many parts were scratched in the published versions due to it being deemed 'immoral', thereby successfully erasing her bisexuality and presenting her as straight instead. +

Bisexual erasure has many consequences. Due to it, stereotypes and misinformation have taken hold. When coming out, some bisexual people are denied solely because others don't believe bisexuality exists. This chance is even higher with less common labels like pansexuality. +

By erasing examples of bisexual people this gets further reinforced, as is the case with many stereotypes attached to bisexuality like bisexuals being seen as promiscuous, confused, closeted monosexuals, inherently bad or simply not 'gay enough'. +

The effects of bisexual erasure can be undone with more visibility and good representation to combat all the confusion and misinformation that has been compiling over the years. And it will be corrected as representation grows and we raise our voices.