Steph Not Stephanie

Monday was decidedly not my favourite. Daylight Savings can eat a bag of dicks, it was dark and rainy and gross outside, and I had to deal with apartment logistics shenanigans. Basically, this:

During this wonderful day, the TTC gifted me with a gaggle of morons in my immediate vicinity. I’m normally pretty good at tuning out the tomfoolery around me, but as the subway held in the claustrophobia-inducting tube right before Finch, a group of teenagers were having a very loud discussion about bisexuality.

Being too curious nosy for my own good, I muted my music and listened to what the future generation had to say.

Obnoxious girl: Something something … even if you’re bi, there’s 50% of you that would never sleep with a man.

Obnoxious guy: I know. You have to pick, you can’t like both.

Other obnoxious girl: Bisexual just means you don’t want to come out as whatever you are.

Me:

I very seriously debated engaging in conversation with these idiots teens, trying to give them the benefit of the doubt for their lack of developed frontal lobe. They cackled on, but I barely heard as I vividly imagined schooling them and standing up for bisexuals everywhere, like some sort of sexually fluid superhero (oh wait, he already exists). Of course, by the time my fantasy came to an end, the subway doors were opening and the group spilled out, in a rush to continue  being assholes above ground.

Instead, I took my rage online to Twitter—where else? In doing so, I realized this would make me “officially” out. I cautiously dipped my toe in that water last year, blogging about dating couples, speaking about sleeping with women on podcasts, and calling myself ‘heteroflexible.’ Now, seething with anger because some fucksticks said something dumb in public, I wondered why I’ve been so reluctant to call myself bi. What would my family or friends think/say/do—and why did I care? I felt a familiar hesitation creeping back in, not-quite-worry but still something, who would read this and how they would respond, and again, why do I care?

My initial quasi coming out was very anti-climactic. If anyone did clutch their pearls, they did so without telling me. I had confided in a dear friend about my anxiety, and the lack of reaction made me feel almost silly about it. Now that I’ve taken a full step, ignoring the imaginary questions in my head (oddly in my family’s voices, wondering things like what Bogart thinks—he’s well aware, not that it matters), it’s easy to brush it all off as not a big deal. Then I remember the clusterfuck of a conversation on the subway, the treatment of bisexuality in women as a vehicle for male pleasure, or the issue of bi erasure/bi invisibility. I think about the number of times I’ve heard shit like bisexuality is just a stop on the train to gay town, or that it’s ‘just a phase’, and the rage comes back.

So, dear idiot children on the subway, and everyone else who has thought/said that sort of foolishness: This is for you, from me and all my greedy, playing for both teams, magical unicorn, fabulously bi brethren: