Unintentional bisexual erasure and regret

I have a confession. In my younger years I greatly enjoyed making a homophobic fuckwit plotz by pointing out that their favorite celebrity was homosexual. They hardly ever believed me but I saw an opportunity to put a chink in the armor of their bigotry and I leapt on it with glee.

Lately I’ve reflected and not only was it a bit tacky of me to out celebs who maybe wanted to stay private — a fact that hit home particularly when I started working for some of the more private ones — in many cases I failed in another way. A whole bunch of bisexual people got slotted into the “gay” corner and I never thought twice about it.

Last week was bisexual awareness week and someone asked me why there even needed to be a bisexual awareness week and didn’t LTGBQ et al. already cover the bases? But I thought back to my inconsiderate youth and felt regret that I’d made so many of my friends and colleagues invisible. We’re an either/or sort of species, I reckon.

And I have friends even now who will gently mention their various predilections and maybe I don’t know exactly how to categorize them in my either/or worldview.

I’m working on it and I see you guys and I don’t want to diminish the richness of our human rainbow by skipping over any of the color gradients. My bad.

#bisexualawarenessweek #homosexual #homophobia #outing #FreddieMercury #bisexual #gossip #celebrity #gay #LTGBQ