By Elinor Aspegren and Ashley Bamfo
The world was very different 20 years ago. Facebook was launched, Beyoncé had won her first Grammys without Destiny’s Child, and ruffles were still in style.
Besides fashion, Beyoncé, and social networking, the lesbian and gay community was thriving. But one group sought more visibility in the community, as ABilly S. Jones-Hennin told Rainbow History Project in a 2004 oral history.
“I define myself as gay, as my political activism has been much more in the gay movement as opposed to the bisexual movement,” he said, but “the challenge there is, I am always amazed at how people put gay, persons in the gay and lesbian community, get really angry if you appear to be, if you define yourself as bisexual, appear to be intimate with someone of another gender. I think a lot of it is just [a] lack of understanding and comparing it with their own experience.”
Jones-Hennin died earlier this year after decades of activism for the LGBTQ community. But he spoke to the experience of a lot of bisexuals in the decades after the group became a part of the national conversation.
The Furies , (volume 2, number 2) was the newspaper of the eponymous collective. In this 1973 article, Loretta Ulmschneider writes about bisexual women: “Just as the existence of lesbians is not a new phenomenon, so the existence of bisexuals (women who relate sexually to both women and men) is not new.” Rainbow History Project Digital Collections.
A definition of bisexuality took shape around the mid-19th century, but in DC, the term started to become mainstream around the 1970s with lesbian and gay student groups and support groups for men in male-female heterosexual marriages.
Loraine Hutchins, co-founder of the Alliance of Multi-Cultural Bisexuals (AmBi), co-wrote a book with another activist Lani Ka’ahumanu. The 1990s book Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out has been largely praised as a seminal book in the history of bisexuality.
“Bisexual people… have lived and loved since the beginning of time. Yet we’re told we don’t exist, that we’re really heterosexual or really gay, that nothing exists except those two extremes,” they wrote. “Though not usually talked about or acknowledged, our lives… manifest a wealth of experience and behavior between those extremes.”
“It’s sad that I helped create [bisexuality in the modern sense], because I’m only 76 years old, and bisexual [has been] in our world since the beginning of time, I’m sure,” Hutchins added in an interview with Rainbow History Project.
She went on to add that these groups evolved because of discussions surrounding feminism and womanhood. They learned their organizing skills in the women’s movement or the civil rights movement, and wanted bisexual activism to be inclusive.
Many bisexual rights groups formed as visibility increased. Bi-Ways, a monthly support group for bisexual men and women organized in 1985 and continued until the mid-90s. AmBi organized DC’s first Celebrate Bisexuality Day in February 1993. 2024 marks 25 years since the first Bi Visibility Day back in 1999, according to bivisibilityday.com.
A t-shirt for the April 25 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Rainbow History Project Digital Collections
April 1993 brought the March on Washington for Gay, Lesbian and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation – the first time bisexual people were included in the title of a national LGBT march.
Bisexual and trans activists created a separate Pride Festival to protest bi and trans exclusion from the Pride title, which was at the time the “Lesbian and Gay Pride Festival.” In 1997, Whitman Walker Clinic renamed it to “Capital Pride Festival: A Celebration of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgendered Community and Friends.”
Today, bisexual visibility has grown since the days of “Bi Any Other Name.” Multiple celebrities have come out as bisexual, bisexual name recognition has flourished at Pride, and according to the 2020 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, bisexual people make up 75% of all young people who identify as LGBTQ.
But Hutchins says that we still have some way to go in terms of achieving full visibility in the LGBTQ community.
“The bi identity often gets eclipsed by queer, by gay, by pan. And that is fine with me in some ways, because I identify with all those words in some ways, and I also understand that the erasure of the B word is toxic and harmful to all of us,” Hutchins said. “It’s more about what I would call erotophobia, fear of desire and nonconforming gender roles being expressed publicly in general, not only specifically about people who are attracted to more than one gender, but also in terms of all sorts of sexual minorities and our inability to do good sex education and health education in our culture in general.”
Rory Gory, a digital marketing manager for the Trevor Project, added on the news site Them that “common biphobic stereotyping includes assuming bi people are sexually promiscuous, going through a phase, more likely to cheat, or unable to commit to a relationship.”
One quarter of bisexual people aren’t out within their community, compared to 4% of lesbian and gay members, according to Pew Research Center. That’s not all – in 2021, only 11 states (and the District of Columbia!) mandated “inclusive content with regard to sexual orientation.” Five states permit negativity towards homosexuality in their curriculum, according to USA TODAY. These “no promo homo” laws increase the stigma of sex, which in turn impacts all of the LGBTQ community.
But despite all of this, when Hutchins looks back, she sees potential in the bisexual activist group coalition building.
“Caring for each other, reaching out, taking risks, making the connections” is how they fought against stigma. She charged the bisexuals of the future with a focus: “I do think it all comes back to basic sex education and human rights.”
Jones-Hennin was committed to coalition building and helping bisexuals through his activism, he said. He made space in the gay activism community for bisexuals and knew that they were fighting for the same cause.
“I know that whatever we achieve as gays will benefit bisexuals,” he said in 2004.