“I used to feel that i was a pretty untypical bisexual when listening to the bad experiences some people had been put through by heterosexuals and by lesbians and gay men. As of Sunday 9th June 1985, and the 2nd Extraordinary General Meeting of the London Lesbian and Gay Centre, i have been in the firing line of a lot of angry lesbians and gay men. I have had glares, snide remarks, and even open hostility from people there, mainly women. It seems that by standing up as a bisexual man, by saying that i belong to the centre, by simply existing as I am, I have alienated some, possibly many, women from the place. This was not my intention, and it hurts very deeply that lesbians who knew me to be a bisexual man before the 9th, and accepted me, now reject me, even treat me quite hostilely, or are just pure and simply embarrassed to know me.“
Bisexual Lives, 1988.
“Then I moved to London and got involved in the London Lesbian and Gay Centre. Another manifestation of the 'more right-on than thou' syndrome struck, and bisexual groups were banned from meeting there, for reasons which varied according to who you spoke to and when. There were most of the usual ones plus the idea that lesbians who use the Centre should know they're not being lusted after by a man …. which I can see, except that there was no Proposal to ban individual bisexuals ('We feel that it's a phase that many people go through on their way to being lesbian or gay' – a management committee member).”
Bisexual Lives, 1988.
“A particularly striking example of biphobia occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Northampton, Massachusetts, a town renowned for its large concentration of lesbian and gay people and its atmosphere of sexual freedom. The town had held a lesbian and gay pride march for many years when, in 1988, members of the Valley Bisexual Network approached the Northampton Lesbian and Gay Pride March Committee, requesting that the name be changed to the Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Pride March. The five or six members of the committee unanimously agreed to change the name for 1989. The overall community response was overwhelmingly negative. A vote was again held for the 1990 march, which retained the name change. The vote was denounced in the local lesbian press. An announcement was circulated in the lesbian community, making it clear that one was expected to choose between the lesbian “we” who have “created a community we care deeply about and are in danger of seeing ... made invisible” and the bisexual interlopers. At the next meeting, attended by forty or fifty people, a clear majority confirmed the decision to revert to the former name, omitting “bisexual” from the title (Hemmings 2002:66).
Hemmings underlines the fact that the debates about the inclusion of the term “bisexual” in the march emerged as a result of a conflict within the lesbian and gay community, not outside it. In the view of those who wished to include the term, its inclusion demonstrated that bisexuals were considered part of the core of lesbian and gay community, in need of allies, rather than being allies. In the alternate view on which its later exclusion was premised, the attitude towards bisexuals demonstrated a policy of “political affiliation,” based on the assumption that they are not part of the community. Bisexuals are then seen as claiming lesbian space that is not theirs. In the words of one writer, “We lesbians have worked long and hard to create safe communities for ourselves. Bisexuals are welcome to, and should do, the same. But do not try to grab what we have created.” Yet those arguing for the inclusion of bisexual in the title of the march do so on the basis of “group unity inclusion,” rather than the desire to create a bisexual community separate from the lesbian and gay community. This has created an ambiguity in the use of the often - used term community. For example, one committee member stated, after the 1990 march “The lesbian and gay community gets on very well with the rest of the community.” Does this refer to bisexuals, or heterosexuals? Does reference to “bisexuals” demarcate a space inside the lesbian and gay community, or outside it? (Hemmings 2002:71).
Another issue that must not be overlooked regarding biphobia is the fact that the term “bisexual” is not gendered. Bisexuals comprise both men and women. The lesbian “reclaiming” of the 1990 march was consistently viewed in terms of territorial rights, where lesbian territory is understood as a space free from men. A triumphant editorial in the local lesbian press was entitled “Take Back the March Night.” A connection was clearly being drawn between violence against women protested in Take Back the Night marches and bisexuals. This link was made more explicit in a “note to the editors” of the Valley Women’s Voice that read, “The following statement on lesbian occupied territory was in part sparked by the recent controversy in Northampton, MA surrounding the 1990 Gay/Lesbian Pride March.” The authors linked the Pride March debates with the rape of a woman following the Take Back the Night march in the same year, arguing that both marches will remain symbolic until the community becomes “LESBIAN OCCUPIED TERRITORY,” which is the only space that “can offer long-term protection from men, and create alternative women’s culture free from the violence of heterosexuality.” In the context of this lesbian separatist spirit, the inclusion of bisexuals was seen as intrusion.
The experience of Northampton was not unique. Hemmings notes that the lesbian and gay community in San Francisco marginalized bisexuals by omitting bisexual involvement in events, publishing letters of complaint from bisexuals under disparaging headings such as “Bis Feel Left Out.” In 1984, the San Francisco Bisexual Center closed. According to Hemmings, this was centrally because of its continued emphasis on nonmonogamy, group sex and SM (sadomasochism, now often called the “leather” lifestyle) as political expressions. The crowd booed the bisexual contingent in the 1985 San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Freedom Parade.”
Bisexuality and Transgenderism, 2003.
Its not a secret that bisexuals were sometimes banned from pride marches or from communtiy spaces, but a common reason for this seems to be the idea that bisexuals, as a mixed gender group and as people who dont experience exclusive sga, are allowing predatory men, bisexual men, into the community. Hopefully I dont have to explain why painting bisexual men and the bisexual women who share a community with them as predators is homophobic, biphobic, and misogynist.
It's especially cruel considering these examples all occurred during the AIDs crisis, a number of the attitudes towards bisexuals expressed by separatists in those texts are direct parallels of mainstream hatred of bi men as predatory vectors of AIDs:
In a number of Hollywood films from 1985-1995, bisexual characters were represented as violent, drug-using murderers. With relatively few representations of bisexual men and women in mainstream cinema during this period, the near-uniformity with which such films as Basic Instinct, Blue Velvet, American Commandos, and Chained Heat II depicted bisexuals as killers suggests that a deeper ideological substitution was taking place. Tracing the particular history of this trope, this article finds that media constructions of bisexual men as vectors of HIV transmission in the mid-1980s played a decisive role in creating the image of the bisexual man as sexualized killer. This figure fused representations of unrestrained heterosexual-patriarchal power with queer subversion, as epitomized in Blue Velvet. In turn, in the early 1990s, these images were transposed onto bisexual women, most influentially in Basic Instinct, to form a new category of heterosexist representation modeled after depictions of bisexual men, rather than traditional images of lesbians. The construction of bisexual identity as a form of sadomasochistic, drug-linked criminality served as a public appeal for greater state repression of bisexual communities.
Bisexuals Who Kill: Hollywood’s Bisexual Crimewave, 1985-1998.