Do bisexual people suffer? Ask any serious queer, and they’ll roll their eyes. After years of Twitter talk about #biphobia and #bivisibility, the larger LGT+ community concluded that it’s not that serious, really. I posed the question to a young colleague who identifies as fluid—à la Paul Baker from Adults—and she scrunched her nose.
Bisexuals have more privilege, she reasoned, because they can pass as cishet. “I don’t know. Bi people just really like to feel oppressed,” she joked on text.
When I asked a dear friend whether bi struggles are valid, he passionately replied, “No.”
“Bi people complain about not being included in queer spaces? The rest of us getting killed out here. Ask a bi person what they’re complaining about, and 90 per cent of the time, it’s something inane,” read his WhatsApp text.
American comedian Caleb Hearon summed it up in his interview with Ziwe.
“I do believe bi people exist. I’ve grown a little weary of hearing from them,” he joked.
That’s how today’s queers see bi folks. They’re presumed to be privileged, whiny, and fixated on immaterial issues. They supposedly complain that they feel “excluded” in queer spaces but do nothing to form communities of their own. Some homosexuals even see the bi agenda as an imposition. So what are the bisexuals actually struggling with?
An in-between place
A colleague in her early 30s said that she doesn’t feel excluded in queer spaces as much as invalidated from time to time. And with every new person she tells about her sexuality, straight or queer, she has to brace for a barrage of questions: Does she prefer men? Has she ever fallen into bed with a woman, or is she just spiritually sapphic?
“I have to justify that I’m bi, and convince them with my answer,” she said.
Her bigger problem is that she can’t find a woman to date. On the rare occasion that she does, she has to spend an hour explaining her sexuality. Throw in the polyamory, and there goes another hour of patient explanation.
An urban practitioner who is dating a queer man said she felt like an imposter in both straight and queer worlds.
“Bhav hi nahi hai kahi par bhi (Nobody gives two hoots about you). It’s the curse of in-betweenness. I want to belong somewhere,” she said.
In fact, “bi women and their boyfriends” has become a running joke. Ananya, a marketing professional, said that in queer spaces, the fact that she has a boyfriend is taken to mean she’s practically straight.
“A lot of it is in the jokes. One friend jokingly said that I’m homophobic because I don’t get all of the struggles (that a gay or lesbian person might); that I’ve cherry-picked some struggles and labelled myself as bi. It’s so problematic,” she wrote in an Instagram DM.
When Anushree, a Pune-based bi woman, shared her sexuality on dating apps, she was ghosted by three lesbians. Men, on the other hand, are excited about meeting a bi woman—they’re already planning a threesome in their heads, drooling at the prospect.
“Bisexuals are the dhobi ka kutta of queer community. Na ghar ka na ghat ka (Bi people fall between two stools),” she joked.
“When you’re seen only as a sexual object by both men and women, how can you be vulnerable with them?”
In 2020, a study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders of 931 LGB people in Hong Kong found that its bi participants were at greater risk of poor mental health than lesbians and gay men.
“Compared with lesbians and gay men, bisexual individuals were more likely to report identity uncertainty, conceal their sexual orientation, and have a weaker sense of connection to the LGBT community, which were in turn associated with greater affective symptoms and poorer mental well-being,” read the article.
Sure, the struggles of bi people might fall toward the bottom of the queer ladder. But their loneliness and feeling of in-betweenness exist because bisexuals have been unable to form a political movement the way gay, lesbian, and trans people have.
Also Read: Is Indian govt warming up to queer community? I wouldn’t celebrate just yet
A bisexual politics?
Bisexuality didn’t exist in the 1970s United States, author Ranbir Sadhu writes in No one gets out of here alive (2026). The two opposing camps, hetero and homo, were sworn enemies and refused to acknowledge that they shared even one aspect of the other’s lifestyle.
“Sexuality was ideology, and by definition, ideology had to be fixed; it couldn’t be allowed to float all over the place. In-between was no man’s land, bomb-centred and where the bodies lay,” Sadhu writes.
Early gay and lesbian activists argued against discrimination based on sexuality by saying that it wasn’t a choice. No one chose to be queer, and hence, the world shouldn’t hate those who were “Born That Way” (TM). But bisexuality upset this neat argument. Bi people could very well choose to date a person of the same or opposite sex. This inherent contradiction between gay appeals for inclusion and the bisexual faculty of choice was that the homosexual movement discarded them just as it had done to trans people. Bisexuals fell into the chasm between a bipolar world order and have never recovered.
They attempted to forge a politics with a flood of blue-purple-pink flags and demands for more visibly bi characters, but the inherent diversity in the community meant it wasn’t so easy. What identity label can hold a semi-closeted man and a nonbinary they/them? The result was the birth of pansexuals and omnisexuals. The former are attracted to people regardless of their gender identity, while the latter are attracted to all genders, but “gender actively plays a role in this attraction”. Suffice to say, the differences are so vague as to be negligible.
More labels are not going to save bisexuals from the no-man’s-land, however. So long as the two poles—hetero-homo, male-female—continue to dominate our political imagination, people—bisexual and trans—will continue to fall in the chasms between them.
A bisexual politics must emerge, but unlike gay, lesbian, and trans movements, it cannot centre on identity. It will instead have to work on demolishing the two poles.
By all means, it’s a tall order, but we can start with rejecting labels. Let people wear what they want and kiss whomever they fancy. In the meantime, I will do my part by rewatching the entirety of The Vampire Lestat.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Insha Jalil Waziri)