Bisexuals Should Be Existentialists

The argument is simple. For the bisexual woman, the path of least resistance is to date men, or to let men date you, or to let a man make a move and see what comes out of it.

At some point in a bisexual’s life cycle, perhaps a decisive older lesbian makes a move on her and thus sprouts her new potentialities. Now follows a crisis of identity; am I a real bisexual? How much was I supposed to like it for it to really count?

For me, it was a woman ten years older, wearing an all-white suit before the summer ends. She had shoulder-length brown hair. We had a mutual friend, and so I sat down beside her. She touched my leg and ordered me a gin cocktail. I drank it, and then she ordered me another. That’s when I thought that she might be interested in me.

That day (and the encounters after) was a day that ended up changing my life. I could have continued to go on as I had been, flowing through the universe, letting things happen to me. But she made a move, and then I had to decide what to do with that.

Sartre’s central claim in Existentialism Is a Humanism is that existence precedes essence: that we are not born with a fixed nature that determines our choices, but instead become who we are through the choices we make.

The bisexual, in being straight-passing, has to make a choice to become a bisexual. Or more precisely: she has to choose against the ease with which the world will make her straight.

To date men, she can be passive. To date women, she must become intentional. She must take some fucking risks! She must signal her intents, interpret people’s signals back, risk becoming suddenly legible in what she wants. Action is incriminating and produces evidence in reality that you cared about something enough to go for it.

It is one thing for loving women to be inevitable as it is for lesbians. It is another thing to feel that one could love women. “I could move to Berlin.” “I could quit my job.” It is another thing to reorganize one’s life around that possibility.

The actions count a lot more for the existentialists.

Sartre writes:

Why should we attribute to Racine the capacity to write yet another tragedy when that is precisely what he did not write? In life, a man commits himself, draws his own portrait and there is nothing but that portrait. No doubt this thought may seem comfortless to one who has not made a success of his life. On the other hand, it puts everyone in a position to understand that reality alone is reliable; that dreams, expectations and hopes serve to define a man only as deceptive dreams, abortive hopes, expectations unfulfilled; that is to say, they define him negatively, not positively. Nevertheless, when one says, “You are nothing else but what you live,” it does not imply that an artist is to be judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things contribute no less to his definition as a man. What we mean to say is that a man is no other than a series of undertakings, that he is the sum, the organisation, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings.

Sartre might actually argue that denying your bisexuality is actually living in bad faith.

So build your life! Build your bisexuality! You can do it!