by Cecilia Tan
The first time I heard the term "Invisible Minority" I had just arrived at college. The Lesbian Gay Student Alliance (LGSA) used it to describe the gay population in their freshman orientation program. Invisible Minority. The term caught my attention because it seemed to fit me. As it turned out, as a bisexual I was even more invisible than I realized.
Born half-Chinese and half-Irish, I have always been both a minority and invisible. My ethnic heritage is not obvious on my face. I could be Italian, American Indian, maybe Hispanic. When people cannot determine my ethnicity, if they never meet my Chinese father or I don't ever bring up the subject, they tend to assume I am white. Strangers, and even acquaintances of mine, have made racial slurs and jokes in front of me without any inkling that I might be offended. Growing up this way, I grew accustomed to people making assumptions and I never felt the need to shatter those assumptions.
In high school, I never felt the need to shatter the assumptions that I was straight, either. I had plenty of boyfriends, and kept my crushes on girls secret. Since I could easily be mistaken for straight by my heterosexual behavior, I did nothing to discourage this belief. Even to my parents I was invisible. But I had to wonder, where were the other gays and lesbians in my high school? I know now that with a student body of 1200 students, there should have been about 120 others in my high school. Who were those other 60 young lesbians? But then, as an uninformed teenager, I thought maybe I was the only one. Maybe there were no gay students.
The administration, too, seemed to believe that there were no gay students. The invisibility of gays had not only to do with the fact that the students were hidden, but that their needs were never addressed. At a public high school in suburban New Jersey, there were many "problems" the administration felt compelled to address--drugs and alcohol, family abuse, crime, even if it was only to pay lip service to them, but same sex relationships was not one of them. Some of the counseling programs in the school were actually quite developed. I remember when they instituted a ground-breaking technique--confidential counseling. They gathered the student body into the auditorium to introduce the new counselors and to discuss the troubles the counselors could handle. Sex was mentioned, in the context of dating, but no one breathed a word about homosexuality.
Even our sex education class gave no mention of gay issues. Birth control was the major emphasis of the class. We also covered sexually transmitted diseases, at a time when herpes was considered the biggest new problem in that area. Thinking back on it, I am shocked we received no information at all about AIDS. It wasn't that the disease wasn't known in 1982, but that it was considered a gay disease, and not something that needed attention in our curriculum. The problems of gays were as invisible as gays themselves.
When I arrived at college in 1985, I found a whole community of gay activists waiting with open arms. At last, I thought, my problems are over. These people are not invisible. They walked on the campus and kissed in the halls! I wore my first pink triangle and went to my first gay bar, and came out to my mother over the phone. It never occurred to me that I might still be invisible among them--as a bisexual.
Among the straight community, I expected people to assume I would be straight, too. But I hadn't expected that among the gay community, I would be assumed to be a lesbian. Acquaintances made jokes about opposite sex relationships, and slurs on bisexuals. I kept my mouth shut, thinking, Am I the only one, again? Closeted again, I investigated the attitudes of the gay community in an effort to find out just what was so weird about me. At this time, there were no classes in homosexuality to be taken per se, so the Lesbian Gay Student Alliance was my only source for information.
Within the gay community, a number of misconceptions about bisexuality dominate. For one, conventional wisdom dictates that a person who calls him or herself "bisexual" is in a period of transition from straight to gay. While it may be true some people make coming out easier by calling themselves bisexual at first, this is not the only reason people call themselves bisexual. Yet this myth persists. A friend of mine recently attended a PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) meeting, where one parent was puzzled by their child's declaration of bisexuality. Many people around the table nodded their heads that yes, it might just be a "transition" phase. My friend was the only one who spoke up that maybe the child really is bisexual, not fence sitting, not in transition, but with one foot firmly planted on each side of the straight/gay line. No one seemed to believe her even when she offered herself as living proof.
Another reason bisexuals have been invisible in gay communities has been their own reluctance to confront heterophobia. Open bisexuals sometimes meet with feelings of intolerance and resentment from some gays. The resentment can spring from the perception that a bisexual has a choice about his or her orientation. In that way it seems unfair to some gay individuals that bisexuals could be gay "only when convenient" and could hide in the straight crowd the rest of the time. Bisexuals are sometimes looked down upon as "only slumming," as if we are not serious members of the gay community but only out for the thrill of it.
Since my main source of information on all issues of same sex love was the campus student group, I believed I might have to live my life as a chameleon, shuttling back and forth in perfect disguise from the straight world to the gay, as I do from the white world to the asian american. In that way, I always felt alienated from my campus group. No doubt, student organizations are the main link to the gay community for gay students on campuses across the nation. Their role is not to be belittled. But as a bisexual, I felt excluded by attitudes and community beliefs that perhaps were beyond a student organization's ability to overcome.
Fortunately, in recent years there have been advances made in bisexual visibility and acceptance within the gay community. As gay and lesbian studies and gender studies are beginning to grow as academic fields, bisexuals have begun to demand recognition and inclusion at conferences and academic meetings. While there is still some resistance, the changes are happening, in academia and also in the community at large. For one thing, the my old student group has changed its name from Lesbian Gay Student Alliance to Lesbian Gay Bisexual Alliance, and the same has been happening other places around the country. Words like "bi-positive" and "bi-identified" have been coined, and gay academics and activists are beginning to address the issue of bi-phobia from within the gay community. A current debate rages on as to what word could be used to include gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals all under one name.
Ultimately, I am optimistic. For if bisexuals can overcome their invisibility within the gay community, I believe that the gay community can overcome its invisibility in mainstream culture. The validization coming from academia, affirming gay and lesbian studies as a field of research, bodes well for the whole community, and if anything will encourage and help campus student groups to grow. Perhaps in the future we'll see it trickle down from the universities into the high schools. To this day, the other bisexual women from my high school are still invisible to me. Other people remember me, I'm sure, from the boys I dated, the poster boys in my locker. It's a picture I hope will change for teenage bisexuals in the future.