Imagine standing at the brink of the universe as a child in a dream. You are asked to choose: to leap into the unknown or to stay within the safety of the known. What do you choose?
For me, this is not a hypothetical scenario or a sleep-induced fantasy. This is a metaphor for my life.
This piece is about my journey as Ross, a person who happens to be Black, male, and bi, and how each path presented before me is laced with a deadly element — biphobia.
No matter relationship status as a bi+ person — single, dating, same-sex partnered, different-sex partnered, or polyamorous — we are all faced with a unique question:
How do I survive the binary paradigm?
Why aren’t there more roads to freedom and visibility?
How do I breathe in what feels like a cage?
Imagine a gathering of people from diverse backgrounds, some young, some seasoned, some bearing the wisdom age has provided, some with Black, Hispanic, Asian, and bi+ identities — standing at a crossroads, each facing a unique labyrinth of experience. While our paths vary, we share common encounters with biphobia: a whisper of judgment here, a glare there, the bite of casual stereotypes, some physical violence.
The journeys I describe below are not choices; they are paths shaped by the world’s reaction to who I am as a bi man and a society struggling with binaries. This is an invitation to understand and reflect on biphobia’s impact across races and generations and our shared pursuit as bi+ individuals for acceptance, recognition, respect, and the space to breathe freely.
To write about biphobia without acknowledging how it’s amplified within the context of my race and culture would be a disappointment. Within my Black community, traditional masculinity (hypermasculinity), one informed by slavery and colonization, casts a long shadow over Black men. The expression of manhood is limited. To be a man in the Black community means to break your back reaching for an unachievable ideal that everyone knows does not exist but expects you to portray. An ideal that suffocates and gaslights us to believe the measure of a man is based on his threshold for pain.
Because of this, the vigilance I maintain is layered. Somehow, I must protect myself against the biases that see Black men as a threat. I critique myself based on honorability and respectability with every action. Every word. I shield myself from those who view my bisexuality as invalid, an abomination, and, in many ways, an attempt to align with whiteness. When all I seek is an attempt to be me.
Path of Heteronormativity
Let’s call path #1 the path of heteronormativity coupled with open discrimination on LGBTQ+ identities. This path seduces many men. As to a siren, sailors are attracted by the angelic voice of ‘fitting in’ and ‘discretion’ before they notice the allure is just as fatal as ‘standing out.’
I once found myself on this path. After years of trial and error with disclosure, primarily to women, the easiest way for me to exist here was to not speak about my orientation or experiences, to not talk about how I discovered I was bi as a teen, to not talk about the joy I felt when I discovered “the b word” or the challenges I faced with bullying, maintaining friendships, and anxiety in high school.
Path #1 — the heteronormative path, the path of nauseating tradition, required me to shrink and compartmentalize emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. In many ways, I became complicit in my erasure — unable to push back, educate, or connect authentically. This path required me to tolerate bigoted conversations and off-color jokes in social settings. I learned that biphobia does not only impact people who identify, it also targets those who “may” be or “could be” and casts an air of consistent suspicion over someone.
Biphobic (and homophobic) statements I’ve heard from family are:
“The California wildfires are God’s punishment for legalizing same-sex marriage.”
“He’s really gay; why did he waste that woman’s time by having a family?”
“Any man that gets close to a penis sexually doesn’t like women.”
Stomaching bi-negative stereotypes from friends, family, and acquaintances is a reality that many non-monosexual people have had to master on this path to survive. The goal is to not be singled out — never to reveal yourself as one of them. Some resort to spewing homophobic rhetoric to direct attention away from us. Words that are at odd with our being. And like papercuts, slice through our heart with each utterance.
This path also promises biphobia in media and healthcare settings. Ideas that you –as a bi man or person — don’t actually exist and are only an idea. In 2005, the New York Times published an article Gay, Straight, or Lying, where the writer aligned bisexual men with gay men by presenting several studies of male arousal patterns.
Benedict stated, “…men in the study who described themselves as bisexual did not have patterns of arousal that were consistent with their stated attraction to men and to women.” When I read this article, I wondered who it was for. Who benefits from debating how aroused a man gets and by whom? Who cares and why is everyone so obsessed with penises?!
On path #1, your existence will be debated. People will launch podcast series about the concept of you. And if they say you exist, you exist in a specific context, which includes promiscuity, deceit, blood shortages, and likely a villainous gay man.
As one bi man told me, he once went into urgent care for arm pain, where his provider suggested he take an HIV test as well. So, people also may think of you as a walking pandemic. Stigma about blood and HIV is so intense that young Black bi boys may conflate their bisexuality with HIV.
This was the case for me as a youth, when I would, in periods of celibacy and low-risk activity like kissing, take blood tests frequently out of fear.
Because I’m bisexual, right?
I may have HIV for existing, right?
When you are a bi Black boy, you are at risk for believing that your very existence is a threat in any context — a unique experience that is not only dehumanizing but indicative of the emotional damage racism coupled with biphobia can cause.
Path #1 makes you feel at risk for existing. On path #1, the air is thick. The weight of the world is heavy here. This heteronormative road, while offering semblances of safety, ultimately led to mental (and physical) suffocation and a severe medical event that I promised myself would never occur again.
In stark contrast, the second path promises liberation — a divergence from the first, yet it, too, harbors its own insidious brand of biphobia.
Path of Homonormativity
Then there’s the other path: Path #2. For a bi+ person and the world, we have been sold that contemporary LGBTQ culture is synonymous with freedom and affirmation. This path tends to be brighter than Path #1. It’s decorated in rainbows, kink vests, drag performers, and leather chaps. But you may notice inconsistencies in the details, AKA “sharp needles and gotcha traps.” I will call this path homonormativity, which has contempt for anyone who codes as straight in appearance, interests, or partners.
Here, you quickly discover the irony that this path mirrors Path #1 in many ways, with similar storylines and microaggressions — shrink, be quiet, we don’t care, or ‘good-humored’ jokes from a community that thinks you can take it since you are “half” oppressor.
A columnist, Joel Lucyzyn, wrote a piece called Biphobia in the LGBT Community. He describes how gay men received his personal coming out story and insinuated he was less queer and not equal to them because of his relationships with women (and yet again, his proximity to a vagina). Path #2 is just as obsessed with genitals, with strong projections of the sex they think bi men are having.
Path #2 makes a bi man a target for direct, open discrimination in social spaces, including the workplace, housing, and LGBTQ-centered groups. However, on this path, instead of being complicit in your erasure, you can find a supportive community of folks who identify the same as you, hold the same values, and offer a chance of authentic relationships.
The bi man who dances down this road becomes a revolutionary just for existing. His light is so strong here that men on Path #1 will notice it, as has often been my experience when bi men or parents of bi young adults reach out to me to express their gratitude for a piece or a clip or video they watched. In Path #2, you mostly exist, but now you are also a political framework.
Surviving the Binary
After my father passed in 2017, I made the intentional decision to begin sharing my bisexuality online and incorporating bi-themed topics and imagery into my storytelling in music and writing. These parts of myself ached to be seen. They wanted air. In many ways, my father’s death opened a door and an opportunity to live fearlessly. Although I have been bi for over twenty-five years, living out loud required me to deconstruct the internalized biphobia and construct a new way of showing up in the world. Granted, I was born and raised in the U.S.A., specifically Los Angeles, and cannot claim to be a victim of a hate crime. However, I found the emotional experiences of biphobia and the psychological warfare of it all to be just as violent.
I often wondered if I had killed my dreams of becoming a musical artist or reduced my job prospects with this decision. This fear was not from evidence but because I learned from Path #1 that shrinking was always the goal. Today, I find myself as a published author of six non-fiction and fictional titles, an independent music artist who dares to sing, rap, and put the word ‘bisexual’ in my titles, and, as of October 2023, a board member of the nonprofit Los Angeles Bi+ Task Force, where I aim to advocate for the broader needs of bi+ folks.
Path #2 has inspired me to not only create but to invest heavily in self-care to alleviate the isolation the over-vigilance has caused. Navigating the heteronormative path and the rigidity of Black communities where silence equals survival, I reached a tipping point that challenged my health. The path had to shift from concealment to a pursuit of community and inner peace.
Embracing our whole self transforms a “crossroads’ from a place where we must choose into a place where we proclaim. When confronted with the black or white, the left or right, any binary concept, the question, “Which are you?” we respond with a empowered, “I am here!”
Even as we acknowledge that every choice converges on the reality of biphobia, “I am” reframes the way in which we navigate these societal paths, accessing a higher consciousness.
All roads lead to biphobia until we forge new roads. Or until humanity destroys itself.
Or until the “phobic” institutions, bigoted leaders, compromised systems, and brittle frameworks, reveal the blood on their hands and admit to putting poison in the water — and someone, ANYONE, is held accountable for all the souls who do not last one day on Path #1 or Path #2.
The truth is — Bi+ people are the most resilient of them all because we must be. Indeed, many of us don’t survive. But many certainly do. And those who do are the way-showers fully equipped to redirect the binary paradigm through skill and true grit.
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Previously Published on Medium
