Why biphobia remains rampant within the queer community

The bisexual community in India often navigates preconceived notions of how they are all cheaters and will use queers only for sex, ultimately marrying cishet people

“Who do you like more?”

“Do you go down on girls too?”

“Do you have phases?”

This was an episode of a well-known reality show, Bigg Boss, that I will never forget. Considering its popularity, nearly every Indian who owns a television has never been immune to the wave of the show in the past decade and a half. In the seventh season of the show, VJ Andy faced biphobia for his seemingly femme appearance.

“Is he gay?” asked one contestant, behind his back, on camera.

“No,” replied the other, “he’s the kind who flirts and gropes unsuspecting women under the pretext of being gay but also fuck men when he is with men.”

This season aired on television in 2013. Instagram was yet to take the world by storm, the term ‘woke’ hadn’t been coined yet and cancel culture was many miles away. In 2022, these two contestants would be wearing pride flags and using pride stickers in their Instagram stories to get bonus points– all in the service of the great grand algorithm game.

Othered by the queer community?

But the enemy, so to speak, isn’t always the cishet gaze. Unfortunately, the biggest brunt that bisexual people face comes from within the community. The ripple effects are many–from mental health woes to always being conflicted about your identity. Pop culture seldom provides any cues in terms of characters. India had one of its explicitly bisexual films only recently in the form of Cobalt Blue (2022), based on the eponymous 2013 novel by Sachin Kundalkar that was released on Netflix a few months ago without much fanfare.

Research by Stonewall, the United Kingdom’s leading charity for queer equality, recently found out that bi people are significantly less likely to be out than gay men and lesbians, whether that’s at home, in education, at work, or as part of a faith community.

Deborishi Gogoi, a 23-year-old student of master's in English literature from Delhi University, says that the source of all biphobia is the perception that bisexuals are species that have the ability to camouflage–they can change tracks, change how they appear, pass off as straight.

“Since this is considered as a privilege, biphobia becomes a valid excuse,” they say. “It mostly manifests in microaggressions, particularly when gay men don’t want to date me because they think I might cheat. I’ve always faced the erasure of my identity in the queer community because it’s almost as if they forget that I’m bisexual.”

They add that the most common perception that many queer people have is that all bisexuals do is oscillate between genders. “All these misconceptions might seem minor but they keep building up and manifest in dangerous ways. People will always project their own insecurities on you and this linear way of thinking often comes in the way,” adds Gogoi.

Misconceptions in the media

But the larger influence of media in its widest sense cannot be discounted, believes Varuna Srinivasan, a 31-year-old sexual health expert based in New York City. “Bisexual women are fetishised because often I get comments if I’m into threesomes. There is nothing wrong with a consensual threesome but conflating bisexuality with a skewed understanding of promiscuity is not necessarily healthy.”

Even seemingly queer-friendly shows often end up having a character that ticks all the boxes of biphobia–it’s usually a man who will cheat and break the hearts of gay men. Regardless of the cinematic merits of Call Me By Your Name (2017), the movie ended up furthering the stereotype that seemingly bisexual men who are married to hot, straight women will always use and dump gay boys. Similarly, Ryan Murphy’s teen Netflix show, The Politician (2019), waxes eloquent on BIPOC representation but ends up passing snide remarks about the only bisexual character.

Even the British Film Institute argued that bisexuals are often not explored in cinema, with the worse examples of films being “downright squeamish about their characters’ bisexuality.” Some of the films cited included Alexander (2004), Caligula (1978), and Skyfall (2012). The story further added that bisexual women are “even less visible in Hollywood films.”

Bisexual women have it tough

“People just don’t believe it’s real,” Srinivasan adds. “This is quite sad because almost 40 per cent of the queer population identify as bisexual and yet we face the worst mental health outcomes–anxiety, uncertainty around our identity.”

She said that a lot of bisexual women who are married to cishet men, much like her, face a lot of erasure within the queer community.

“Queer people tell me all the time how I have a lot easier because I’m married to a cishet man–that’s just plain biphobia,” she said. For, Saumyaa Vohra, a 31-year-old editor and journalist, similarly married to a cishet man, it took her a lot of time to figure out for herself that she is bisexual, at 25. “When I wrote an essay about being bisexual and married to a cishet man, a queer woman said I’m doing it only for attention while another queer man said I’m only now coming out because of the safety of a marriage.”

In many cases, when a bisexual person faces discrimination within the queer community, getting access to a support system becomes all the more impossible for fear of getting discriminated against further.

“No community fully sees you as their own,” Vohra adds. “It is widely seen as simply being greedy and wanting more attention. There is so much nuance and shade because even bisexuals experience the world in such different ways. This happens because the mic is never passed to the bisexual people as everyone else is doing the talking and speaking on their behalf.”

More than education, Vohra says, exposure is the key to sensitising the larger queer population and cishet people towards bisexuality. And more importantly, who gets to talk about the layered world of bisexuality. “The authenticity of a story will always get diluted if it’s not from the lenses of a bisexual person. You can almost notice when a story has been narrated from a bisexual gaze,” she concludes.

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