Interview by Robyn Ochs
Robyn Ochs: AJ, thanks so much for agreeing to this interview. Please tell us about yourself.
AJ Dolman: Thanks for inviting me, Robyn.
I was born in Barrie, Ontario, the first in my family to be born in Canada after my parents immigrated from the Netherlands with my two sisters. My parents were part of the wave of young people who had grown up in the Second World War and feared German rearmament. I was largely raised on a hog farm, half an hour outside the small town of Wingham, Ontario, in the region that Alice Munro wrote about in many of her short stories. But the bottom fell out of the hog market a few years after my parents bought the farm, so they spent most of my childhood like so many of the farmers around us: trying simultaneously to sell their farm and find ways to make it financially viable. Eventually, they did manage to sell, and we moved to Pincher Creek, Alberta, when I was a teenager.
While growing up on the farm I had become fascinated with other people’s lives and stories, and even more so when my parents bought and started operating a motel in Pincher Creek, at the town’s only stoplighted intersection. After earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of Victoria, I became a professional writer and editor. I’ve lived in Canada’s capital, Ottawa, since 2000. In my creative life, I write mostly poetry and fiction, and I’ve been fortunate to have been published a fair bit, although these days, I spend a significant amount of my writing energy on the bimonthly Bi+ Canada newsletter.
RO: Would you please share a bit about your identity journey? How did you get to bi? What caused you to first start questioning your identity/sexuality?
AJ: I actually came out as lesbian in my 20s, before ultimately settling into my bisexual identity more comfortably later on. I knew I was attracted to girls by the time I hit puberty, but aligning that with sometimes being attracted to boys was a long journey for me. First, I didn’t know that was something a person could do or be, so I just thought I was miswired or confused throughout my teens. For me, attraction to men is rarer than attraction to women or nonbinary people, so I could sort of write it off as something not very relevant for me. Even after I knew what bisexuality was and that bisexual was something people could be, I found that, with so much bias against bi+ people and identities, it was simpler, and certainly more understandable to others, if I described myself as monosexual. “Lesbian” was a clear absolute, and therefore something people took at face value, for the most part, and wouldn’t follow up with heaps of intrusive questions and judgment. The label became rather impossible to maintain, though, after I met and ultimately fell in love with my now husband. I am particularly fortunate to be married to a fellow bisexual, as we can understand each other in that way.
In the end, for a variety of reasons, my mother was one of the last people I came out to, years after I was married. I was already around 40. My first book—a collection of short stories that included characters of many different orientations—was about to launch, and I didn’t want to avoid talking about my sexuality as part of the discussion and media promotion around the book. When I told her, she asked a few questions, and then, satisfied that my announcement wasn’t a preamble to saying I was getting divorced, she shocked me by saying, “Me too,” and showing me pictures of her girlfriends from the late 1940s. She was over 80 by the time we had that talk, and she had never been able to describe herself openly before. A lot of my bi+ community organizing is with her memory in mind. No one should have to hide such a fundamental part of themselves.
RO: Too many people think we choose to identify as bi because it’s easier. That may be the case for some people in some circumstances, but for many of us, a monosexual identity would be simpler and easier for others to understand. And I love the story about your mother!
AJ, you and I had a long conversation a couple of years ago when you were exploring the possibility of forming a national bi+ organization in Canada. What made you decide there was a need for such an organization? What kinds of discussions did you have with other bi+ folks across Canada?
AJ: That conversation was so inspiring and helpful, Robyn. Thank you again for that. I had actually set my sights much smaller. At first, I just wanted to connect with my local bi+ community here in Ottawa, and realized that besides dating apps and self-help groups, there was nowhere for doing so. I’d had the privilege of being invited to read at Toronto’s Bi+ Arts Festival the previous year, and the feeling of being in a room of creative, brilliant bi+ artists and attendees was something I wanted to reproduce. It was the first time I had felt truly myself and at ease in a queer space, and I wanted to make that happen for other people, too. I wanted to create a space where bi+ people of all types and backgrounds could just be in community. I started a local bi+ crafting group, which quickly became popular. We moved it online during the pandemic and merged it with a similar group in Toronto that had started up after we did.
It was through conversations I had in these groups that I realized how little support there was in Canada for the bi+ community, and how abandoned bi+ people felt by the broader community, in both straight and queer spaces. There is little research available on bi+ people in Canada to date, aside from census data that tells us we make up more than half the LGBTQ+ spectrum. And there is no support or infrastructure available to us that is specifically by or for us. Nationally and regionally, broad 2SLGBTQIA+ organizations are often focused on “general” support and defense for the entire alphabet, without taking into consideration the specific needs of and obstacles for the bi+ community. When, a few years ago, the federal government released a much welcome national strategy to support the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, it included no specifics for the bi+ community, even though—extrapolating from international data—we have, among other concerns, the highest rates of poverty, poor mental and physical health outcomes, domestic violence, and sexual assault of all orientations.
Most frustrating to me was that when the government announced a national fund to accompany the strategy, there wasn’t a single bi+-specific organization eligible to receive and apply for any of that funding, because there wasn’t a single registered not-for-profit working directly for our benefit in Canada. When I started asking around in the bi+ community, both via the crafting and writing communities and the wider 2SLGBTQIA+ organizing community, whether there was interest in creating a national bi+ organization to help solve this, the response was overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic.
RO: Would you please provide an update on your progress?
AJ: Absolutely! Bi+ Canada incorporated last summer as a national not-for-profit organization whose mission is to use community building, education, and outreach to advocate for bi+ people in Canada to have access to the support and informed resources we need to flourish.
We are growing quickly, and the response from the bi+ community in Canada has been amazing. We had our first booth at Ottawa’s Capital Pride in August, and it was beyond rewarding to see people nudge their friends and say, “Look, a place for you!” or to come bounding over saying, “That’s me!” We had preteens to folks well into their senior years come up to us, all so grateful to see themselves reflected at last. We are still just starting out, but already we have had new members say, essentially, “If only an organization like this had existed before, it would have saved me so much grief and loneliness.”
We are the first registered national bi+ organization in the country, and there is so much work to do, but one thing we want to make sure of is that we don’t leave anyone behind, regardless of age, class, labels, race, religion, background, or anything else. I think it is crucial that, this time, when the tide rises against hate and exclusion, we don’t get crushed under the pressure to divide and segregate within the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, but instead, lift everyone up together. Alongside our trans members and siblings, bi+ people were victims of respectability politics in the previous era, but we are a majority within the community. I believe we can not only lead the way again, but this time empower each other and the whole breadth of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community fully, so we can move forward together.
I encourage anyone who would like to join us to follow us on socials (we are everywhere except X), donate if able, and sign up for our newsletter at bipluscanada@gmail.com.
Bi+ Canada booth at Capital Pride 2025 in Ottawa
Find Bi+ Canada here:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/p/Bi-Canada-61573544130300/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bipluscanada/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bipluscanada.bsky.social
Robyn Ochs is a global speaker and has been Editor of Bi Women Quarterly since 2009.