By Loraine Hutchins
Back in the 1970s, when I was in my 20s, I sought bi community but found only sad, lonely “married men” who were longing for men. They taught me nothing about how to connect with women, nor how to manage my attractions to more than one gender. However, they led me to gay men and men who were more bi-expressive. We bonded over our attraction for men, and enjoyed male essence and charm. What really made the difference was joining a women’s liberation consciousness-raising group. It wasn’t that every woman was a potential lesbian, but it was the cultural flowering of lesbian separatism, meaning we all cheerfully sang Alix Dobkin’s “Any Woman Can Be a Lesbian,” and fervently believed it. A few of the women singled out me and the other bi woman saying that we were “double agents” whom they “couldn’t trust,” but they had no trouble trusting the lesbians in the group. (I guess they didn’t see them as competition?) Hurt and angry with my first experience with biphobia, I couldn’t sort out what was going on. The women’s movement gave us permission and encouragement to explore lust for each other, to celebrate experimentation and exuberance for life. Having women-only events at that time was a wonderfully liberating experience for me.
In the 1980s—as I developed my own bi identity as a feminist and a multi-issue activist—I found that there were bi groups and bi events emerging in cities and small towns across the country. I was young enough to travel to conferences and loved talking on the phone. We networked and welcomed in the technological revolution of communication as my nerd friends bragged about helping create the world wide web.
Because I lived in Washington, D.C., I participated in many protest marches, including the first one for gay and lesbian rights in 1979. I was already friends with one of the March’s organizers, ABilly S. Jones-Hennin, and attended the first Third World Conference for Lesbians and Gays which he helped convene. Many years later, we joked about how the term “gay married men” flipped from a designation of men married to women, to an entirely different group, men married to each other, which made us laugh. The second queer March on Washington in 1987 was our opportunity to mobilize the first bi contingent and the founding of BiNet USA, a national organization whose board I served upon. This was right after I visited San Francisco and met the Bay Area Bisexual Network which inspired me to create my own bisexual contingent of one to join our Washington, D.C. Pride Parade, riding my own BI-cycle (see photo).
A lot changed between 1987 and the 1993 March on Washington. Lani Ka’ahumanu and I co-edited and published Bi Any Other Name, the ground-breaking anthology presenting 76 contributors. Although we didn’t have the next century’s gender-identities vocabulary, there was discussion of gender and trans identities in the book.
Where did I find bi community then? Within the growing LGBT movement, where a lot of gay men and lesbian women privately behaved bisexually, but didn’t talk about it because “born that way” arguments prevailed. The turn of the century featured another March on Washington (in 2000, a mismanaged disaster). Instead of getting involved, I joined an Ad Hoc Committee opposing “gay marriage,” and advocating instead for expanded definitions of family and commitment and partnership. BiNet USA experienced a lot of pressure to create a national office and paid staff in D.C., but we stubbornly maintained that there was no need for a separate “office,” and that better organizing happens via coalition building and cooperation among sexual minorities all together.
Community? The AIDS crisis was growing, and we were losing a whole generation of beautiful people; there was a lot of grief and pain and fear. I found community more through the growing polyamory movement which was relatively bi-friendly. A lot of us organized safer sex events, both for health education reasons (to save lives) and for enjoyment and entertainment. In my own life I pursued a graduate degree, researching queer feminist erotic spiritual practices from a cultural studies perspective. Many more people among my friends and families died and I, after more than a decade as an out bi academic, stopped doing women’s studies and sexuality studies teaching and retired. I was surprised at how fast marriage equality became popular and wondered whether it would last (fast forward until now—eeek.)
In 2018, I moved into a Maryland continuing care retirement community that included an affordable housing project. With that move, I was struggling with chronic health problems and became more closeted. It wasn’t that I wanted to be closeted; it’s just that there wasn’t anyone here like me (except for one friend.) This community is faith-based even though it’s inter-faith and quite eclectic. I didn’t feel ashamed, but I did feel “made different” because I wasn’t married or a parent. The people I sometimes felt closest to in my new place were the handful of nuns who live upstairs in our building; at least they know what sisterhood and cooperation between women means and are not, at this point in their lives, wedded to caregiving relationships with aging men. If we live long enough, all of us become disabled—it’s a reality.
Loraine at home with friends Amena and Phillip, her colleagues on the county’s LGBTQ+ advisory committee
Fortunately for me, the disability justice movement today is led and influenced most profoundly by queer people of color and that has given me hope and purpose. I work every day, in every way I can, to make my current hetero-normative couples and singles senior community more bi-friendly and bi-supportive, as well as more accessible. This has included chairing our retirement community’s diversity committee, serving on an LGBTQ+ advisory committee for the county and presenting workshops to help my neighbors understand their grandchildren and these young people’s pronouns and identities. My greatest support here is my own bi woman friend who lives in my building. She complains that when she goes to local bi events, she’s always the oldest and there need to be more events for people our ages. Me? I’ve given up; she has more hope and ambition than me.
It’s sad and frustrating how many beguiling and tender hetero-oriented women I get crushes on here. My touch-hunger is not satisfied and my need for emotional comfort is only sometimes met. My erotic fantasies continue and are populated by all sorts of unlikely people. The best thing is that some of my fellow community members are finally, after years of being afraid of me, mellowing into realizing I am not so threatening, and am an ordinary cool normal human being they can enjoy and trust. I fear they’ll never understand how different my life has been from theirs; I still have nightmares that I may be rounded up into an LGBT concentration camp. Still, my life is full organizing on disability issues, and sexuality and sexual identities is a huge part of this. I study non-violent conflict resolution methods, but sometimes it is only escapist fiction and films that sustain me. That, and turning my rollator into walking performance art with bi colors and rainbow bracelets.
Loraine Hutchins helped put the B in LGBT from her place in national organizing via Washington., D.C., and co-edited the beloved anthology Bi Any Other Name with Lani Ka’ahumanu back when there was a national network of bi activists which they helped found in the 1990s.