By Bailey Merlin
I never met Loraine Hutchins in the way people usually mean when they talk about meeting someone. We never shared a table, never argued politics in the same room, never built something side by side in real time. And yet, my work as a writer, an organizer, and a bisexual woman who refuses to disappear has been shaped by her insistence that we matter.
That is the strange and powerful thing about movement elders. You can arrive late and still be changed by them.
I came to Loraine’s work the way many of us do: through books that had already been passed down or found in storage lockers, essays that felt uncannily current despite being written decades earlier, and stories told by people who assumed (correctly, by the way) that we needed to know where we came from. Her writing did not feel historical. It felt current. It named patterns I was still living inside.
Loraine Hutchins was not interested in making bisexuality palatable, and that’s what makes me love her even though we never really met.
She understood early on that bisexual people—especially bisexual women—were being asked to solve everyone else’s discomfort. We are expected to explain ourselves endlessly, to perform stability, to choose sides when it would make things easier for others. She rejected that framing outright. To her, bisexual people were not a phase, a bridge, or a footnote. We were (and are) a political reality.
And she organized accordingly.
Loraine was a consummate child of the 1960s. She attended Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. She worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She was proud to say she had an FBI record. Before bisexuality became the center of her public work, she organized around housing justice in Washington, D.C., helping tenants form a cooperative that would later become a model supported by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Long before she was known as a bi activist, she was already practicing a politics rooted in collective survival.
That context matters. Loraine did not come to bisexual organizing as a single-issue project. She came to it understanding that justice is always interconnected: racial justice, economic justice, sexual freedom, disability justice, and public health. Bisexuality was never separate from the rest of her politics. It was a lens through which power, erasure, and possibility became clearer.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, bisexual organizing was fragile and diffuse, held together by newsletters, phone calls, conferences, and people willing to travel between cities to see one another. It was not glamorous work (though some would argue that it still isn’t). It was relational, slow, and often exhausting. But it grew. By the mid-1980s, bisexual people were not only forming social and support groups; they were organizing politically, building national networks, and insisting on decentralized models that resisted rigid hierarchy while still demanding leadership.
Loraine wrote about this tension directly in her 1995 essay in “Our Leaders, Our Selves” in Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, & Visions. When I first read it, I had the feeling that I was reading something I had written myself. Her analysis of leadership, accountability, and coalition politics felt less like history and more like a mirror. She challenged bisexual communities to take leadership seriously without reproducing the power structures that harm us elsewhere, and she warned that an unexamined distaste for leadership could hold the movement back.
She also wrote—and lived—through the AIDS crisis, when bisexual people were simultaneously central to care work and erased from public narratives. Bisexual activists helped create safer sex curricula and AIDS care systems even as public health institutions and gay and lesbian movements often ignored and/or blamed them. Loraine did not look away from that contradiction. She named it.
In 1991, she co-edited, with fellow bicon Lani Ka’ahumanu, Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, a collection that remains foundational not because it resolves bisexuality into something neat, but because it refuses to. The book made space for contradiction, anger, joy, eroticism, theory, and lived experience. It treated bisexual people as thinkers and narrators of our own lives.
The decision to trust bi people with our own complexity is one I return to in my own work.
When I talk to other bi+ organizers now, one of the things that comes up again and again is how small the community can feel once you’re inside the work. The names repeat. The same people appear across decades of organizing, writing, mentoring, and showing up. Loraine Hutchins is one of those names.
When she died on November 19, 2025, the loss landed heavily for me. When I found out, I was literally in the middle of preparing an episode for Bisexual Killjoy, rereading her writing on leadership and movement-building, underlining sentences I wanted to return to. I had been imagining questions I might ask her someday, perhaps even at Creating Change 2026. And then, suddenly, there was no someday.
I grieved not just the person, but the conversation that would never happen.
And then I realized something else. During the pandemic, I had been on a Zoom event titled “Listen to your Bi+ Elders,” organized by the Los Angeles Bi+ Task Force. Loraine was there. I didn’t speak to her directly. I didn’t yet know how much her work would shape mine. But I saw her. I heard her voice. I was in her presence, even briefly. That memory has stayed with me, especially now.
Loraine believed deeply in younger people. She believed that each generation would inherit the work with fewer apologies and more language. She was honest about the fatigue of organizing (the way battles repeat, the way progress can stall or reverse), but she did not mistake exhaustion for failure. She understood that memory itself is a form of resistance.
That belief is part of what I carry forward.
Bi+ women are still navigating the same myths, the same suspicions, the same pressure to be legible on someone else’s terms. We are still oversexualized, erased, blamed, or treated as incoherent. The landscape has changed, but the structure of the problem has not. Loraine’s life reminds us that progress is not linear and that nothing we have is guaranteed unless we remember how it was fought for.
This is why archives matter. This is why telling the story matters. This is why naming our elders matters.
Even those of us who never met Loraine are part of her legacy. Every time we insist on nuance. Every time we refuse to simplify bisexual lives for the comfort of others. Every time we build spaces where people are not asked to split themselves in half, we are practicing the politics she articulated so clearly.
There is a particular responsibility that comes with inheriting a movement rather than founding one. It is not nostalgia. It is stewardship.
Loraine Hutchins did not ask to be remembered politely. She asked us to take ourselves seriously. To organize with integrity. To question authority, including our own. To refuse erasure even when compliance would be easier.
I did not get to meet her in the way I wanted to. But my work exists in conversation with hers. And that means I carry it forward. Not as tribute, but as continuation.
May her memory continue to challenge us. May it continue to complicate us. May it continue to make room.
Loraine Hutchins’s work lives on.
Bailey Merlin (she/her) identifies as a bisexual menace. She lives in the U.S., and is the co-host of the Bisexual Killjoy podcast, board member at the Bisexual Resource Center, founder of the international bi+ writers’ collective, the Bi+ Book Gang, and author of A Lot of People Live in This House. She also really loves opossums.
