By Olivia Buntaine
Two days before my wedding, I am drunk, glittery, and so, so happy as I attempt to line dance at Charlie’s—Denver’s gay cowboy bar—with my dearest friends in the world and my soon-to-be wife. Well, they were already my wife—we got legally married in October of 2024, wanting to make sure we had the paperwork done before Donald Trump became president. Just in case.
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Alex and I have been in love with each other from the first day of college orientation. Now that we were both 32, we had a whole community of people so excited that it was finally happening. Our love story was far from a straight line from freshman year to marriage—there were break ups, other people, state lines, moving in together, moving out, and lots of flights with lots of turbulence. But we were never able to let go of the soft golden string that tied us to each other—even when we tried.
My bisexuality has always been a part of that story. I came out in early high school, and in an inversion of what many bi women go through, I have had much more experience with AFAB [assigned female at birth)-bodied people than male. I’m sure this was for many reasons: partly just the unpredictable nature of love, partly because—especially as a young person—I was probably pretty terrifying to young men, but also because of my sense of safety. As a teenager, I unfortunately already had plenty of reasons to be afraid of boys and men. So I blossomed into my queerness in ways I am so grateful for—while keeping a peripheral eye on my still steady attraction to men. I spent a lot of time correcting people who assumed I was a lesbian, and sometimes mourning the typical coming of age experiences of my straight peers.
That’s all to say that, in our various separations, Alex understood part of my need for space was to reclaim and re-understand my intimate relationships with men. I wanted to know for certain that my queerness was not anchored in my fear of intimacy with AMAB [assigned male at birth]-bodied people. So I explored. That exploration was beautiful and messy and sometimes heartbreaking, but ultimately, it led me back to the one I loved.
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Planning a queer marriage is strange as a bisexual woman. What traditions do we keep from an institution designed, originally, for men to formalize women as their property? Every choice during our engagement felt like a puzzle: are we replicating straight culture or is it just wedding culture? What if something is cute but it also reinforces the gender binary? Is someone supposed to take someone’s last name? If amongst the endlessly heteronormative and gendered wedding industry it is confusing to be a gay couple, it is very confusing to be a nonbinary lesbian/bisexual woman couple.
I began to wonder if, through a queer marriage, my bisexuality would slowly just fade away. Or become irrelevant. If you’ve found the person you hope to be with for the long haul, does your attraction to multiple genders still matter? Six months into my very happy marriage, a beautiful flag hangs on our front porch with the words: “A day without lesbians is like a day without sunshine.” I feel seen by it. And also I don’t. I want to find comfort in lesbian culture, in the ways in which gay women (and others who align with womanhood in some capacity) so lovingly shape my world. But where does bisexuality fit in a “gay marriage?” Where does bisexuality fit in marriage at all?
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But back to Charlie’s, and one of the happiest nights of my life. I am dancing under the light of a dangling cowboy boot disco ball feeling lucky and beautiful. Two gay male friends of mine start chanting around me—yelling “Les-bi-ans! Les-bi-ans!” over the music, while I dance. I am too happy to think about challenging the misnomer, but then I hear a soft voice to my left. “She’s bisexual.” And then she says it louder—and louder—until she’s shouting back at them. The boys are too gay and drunk to notice, but I do. And I realize, two days before my wedding, how very very much I needed someone to say that.
Kyra is straight. And beautiful, and so smart and funny, and sometimes mysterious. I’ve wondered before if she cares for me as much as I care for her. I am an extremely emotional and expressive (bordering on needy) person, and Kyra is a badass, independent Capricorn. We don’t move through the world in the same way. But these are the moments I know she loves me. She had nothing to gain from correcting them. In fact, she might have been called a buzzkill by my way-too-drunk friends. But she chose to show up for me in a way I wasn’t even going to show up for myself.
She is a reminder that at the core of friendship is allyship—that you can’t really have one without the other. Kyra’s allyship buzzed around my heart in the following nuptial days, and reminded me to be a better ally to myself during this important milestone. Kyra helped me remember, as I walked down our non-traditional queer aisle, that marriage is not about leaving “inconvenient” parts of yourself behind. It is about bringing your brightest, fullest, most multifaceted self to exist alongside someone else’s. And if you’re lucky, you’ll have a community of people like Kyra smiling back at you. Reminding you who you are.
Olivia Buntaine (she/her) believes in theatre, poetry, and prose that brings everyone to the table—starting with those of us who haven’t been invited. She recently gave up New York for Denver, U.S., where she is trying to be a cowboy. More at www.oliviabuntaine.com.