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A Hatred of Bisexual People in Gay Communities? |
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Yoshino, Kenji (2000). The epistemic contract of bisexual erasure. Stanford Law Review, 53(2), 353-461.
"...gays
delegitimate bisexuals in two ways. Again the more obvious way is simple
denigration - 'the lesbian and gay community abounds with negative images
of bisexuals as fence-sitters, traitors, cop-outs, closet cases, people
whose primary goal in life is to retain heterosexual privilege,...
Less intuitively, gays can also delegitimate bisexuals by impersonating
them... such gays may later reveal themselves to be gay, thereby detracting
from the credibility of those who experience their bisexuality as a stable
identity" (p. 399).
"Bisexuality
implies that sex need not be as important in our desirous lives as we have
made it. Bisexuals and asexuals are thus the only individuals who at least
have the capacity not to discriminate on the basis of sex in any aspects
of their lives... Straights have a distinctive investment in bisexual erasure
relating to the primacy of sex. This is because sex is currently understood
through a heterosexual matrix; that is, straights have a monopoly on sex
norms. And bisexuality, unlike homosexuality, has the potential to disrupt
that monopoly" (p. 415).
Current
norms of sex and current norms of heterosexuality are thus implicated in
a feedback loop in which each shores up the other. Homosexuality does not
present much of a challenge to prevailing sex..." [Are not homosexual males
general more like females, as "bio" research suggests?] "This is a modern
vestige of the older trope of homosexual as 'invert' - a 'woman trapped
inside a man's body' or vice versa. The logic of the invert is the means
through which homosexuality is read back into a straight paradigm"
(p. 416).
As
a positive matter, however, the day when gays (or at least gay men) renounce
the immutability defence appears distant... The immutability argument is
often the only effective strategy for gays 'seeking to persuade their parents,
coworkers, and neighbors that they can love someone of the same sex and
remain fully human.' Continued gay reliance on the immutability argument
may lead to continued gay reliance on bisexual erasure" (p. 407).
"As
Naomi Mesey has argued, straights collectively attempt to preserve a 'heterosexual
ethic,' that is, an ethic that heterosexuality has a monopoly on sexual
virtue. In order for the heterosexual ethic to present itself as congruent
with virtue, however, the homosexual ethic must be presented as congruent
with vice. The survival of the heterosexual ethic is thus dependent on
a binary world view of 'right and wrong, or health and sickness, or heterosexual
and homosexual.' Mesey describes the martial rhetoric of homophobia as
arising out of this dependence. She then astutely notes that the real enemy
to the heterosexual ethic is not the named enemy of homosexuality, but
the unnamed enemy of bisexuality. By deconstructing the straight/gay binary,
bisexuality reveals that it cannot be isomorphic with the virtue/vice binary.
It thus threatens the heterosexual ethic at the collective level as well
as threatening heterosexual identity at the individual level" (p. 404).
Comment: Therefore, gays were created and exist to maintain the status of virtue and power that heterosexual males continue to enjoy which, in turn. implies that "being gay" is a double bind. Gays were created by heterosexual males to maintain what has been termed "hegemonic heterosexuality," and gays act accordingly. Why gay males have crawled into bed with heterosexual males with repect to abusing bisexual males and desiring their non-existence remains to be analysed for all its implications.
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