QUIZ 8

Published online 2016 www.nps.gov/subjects/tellingallamericansstories/lgbtqthemestudy.htm

LGBTQ America: A Theme Study of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer History is a publication of the National Park Foundation and the National Park Service. We are very grateful for the generous support of the Gill Foundation, which has made this publication possible. The views and conclusions contained in the essays are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the opinions or policies of the U.S. Government. Mention of trade names or commercial products does not constitute their endorsement by the U.S. Government. © 2016 National Park Foundation Washington, DC All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted or reproduced without permission from the publishers. Links (URLs) to websites referenced in this document were accurate at the time of publication.

INCLUSIVE STORIES

Although scholars of LGBTQ history have generally been inclusive of women, the

working classes, and gender-nonconforming people, the narrative that is found in

mainstream media and that many people think of when they think of LGBTQ history

is overwhelmingly white, middle-class, male, and has been focused on urban

communities. While these are important histories, they do not present a full picture

of LGBTQ history. To include other communities, we asked the authors to look

beyond the more well-known stories. Inclusion within each chapter, however, isn’t

enough to describe the geographic, economic, legal, and other cultural factors that

shaped these diverse histories. Therefore, we commissioned chapters providing

broad historical contexts for two spirit, transgender, Latino/a, African American

Pacific Islander, and bisexual communities. These chapters, read in concert with the

chapter on intersectionality, serve as examples of rich, multi-faceted narrative within

a fuller history of the United States.

08

MAKING BISEXUALS VISIBLE

Loraine Hutchins

Introduction

Everyone is not either gay or straight. This mistaken assumption lies

behind most ordinary daily conversations about who and how people

create their families, identities, and love lives, but it is often not the whole

truth. Bisexual people’s experiences are hidden in plain view, perhaps not

visible, sometimes revealed.

This chapter is about that paradox: how we see what has been unseen,

become more conscious of those who love others of more than one

gender, until we recognize that these relationships and realities are more

common than is usually acknowledged and have always been a part of

history, visible or not.

If they think about it, most English teachers are aware, for instance,

that the writing of Walt Whitman, the well-loved US civil war nurse who

changed the form of poetry from rhyming verse to lush free-form praise

songs, celebrated the beauty of both women and men in his works, as did

poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.1 Students, however, are rarely taught these

1 Walt Whitman nursed injured Civil War soldiers at the Old Patent Office Building at F and Seventh

Streets NW, Washington, DC. Now home to the National Portrait Gallery, this building was listed on the

Loraine Hutchins

08-2

parts of their biographies.2 When studying nineteenth-century US political

history, many pupils discover the story of social justice organizer Emma

Goldman, but only a few textbooks record her significant relationships with

both women and men during her lifetime or the fact that she was a very

outspoken advocate for gay and lesbian rights.3 It is now pretty well

established that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had a long-term relationship

with journalist Lorena Hickok, who even had a special guest room at the

White House.4 People now know that CNN anchor Anderson Cooper is gay,

because he’s spoken openly about it over the past few years. But what he

and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, are only now revealing publically is that

her mother, his grandmother, had at least one relationship with a woman,

back in the 1920s.5 Similar stories circulate about other US public figures

like famous musician Leonard Bernstein.6 Contemporary artists such as

Margaret Cho and Alan Cumming, usually described as gay OR straight

(but not both), insist that their lives are just not that simple.7 “Some days I

feel like I have a foot in both worlds, yet never really belonging to either,”

NRHP on October 15, 1966 and designated an NHL on January 12, 1965. Whitman spent the last

years of his life at his home, 330 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard (formerly Mickle Street),

Camden, New Jersey (listed on the NRHP on October 15, 1966; designated an NHL on December 29,

1962). It was here that, just before his death, he finished his final edits to Leaves of Grass. In 1923,

Edna St. Vincent Millay was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In 1924, she and a

group of friends founded the Cherry Lane Theatre, 38 Commerce Street, New York City. While the

original group disbanded in 1926, Cherry Lane is the longest continuously-operating off-Broadway

theater in New York City, and has a long history of producing LGBTQ-themed plays. Millay’s home,

Steepletop, in Austerlitz, New York was listed on the NRHP and designated an NHL on November 11,

1971. She lived in the house from 1925 through 1950. 2 “The discussion of Whitman’s sexual orientation will probably continue in spite of whatever evidence

emerges.” See Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1999), 19. Millay had relationships with both women and men. In 1923, she married Eugen

Boissevain. Married for twenty-six years, Millay and Boissevain had an open marriage and “acted like

two bachelors.” See “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” Academy of American Poets website,

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/edna-st-vincent-millay. 3 Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), 146. 4 Bronski, Ibid, 150. 5 Hank Stuever, “Gloria Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper: Sorting Through Family Hurt and History,”

Washington Post, April 8, 2016. 6 “That Bernstein was bisexual was no secret in his later years, and he has been outed (snarkily,

awkwardly, gleefully) since his death. Here he outs himself, through frank exchanges with his new wife,

Felicia Montealegre, with whom he formed an unspoken covenant: He could have affairs with men, he

could lead his ‘double life,’ as long as he was reasonably discreet.” From John Rockwell, “Maestro:

The Leonard Bernstein Letters,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, December 13, 2013. 7 Margaret Cho, “Queer,” Huffpost Queer Voices, October 3, 2011,

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/margaret-cho/queer_b_984123.html; Adam Sandel, “Alan Cumming

Is Bisexual – And You Might Be Too,” Advocate, March 30, 2015,

http://www.advocate.com/bisexuality/2015/03/30/alan-cumming-bisexual-and-you-might-be-too.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-3

says Oregon Governor Kate Brown, the country’s first out bisexual

governor, speaking openly about how hard it is being a public bisexual role

model, in government or anywhere.8 Hundreds of these stories wait to be

uncovered or have been uncovered and then covered up again. An

organized US bisexual rights and liberation movement keeps bringing

stories like these to light, insisting on the importance of bisexual role

models for everyone (Figure 1).

The acronym LGBTQ—lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer—

encompasses an inclusive, diverse coalition of sexual orientations and

gender identities, and out bisexual people, whatever name they have

called themselves or been called, have been a key part of making these

changes happen from the start. However, when we open the book on the

modern gay liberation movement in this country, its bisexual roots are

often ignored. Though Sylvia Rivera, one of the key mobilizers of the

8 “She wrote in ‘Out and Elected in the USA,’ an online collection of essays by LGBTQ elected officials,

that some of her gay friends called her ‘half-queer.’ Straight friends were convinced she couldn't make

up her mind.” See Associated Press, “Gov. Kate Brown veers from typical graduation speech to talk

about her sexuality,” Oregonian, May 20, 2016,

http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/05/gov_kate_brown_veers_from_typi.html. 9 License: CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bis_at_NEM.jpg

Figure 1: Some of the bisexual contingents at the 2009 National Equality March, Washington, DC.

Photo by BlueFireIceEyes.9

Loraine Hutchins

08-4

resistance against the police crackdown at the Stonewall bar in New York

City in June 1969, for instance, is often claimed as a gay and/or

transgender person, what is not as widely acknowledged is that Rivera

openly related intimately to more than one gender and was open about

loving women as well as men.10 So why not say that and teach that? Why

keep part of Rivera’s, and all these others’ identities, silent? The list of

famous US bisexuals is long, and growing, but as we reconstruct the

history, where do we find the places they lived and loved? 11 Where do we

find the big events that mark accomplishments for bisexual rights and

liberation in the United States during the past fifty years? That is what this

chapter brings to light.

Though much has been said about the limits of the binary (either/or)

view of assuming everyone is gay OR straight, much has yet to be

uncovered and understood. A great many people of all ages have the

capacity to be bisexual. Many may know privately that they are. Many still

are not open about it, for various reasons. However, there is a huge

change in visibility that has been building over the past fifty years. New

studies show that the majority of teens, in the United States and in some

other Western countries, now recognize themselves as non-

heterosexual.12 They are comfortable being openly attracted to more than

one gender, whether they act on it or not. This is a huge shift that US

culture is still adjusting to, to say the least.

This chapter is dedicated to this next generation, and to everyone older

who wants to better understand that bisexuality is not a “new” identity at

all, by whatever names it goes by. Bisexualities and other, nonbinary ways

10 Sylvia Rivera was assigned male at birth and claimed her female identity at age ten, when she

changed her name from Ray to Sylvia. Sylvia Rivera, “Queens in Exile, The Forgotten Ones,” in Street

Transvestite Action Revolutionaries: Survival, Revolt, and Queer Antagonist Struggle (Untorelli Press,

2013). 11 Nicole Kristal and Mike Szymanski, The Bisexuals Guide to the Universe: Quips, Tips, and Lists for

Those Who Go Both Ways (New York: Alyson Publications, 2006) has a list of famous bisexuals, as do

a number of websites like the October LGBT History Month site at http://www.lgbthistorymonth.com. 12 Matthew Rodriguez, “Queer Teens Are Now the Majority, Goodbye Straight People,” Mic, March 12,

2016, citing a report from the J. Walter Thompson Innovation Group that found only 48 percent of

teens identify as completely heterosexual on the Kinsey scale, a smaller percentage than any previous

generations surveyed, see http://mic.com/articles/137713/queer-teens-are-now-the-majority-

goodbye-straight-people.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-5

of viewing attraction are merely coming out more into the open. It

behooves us to be more informed about how this is happening.

Chronological timelines of bisexual US history are available elsewhere.13

This chapter offers a selection of the emblematic stories, the people, and

places where important bisexual events have happened in the United

States, particularly over the past half-century. First some basic definitions

and historic research background for those interested.

i) Defining Bi Identity, the History of Being Bi

Bisexuality is simply the capacity to be attracted to and love more than

one gender. Alfred Kinsey, the father of sexuality research in the United

States was himself someone who had relations with men as well as

women. In the 1930s through 1950s when US sexuality research was

mostly nonexistent, Kinsey and his team surveyed thousands of people

about their sexual experiences.14 Out of this work he developed the Kinsey

Scale, which charted a range of sexual orientations or attractions, all the

way from exclusively attracted to a different sex than oneself (usually

marked as zero) to exclusively attracted to one’s own sex (marked as six),

with five gradations or degrees in between.15 Kinsey didn’t label people or

ask them how they identified, he merely cataloged their behaviors and

experiences. What he found was that a lot of people who would regard

themselves, and be regarded, as heterosexual (near the zero end of the

scale), in fact had significant same-sex experience, and that a number of

people who were primarily attracted to their own sex (toward the six end of

13 For bisexual history timelines, see for example: “Timeline: The Bisexual Health Movement in the

US,” BiNet USA website, http://binetusa.org/bihealth.html; “A Brief History of the Bisexual Movement,”

BiNet USA website, http://www.binetusa.org/bi-history; and “The Bisexual History of HIV/AIDS, In

Photos,” LGBT HealthLink website, https://blog.lgbthealthlink.org/2015/01/29/the-bisexual-history-

of-hivaids-in-photos. 14 From 1927 through 1956, Alfred Kinsey and his family lived in a home he designed in a

neighborhood just south of the University of Indiana. It is a contributing element to the Vinegar Hill

Historic District, listed on the NRHP on June 17, 2005. The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex,

Gender, and Reproduction is currently located in Morrison Hall, University of Indiana, Bloomington.

See Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male

(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1948), 651, Table 147. Also see Ron J. Suresha, ed., Bisexual

Perspectives on the Life and Work of Alfred C. Kinsey (London: Routledge, 2010). 15 Kinsey also recognized that some individuals were asexual, or not sexually attracted to other

people, regardless of gender. He placed these individuals in a category he labeled “X” that was

separate from the Kinsey scale.

Loraine Hutchins

08-6

the scale) had also sometimes had significant relations with a sex

different than their own. But the human mind tends to sort things into

easy binaries; black/white, hot/cold, up/down. And so the categories gay

and straight oversimplify and distort the natural range of people’s

attractions, causing the vast and populated middle grounds to be

minimized, and disappear.

To complicate things even further, a lot of the post-Kinsey researchers

tended to lump lesbians, gays, and bisexuals together when doing studies

about non-heterosexual people so it was difficult, for a long time, to get

good information on how many people have attractions for and

relationships with more than one gender, i.e. how many people are

Figure 2: Peg Preble and Robyn Ochs, pronounced married by Town Clerk Pat Ward in the Town

Clerk’s Office, Brookline, Massachusetts. They were the first same-sex marriage ever in Brookline

that morning of Monday, May 17, 2004, the day same-sex marriage became legal in

Massachusetts. Often misrepresented in the media as a lesbian couple, Robyn identifies as

bisexual and has been a long-time bisexual activist, as well as instrumental in the same-sex

marriage equality movement. Photo by Kate Flock/Brookline Tab, courtesy of Robyn Ochs.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-7

bisexual in the broadest sense.16 And even when studies did try to collect

that kind of data there were/are often discrepancies between which study

counts only people who openly identify with the label, “bisexual,” (which is

still a fairly small group, partly due to the stigma of being labeled such),

versus the much larger group of people who have had sexual experiences

with more than one gender/sex but don’t identify openly as members of a

community or movement for bisexual rights and liberation (or a gay or

lesbian rights movement either, for that matter). Still, as mentioned about

the teens surveyed above, things have changed a lot in the past several

decades, with more people now identifying as other than straight—and

even other than homosexual. Marriage equality has changed things

tremendously (Figure 2). Even while conservative backlash aims to limit

and roll back the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender, and

queer people as well as of other sexual minorities, there also continues to

be forward motion and inclusionary measures building toward making our

society more accepting of a diversity of sexualities and sexual identities.

ii) Erasure’s Roots in Research (& Organizing)

It is no exaggeration to say that bisexuality’s existence, prevalence, and

significance in United States history has been erased and discounted,

made repeatedly invisible even after it has surfaced, again and again and

again. The reasons for this have been explored by some authors, but

generally go beyond the scope of this chapter.17 To briefly summarize the

phenomena here, it is important to say that the foundational concepts of

sexuality research, over the past century and a half of its existence, have

tended far too much to frame human behaviors in a binary way that

dismisses and/or eclipses attraction to any one sex/gender in favor of

16 See Lani Ka’ahumanu and Loraine Hutchins, eds., Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out,

25th anniversary edition (New York: Riverdale Avenue Books, [1991] 2015), 38-47, psychology

overview section. 17 The interested reader is referred to texts such as sociologist Paula Rust’s works; legal scholars Ruth

Colker and Kenji Yoshino’s classic studies on bisexual labeling, politics and erasure; historians

Stephen Angelides’ and Clare Hemmings’ books; and Lindasusan Ulrich’s groundbreaking report to the

San Francisco Human Rights Commission. All of these are cited in the author’s chapter in the new

Routledge anthology on LGBTQ histories; “Let’s Not Bijack Another Century,” in The Routledge History

of Queer America, ed. Don Romesburg (London: Routledge, 2017).

Loraine Hutchins

08-8

ignoring or discounting the other(s).18 Beginning with sexuality researchers

in nineteenth-century Europe, the same assumptions that have

stigmatized homosexuality as a lesser-than-and-inferior orientation have

also re-enforced the heterosexual/homosexual binary-only frame. In other

words, the nineteenth-century white European males who were the first

sexologists based their research on key binary assumptions that

heterosexuality was the “opposite” of being attracted to one’s own sex,

and that it was also superior to same-sex attractions. Underlying these

assumptions was the belief that people are either heterosexual or

homosexual, and that being bisexual and attracted to more than one

gender is neither legitimate nor real.19 Of course this framework was

invented by heterosexuals to differentiate themselves from homosexuals,

neither of which category really exists outside the human mind. As Kate

Millet wrote, “homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with

its own bisexuality.”20

During the first few decades of LGBTQ Studies, bisexual erasure was,

and still is, common.21 The “B” has been included mostly in name only and

often events and organizations that are labeled with the inclusive acronym

are not really inclusive in the processes of reporting and pedagogy that

play out. For example, while English departments, psychology departments,

sociology departments, history departments, and others have opened up

to including positive examples of gay and lesbian life and

accomplishments and formalizing them via scholarly journals, textbooks,

academic conferences, and curricula at undergraduate and graduate

levels, the stories that follow here in this chapter were almost never

included as part of these narratives. They still, for the most part, are not.

18 Other(s) is stated as plural rather than singular since there are many who now argue there are more

than two genders, that gender is not inherently binary, that binary, either/or male/female genders are

a culturally-specific phenomena and an oversimplification of the vastly more complex reality of how

humans understand and express themselves. 19 Stephen Angelides, A History of Bisexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 20 Kate Millet, Flying (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 97. 21 The first decades of LGBTQ studies are considered here to be the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s,

beginning with the release of the first edition of Jonathan Ned Katz’s groundbreaking work, Gay

American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Avon Books, 1978).

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-9

You will read two examples under the Resistance and Protest heading,

and more under other headings below.

Continuing to assert one’s bisexuality in the face of this denial,

dismissal, and erasure takes tremendous strength of will and sometimes

just sheer cussedness or stubbornness—attributes that are often seen to

be anathema to those who want to fit in and be well liked by others. And

yet, bisexuals have been a part of many social movements, including what

is now called the LGBTQ one. This activism has not been without cost, nor

without almost constant censorship, even from within and without the

bisexual movement. This biphobia, both internalized and from external

sources has resulted in the achievements and events related to bisexual

identities being erased or excluded from the record. Repeated efforts are

needed to put bisexuality and bisexual history back in, over and over again.

iii) Important Events and Places in US Bisexual History

Although there were individual bisexual support groups in various cities

during the 1970s and 1980s—including BiPOL, the first bisexual political

organization that formed in San Francisco in 1983—it took until the late

1980s for a national bisexual networking capacity to form.22 During the

mid-1980s, US bisexual social groups and political action groups, not only

on both coasts, but also in the Midwest, the Northwest, and the Southeast,

began to communicate with each other. The official start of the US

bisexual movement and the launch of BiNET USA is often marked as the

day in Washington, DC, in October 1987 when about eighty bisexual

activists from around the country who had come for the second national

March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights gathered to form the

first ever bisexual contingent at a national march. But years of preparation

and cross-country organizing went into making that contingent possible.

People brought homemade bisexual pride signs. Some wore T-shirts

22 BiPOL was founded in San Francisco by Autumn Courtney, Lani Ka’ahumanu, Arlene Krantz, David

Lourea, Bill Mack, Alan Rockway, and Maggi Rubenstein. See Lani Ka’ahumanu, “Timeline: The

Bisexual Health Movement in the US,” BiNet USA website, http://www.binetusa.org/bihealth.html;

Alan Soble, ed., Sex from Plato to Paglia: A Philosophical Encyclopedia (New York: Greenwood

Publishing Group, 2006), 115.

Loraine Hutchins

08-10

bearing a bisexual symbol of overlapping pink and blue triangles making a

purple triangle in the middle. Everyone marveled to see each other, finally,

assembled in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel, a few blocks north of the

White House.23 Before they joined the line of the march farther south, they

distributed copies of a flyer to give out to others along the route. The flyer,

“Are We Ready For A National Bisexual Network?” included BiPOL’s

address that people could write to in order to keep in touch with national

organizing efforts.24 Some of these same bisexual leaders had been active

with the March on Washington’s national organizing committee during the

previous year, including San Francisco BiPOL organizer, Lani Ka’ahumanu.

Her piece in the march’s civil disobedience handbook, “The Bisexual

Movement, Are We Visible Yet?” was a first of its kind in national

gay/lesbian publications of the day.25 While the 1987 March weekend

marks the beginning of national bisexual organizing, bisexual activists

have been involved in the LGBTQ movement from its very beginnings.

For those interested, a number of bi history timelines chronicling

important meetings and occurrences from the 1960s on are available

online.26 These helpful resources—particularly on health, and political

organizing topics—provide useful touchstones. What follows are examples

of bisexual history being reclaimed. A number of archives concentrating on

bisexual history are now also available, most notably the Bisexual

Resource Center’s collection in Boston; the University of Minnesota’s

Tretter Collection; the collection at the James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center at

23 The Mayflower Hotel, 1127 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC, was listed on the NRHP on

November 14, 1983. 24 The address given for BiPOL was 584 Castro Street, San Francisco, California. 25 The Civil Disobedience Handbook guided people through a day of nonviolent protest at the United

States Supreme Court, in response to the Bowers v. Hardwick decision upholding Georgia’s sodomy

law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting same-sex adults. This decision was

later overturned by the court’s Lawrence v. Texas decision. The civil disobedience actions

accompanying the 1987 march weekend occurred the day after the long march down Pennsylvania

Avenue to the US Capitol Building. 26 For bisexual history timelines, see websites included in note 12.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-11

the San Francisco Public Library; and the bisexual materials that are part

of the San Francisco GLBT Historic Society Archives.27

Sites of Resistance and Protest

Were bisexuals at Stonewall? Yes, of course. Those attracted to more

than one gender, like Sylvia Rivera, one of the first transgender activists,

and Brenda Howard, a multi-issue social justice activist, were part of

organized response to police violence directed against sexual minorities

during the days of the Stonewall uprising in New York City in June 1969

and a part of the one-year anniversary commemorative event, later

recognized as Pride Day.28 Howard, now known as “The Mother of Pride”

for her work coordinating the first rally the year after Stonewall, was an

antiwar activist who chaired the Gay Activists Alliance Speakers Bureau

and was one of the first members of the Gay Liberation Front in New York

City.29 She helped steer the city’s gay rights law through the city council in

1986, worked with ACT UP, Queer Nation, and helped found the New York

Area Bisexual Network, along with its Bisexual Political Action Campaign

(BiPAC) and many other groups. She served as a regional representative in

the national organizing that mobilized the 1993 March on Washington for

Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation in Washington, DC, and

served in 1994 as female co-chair of the leather contingent of the

Stonewall 25 march held June 26, 1994 in New York City. She was also

27 The Bisexual Resource Center’s collection is housed at Northeastern University’s Snell Library, 360

Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts. The Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian,

Bisexual and Transgender Studies is at the University of Minnesota’s Andersen Library, 222 Twenty-

First Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota. The James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center (formerly the

James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center) is located at the San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin

Street, San Francisco (part of the Civic Center Historic District, added to the NRHP on October 10,

1978 and designated an NHL on February 27, 1987). The GLBT Historical Society Archives are at 989

Market Street, San Francisco, California. 28 “Brenda Howard,” LGBT History Month website, http://lgbthistorymonth.com/brenda-

howard?tab=biography; Jade Salazar, “LGBTQ History #18: Sylvia Rivera: Transgender Activist and

Stonewall Legend,” Tagg Magazine, October 29, 2014, http://taggmagazine.com/community/sylvia-

rivera-transgender-activist-stonewall-legend; Stonewall, 51-53 Christopher Street, New York City, New

York was listed on the NRHP on June 28, 1999; designated an NHL on February 16, 2000; and

declared Stonewall National Monument (an NPS unit) on June 24, 2016. 29 Eliel Cruz, “Remembering Brenda: An Ode to the ‘Mother of Pride,’” Advocate, June 17, 2014,

http://www.advocate.com/bisexuality/2014/06/17/remembering-brenda-ode-%E2%80%98mother-

pride%E2%80%99.

Loraine Hutchins

08-12

instrumental in organizing the Third International Bisexual Conference

held on June 25th, the day before Stonewall 25, at Bayard Rustin High

School.30

Though often described as gay in historic accounts, Alan Rockway, one

of the key organizers of the Florida orange juice boycott against Save Our

Children’s Anita Bryant, was an out bisexual psychologist.31 He went on to

do bisexual political organizing with BiPOL in San Francisco, including

helping organize the first Bisexual Rights Rally and protest during the

1984 Democratic Convention because the gay and lesbian delegates were

not including bisexuals in the process (Figure 3).32 Rockway created and

taught the first college-level course on bisexuality, “Psychological Views of

Bisexual Behavior,” offered at Sonoma State College. 33 By 1977, Rockway

had founded the Miami Transperience Center, a mental health services

company providing counseling to the GLBTQ community.34

30 The Bayard Rustin High School, named after the famous gay civil rights leader who was chief

architect of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, is now called the Bayard Rustin

Educational Complex. It is located at 351 West 18th Street, New York City, New York. 31 This early homophobic campaign, the precursor of today’s anti-LGBT initiatives, was called “Save

Our Children.” It started in Florida in the 1970s and spread to other cities and states, and was

championed by singer and Florida Citrus Commission spokesperson Anita Bryant. See “Foes of Anita

Bryant Successful in Getting New Gay Law on Ballot,” Akron Beacon Journal (Akron, Ohio), October 5,

1978, 37. 32 The 1984 Democratic Party Convention was held July 16-19 in the Moscone Center, San Francisco’s

convention center, built in 1981, in the South of Market area. It was named after San Francisco Mayor

George Moscone who had been assassinated, along with Supervisor Harvey Milk, in 1978. The

Moscone Center currently consists of Moscone North, Moscone South, and Moscone West; Moscone

South is the original structure, built in 1981. Rockway worked with San Francisco bisexual activist Lani

Ka’ahumanu and others in BiPOL, a political action group, to create bisexual visibility actions around

the convention, including securing a permit from the city for a protest stage for the first Bisexual

Rights Rally in a parking lot across from the Moscone Center. The parking lot at 730 Howard Street is

now occupied by Moscone Center North. Bisexuals had been explicitly told by organizers that they

were not welcome in the National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights that took place from Castro and

Market Streets to the Moscone Center during the convention. 33 In some historic records, Susan Carlton’s 1990 course on bisexuality, at the University of California,

Berkeley is listed as the first college-level course taught on bisexuality. In fact, Rockway originated the

first course a decade and a half earlier. Others have followed suit in various LGBTQ university

programs, but stand-alone courses that focus solely on bisexual issues are still rare, forty years later.

Sonoma State College (since 1978, Sonoma State University) is located at 1801 East Cotati Avenue,

Rhonert Park, California. The Rockway Institute, founded in 2007, is a center for LGBTQ research and

public policy at the California School of Professional Psychology, Alliant International University, One

Beach Street, San Francisco, California. It is named in honor of Alan Rockway. See

http://www.alliant.edu/cspp/about-cspp/cspp-research-institutes/rockway-institute/index.php 34 “Nation’s Press,” Panama City News-Herald (Panama City, Florida), December 16, 1977, 36.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-13

Bisexuals are resilient, surviving in a world that repeatedly erases and

elides their existence. They resist erasure over and over again. Left out of

the names of organizations and marches, excluded from studies and

efforts purporting to represent all same-sex loving people, they persist,

and continue to assert who they are.

In 1991, Princeton and Rutgers universities cohosted the fifth annual

Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at the Rutgers campus in New

Brunswick, New Jersey. Although organizers at the 1990 conference held

at Harvard University had added bi into the title the year before, the word

“bisexual” was taken back out of the name of the conference when it was

held in New Jersey. Likewise, although a number of papers on bisexuality

were presented at the 1991 New Jersey conference, the resulting

anthology, Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects, contained none of

Figure 3: The first Bisexual Rights Rally in the United States at 730 Howard Street, San

Francisco, California. Explicitly excluded from the lesbian and gay protests at the 1984

Democratic Party Convention held across the street at the Moscone Center, bisexual activists

Alan Rockway, Lani Ka’ahumanu, and others in BiPOL arranged their own protest. Photo courtesy

of Lani Ka’ahumanu.

Loraine Hutchins

08-14

them.35 No conference was held during 1992 or 1993 but this

foundational effort in LGBTQ studies resulted in one last November 1994

conference at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. As a result of bisexual

advocacy and resistance over being “written in and out” of earlier

gatherings, the 1994 conference was dubbed “InQueery/InTheory/InDeed:

The Sixth North American Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Studies Conference.”

The Iowa City conference included programming on bisexual and

transgender issues as well as gay and lesbian ones and produced a book

based on conference proceedings.36 The public parks and town square of

Northampton, Massachusetts became a parallel site of resistance in

response to this exclusionary “Now You See Us, Now You Don’t” mentality.

As has been partially related in Hemmings’ Bisexual Spaces: A Geography

of Sexuality and Gender, this small western Massachusetts town used a

bi-inclusive title for its annual Pride celebration one year, and then erased

the bisexual part of the name the next.37

Is resistance “futile,” as the Star Trek Borg would tell us, or is it

“fertile,” as indomitable resisters of all types assert? Many bisexuals long

known for refusing-to-choose (sides in a war not of their making) answer

“it’s both/and.” Both “futile” in the sense of being monumentally

discouraging to continually insist on one’s right to belong and exist, and

inspirationally “fertile” in the sense that hope beyond simplistic binaries

springs eternal in non-gendered human breasts.

Many, many small towns and big city communities around the country

have their own specific tales of bi inclusion/exclusion, instances where

bisexuals were included in groups’ titles, marches and other events, and

then excluded again—sometimes over and over again, even up to this day

35 Brett Beemyn and Michele Eliason, eds., Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender

Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1-2; Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke,

eds., Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Subjects (London: Routledge, 1994.) 36 Beemyn and Eliason, eds., Queer Studies. 37 Clare Hemmings, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender (New York: Routledge,

2002). See pages 62-75 for photo reproductions of posters used for various years of the marches in

Northampton, illustrating bi inclusion and exclusion. Since at least the late 1970s/early 1980s,

Northampton, Massachusetts has been recognized as home to a large number of lesbians; in the early

1990s, it was dubbed “Lesbianville, USA” by the mainstream media. See Julia Penelope, “Lesbianville,

U.S.A.?” Off Our Backs 23, no. 9 (October 1993): 8, 16-17.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-15

in time. There have been bisexual grand marshals who were honored and

helped lead Pride parades, and also many times when they could/should

have been, and were not. For example, in 1986, when BiPOL's Autumn

Courtney was elected co-chair of San Francisco's Lesbian Gay Freedom

Day Pride Parade Committee, it was the first time an openly bisexual

person was chosen to hold this sort of position in the United States.38

Another kind of protest occurred when people did, and do, individual

and small group actions, sometimes involving civil disobedience, to try and

draw attention to their cause. One such example was the action of Dr.

Elias Farajajé-Jones, an African American bisexual Howard University

School of Divinity professor, who staged a sit-in at the Washington, DC

Mayor’s office in 1991 to protest inaction of the DC government regarding

the release of HIV/AIDS funding.39 The exact date of this protest has been

lost and Farajajé himself died in early 2016. This protest is particularly

poignant as his own lover was dying of AIDS in Washington, DC’s Veterans

Administration Hospital at the time.

As the above stories show, there is a lot of hidden history about the

dynamics of coalition organizing—what gets put in a group’s platform or a

campaign’s demands or a march’s platform, and what gets left out or

voted down.40 It is always informative to ask your local college or place of

worship or activist group what kind of naming battles went on, and/or are

still going on, and what people think it means, what kinds of messages are

sent, by the ways we use language: who is represented and who is not,

38 For more of these kinds of bisexual historic political facts, see “A Brief History of the Bisexual

Movement,” BiNet USA website, http://www.binetusa.org/bihistory2.html. 39 The Office of the Mayor is located at 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC. Howard

University, an historically black university, has its divinity school at 2900 Van Ness Street NW,

Washington, DC. Dr. Farajajé-Jones became a Sufi scholar who later changed his name to Ibrahim

Farajajé. He developed a department of Islam Studies at Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley,

California, where he served as provost for many years before his death in February 2016. Starr King

School for the Ministry is located at 2441 Le Conte Avenue, Berkeley, California. 40 See, for example, the updated introduction, “Still About Naming After All These Years,” in

Ka’ahumanu and Hutchins, Bi Any Other Name.

Loraine Hutchins

08-16

present absences, absent presences, whose lives matter, here, there,

anywhere.41

Building Bisexual Communities – Local, Global, and

Everything in Between

The first thing to understand about the concept of bisexual

communities is that they do not stand alone, apart from other

demographic groups. That’s not how bisexuality works. Bisexuals partner

and have children with those who are not bisexual, and work within and

among and apart from and alongside many different kinds of interest

groups. Bisexual leaders and activists in the past were well known for

saying “there is no point in organizing a separate bisexual political

movement” because the issues of loving more than one gender are woven

into more than one community, so the point is to organize cross-

communities and among them, not apart from them. Like others, bisexual

activists do not work only to build bisexual-specific organizations or for

bisexual rights, but work as out bisexuals in many movements that, ideally,

network with each other. It means there are bisexually-identified people

organizing within electoral politics and political parties, within LGBTQ

organizations, within the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the

women’s movement, the environmental movement, and more; making the

intersectional connections between bisexual issues and other issues

whenever platforms, campaigns, and protest demands are formulated.

Still, when trying to trace more precisely the beginnings of bisexual-

focused community efforts, we often start by looking back at the “firsts” in

LGBTQ history, those that have been commemorated in the LGBTQ history

books and textbooks, and those that also have sometimes been left out.

Recognized as the first homophile organization in the United States, the

Society for Human Rights was founded by Henry Gerber and others,

41 For example, regarding organizations on college campuses, see Brett Beemyn, “The Silence is

Broken: A History of the First Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual College Student Groups,” Journal of the

History of Sexuality 12, no. 2 (April 2003), 205-223.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-17

including an African American clergyman named John T. Graves (who is

listed as president on the incorporation papers), in Chicago, Illinois in

1924. The group, which operated out of Gerber’s flat in a rooming house,

limited membership to gay men only (explicitly excluding bisexuals).

Unknown to the organizers, the society’s vice president, Al Weininger, was

married. His wife reported the organization to a social worker in 1925,

resulting in a police raid of Gerber’s quarters. The organization’s records

and typewriter were seized, and not returned, effectively ending the

society’s existence.42

Using “gay” in the most expansive, inclusive sense possible, there have

been lasting gay support and social groups on college campuses and in

individual communities for over sixty years.43 Some histories tell the story

about how students in the late 1980s and early 1990s agitated to change

the names of their groups to be more inclusive, often adding “lesbian” and

“bisexual,” and then “transgender” and “queer” to their names. But what

isn’t generally known, taught, or told, is that the very first US gay student

group was started by a bisexual man.

The Student Homophile League at Columbia University was started in

1966, several years before Stonewall.44 The founder was student Stephen

Donaldson (birth name Robert Martin), perhaps better known as Donny

the Punk. Donny led a short illustrious life, having affairs with famous gay

and lesbian political leaders and organizing for bisexual rights among

everyone from nonviolent Quakers to convicted felons. He was one of the

very first anti-prison-rape activists and died of AIDS much too young. Today,

meetings of the Columbia Queer Alliance are held in a special room

42 The Henry Gerber Residence in the Old Town Triangle neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois was

designated an NHL on June 19, 2015. Vern L. Bullough, Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and

Lesbian Rights in Historical Context (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2002), 27; John Loughery, The

Other Side of Science – Men’s Lives and Gay Identities: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: Henry

Holt and Company, 1998), 54. 43 The Mattachine Society was founded in Los Angeles, California in 1950; the Daughters of Bilitis

formed in 1955 in San Francisco, California. Both of these homophile organizations lasted in various

forms for many years. 44 Brett Beemyn, “Bisexuality, Bisexuals and Bisexual Movements,” in Encyclopedia of LGBT History in

America, vol. 1, ed. Marc Stein (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003).

Loraine Hutchins

08-18

dedicated to Donaldson’s memory (Figures 4 and 5). With Donaldson’s

support, activists on other campuses formed similar groups, laying the

groundwork for what became the gay liberation movement in the late

1960s and early 1970s.45

This is but one example of what historian Genny Beemyn has

characterized as the pattern of many LGBTQ groups being started by, and

continuing to be run by bisexual people, whether they are out and

recognized as bisexual, or not. Other LGBTQ youth groups have also been

started by bisexuals. In Miami in 1977, Alexei Guren, a young Cuban

American bisexual activist, organized the Gay Teen Task Force, an LGBTQ

youth group that met monthly at the offices of The Weekly News. In 1982,

45 Meetings are held in the basement of Columbia University’s Furnald Hall, Broadway and 116th

Street, New York City, New York.

Figure 4: The Columbia Queer Alliance lounge, Furnald Hall, Columbia University, 2016. The lounge is

dedicated to the memory of bisexual activist Stephen Donaldson, the Columbia University student who

founded the first LGBTQ student group in the United States. Photo courtesy of Kaixi Wu, 2015.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-19

it moved to the Institute of

Sexism and Sexuality at Miami

Dade College, where it often

hosted up to fifty LGBTQ youth

at the meetings. In 1996, the

group incorporated and

renamed itself Pridelines; it

continues to provide a

number of programs and

services for the LGBTQ youth

of Miami.46 In 1975, Carol

Queen—a young woman

growing up in rural Oregon—

cofounded Growing

Alternative Youth (GAYouth) in

Eugene, Oregon. When

founded, it was only the third

LGBTQ youth support/social group in the nation. It later affiliated itself

with the Metropolitan Community Church of Eugene.

Grassroots bisexual social and support groups were the pre-internet

basis of organizing the bisexual community and movement. There are

hundreds unmentioned here. They continue, with the assistance of social

media, to foster community ties and to serve as entry points for helping

people identify openly as bi, to find resources, and for those interested in

getting involved with activist and advocacy work on behalf of LGBTQ

issues as well as those specific to bisexuality. Some long-lasting examples

include BiFriendly in San Francisco, Biversity in Boston, and the many bi

brunches and munches that spring up and die down and spring up again

in communities across the country.

46 Offices of The Weekly News were located at 901 NE Seventy-Ninth Street, Miami, Florida. The

Institute of Sexism and Sexuality is located at the Wolfson Campus of Miami Dade College, 300 NE

Second Avenue, Miami, Florida. Pridelines Youth Services currently has offices at 9526 NE Second

Avenue, Miami, Florida.

Figure 5: Text of the plaque outside the Columbia Queer

Alliance lounge at Furnald Hall, Columbia University

commemorating Stephen Donaldson. From an image

courtesy of Kaixi Wu, 2015.

Loraine Hutchins

08-20

Leisure

What is leisure to a community under oppression? Then again, leisure

is all the more necessary and life-giving to people in crisis and under

stress. During the 1980s and 1990s (and often still today) bisexuals were

vilified as being the disease vectors who “spread AIDS to the general

population,” as if they themselves were not part of society.47 In reality,

bisexual health workers and activists designed and developed some of the

first city, county, state, and federally-supported safer sex protocols now in

use around the country. In San Francisco, bisexual activists David Lourea

and Cynthia Slater worked to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS before they,

themselves, died of the disease. As early as 1981, they were providing

safer-sex education in the city’s bathhouses and BDSM clubs, and by

1983, Lourea had been appointed to San Francisco Mayor Dianne

Feinstein’s AIDS Education Advisory Committee. In 1984, he convinced

the city’s public health department to include bisexual men in its weekly

“New AIDS Cases and Mortality Statistics” reports, a model later adopted

by other public health departments across the country. Slater started the

first Women’s HIV/AIDS Information Switchboard in San Francisco in

1985.48 Other bisexuals have made important contributions to HIV/AIDS

prevention, including Rob Yaeger at the Minneapolis AIDS Project and

Alexei Guren, who as well as founding Pridelines, was involved with the

1983 founding of the Health Crisis Network in Miami, Florida which did

outreach and advocacy for Latino married men who have sex with men.

From 1992 to 1994, Lani Ka’ahumanu was project coordinator at Lyon-

Martin Women’s Health Services in San Francisco for an American

Foundation for AIDS research grant—the first grant in the United States

47 See, for example, Martin S. Weinberg, Colin J. Williams, and Douglas W. Pryor, Dual Attraction:

Understanding Bisexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 205. 48 Lourea also worked professionally with LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS communities, and published articles

including “HIV Prevention: A Dramaturgical Analysis and Practical Guide to Creating Safer Sex

Interventions,” (with Clark L. Taylor), in Bisexualities: Theory and Research, eds. Dr. Fritz Klein and

Timothy J. Wolf (New York: Haworth Press, 1985). Lourea died in 1992; Slater in 1989.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-21

targeting young high-risk lesbian and bisexual women for HIV/AIDS

prevention and education research.49

Safer sex education is a topic of science and organizing, not a topic of

leisure. But it relates to leisure because in the time of HIV/AIDS, the

prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases became a matter of life or

death. These safer sex protocols were most efficiently, effectively, and

popularly taught at public baths, at leather bars and sex parties, and at

workshops during conferences where explicit demonstrations and

conversations could be had without fear of condemnation or retribution.

These often transient places can never be fully cataloged.

49 In 1998, Heath Crisis Network merged with the Community Research Initiative to form Care

Resource, South Florida’s oldest and largest HIV/AIDS service organization. They currently have four

locations in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami Beach, Florida, see “About,” Care Resource website,

http://www.careresource.org/about. For more information on bisexual involvement in health, see

“Timeline: The Bisexual Health Movement in the US,” BiNet USA website,

http://www.binetusa.org/bihealth.html; see also Batza (this volume) and Capó (this volume). The

Minneapolis AIDS Project is located at 1400 Park Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota; Lyon-Martin

Women’s Health Services is at 1748 Market Street, San Francisco, California.

Figure 6: The Center for Sex and Culture hosts a World AIDS Day show in 2014 featuring posters

from the collection of safer sex activist Buzz Bense. Photo courtesy of Robert Morgan Lawrence,

EdD.

Loraine Hutchins

08-22

One of the modern-day inheritors of these traditions is the Center for

Sex and Culture founded in 2000 by bisexual activists Carol Queen (who

also co-founded GAYouth, described above) and Robert Lawrence.50 The

Center for Sex and Culture hosts many bisexual and bi-friendly events for

the larger San Francisco community and maintains an archives of

sexuality research (Figure 6). In New England, long-time bisexual activist

and author Wayne Bryant founded Bi Camp, a popular summertime leisure

activity that ran from 1994-2009.51 Each winter, announcements and

flyers were mailed out encouraging people to get their camping gear

together, to start thinking about potluck campfire recipes, and to make

packing lists of musical instruments, games, and sports equipment to

bring along. Bi Camp started at a campground in Vermont’s Green

Mountain National Forest, and moved after five years to Indian Hollow

Campground owned by the Army Corps of Engineers in Chesterfield,

Massachusetts.52 The camp hosted anywhere from 25-80 campers each

year, including bisexual people, their families, and friends. It inspired a

video Bryant made, and a sing-along, multi-versed song by Philadelphian

Moss Stern, called “Bi Camp.”

Organizing Every Which Way

Bisexuals have helped organize the first national marches for the rights

of sexual minorities in the United States, as well as similarly-oriented local

community events, and have been part of Pride parades since the

beginning (Figure 7). They have helped organize LGBTQ events as well as

bisexual-specific ones, locally, nationally, and globally for many years,

recognized or not.

50 The Center for Sex and Culture is located at 1349 Mission Street, San Francisco, California. They

strive to promote creativity, information, and healthy sexual knowledge, see “Mission and Vision,”

Center for Sex and Culture website, http://www.sexandculture.org/mission. 51 Bryant was the author of the first book ever to critique films from a bisexual point of view, Bisexual

Characters in Film: From Anais to Zee, Haworth Gay & Lesbian Studies (New York: Haworth Press,

1997). He served on the board of the Bisexual Resource Center, 29 Stanhope Street, Boston,

Massachusetts and was an organizer of the Fifth International Conference on Bisexuality that drew

nine hundred attendees to Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts from April 3-5, 1998. 52 Green Mountain National Forest is located near Rutland, Vermont. Part of the US Forest Service, it

was established on April 25, 1932.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-23

Bill Beasley, a bisexual man who was also involved in the black civil

rights movement, helped lead the first Los Angeles Pride parade down

Hollywood Boulevard in 1970, and went on to serve on the board of San

Francisco Pride, as well as being active with the Bay Area Bisexual

Network.53 A. Billy S. Jones (now Jones-Hennin), an African American

activist and author, served as operations coordinator for the first National

March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay rights on October 14, 1979.54

The event featured a march down Washington DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue

to the National Mall, where a program of speeches and musical

entertainment occurred. Illustrating the kind of bicoastal organizing of the

time, Jones had been active in San Francisco’s Bisexual Center before

53 The Bay Area Bisexual Network met at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center, 1800 Market

Street, San Francisco, California. 54 Wanting more support as a bisexual man with a wife and family and not finding it in existing groups,

in 1978 Jones founded the Gay Married Men Association (GAMMA) of Washington, DC, which has

been meeting continuously ever since. They currently meet at Saint Thomas' Parish Episcopal Church,

1772 Church Street NW, Washington, DC. There are now several GAMMA groups meeting across the

country. See GAMMA-DC website, http://www.gammaindc.org.

Figure 7: BiRequest/NYC Bisexuality Rocks contingent in the June 2012 Pride march in New York

City. Holding the banner are long-time bisexual activists and leaders Estraven (L) and Matt LeGrant

(R). BiRequest is a bisexual social and support group in Manhattan. Photo courtesy of Efrain

Gonzalez.

Loraine Hutchins

08-24

moving to the Washington, DC, area.55 During the weekend of the 1979

march, Jones also served as one of the key conveners of the Third World

Lesbian Gay Conference held at the Harambee House Hotel.56 It was at

this conference that ties among many black and other people of color

LGBTQ communities were strengthened. Audre Lorde, who was just

beginning to come out as a lesbian poet and leader, spoke at that

conference, as did many others. In the year following that conference,

Jones and the National Coalition of Black Lesbians and Gays, brought the

first ever people of color delegation to meet with President Carter’s White

House staff. This delegation was organized because an all-white gay

delegation had arranged a meeting with the White House a year earlier.

Thirty-three years later, on a cool 2013 September morning, Jones and

many other bisexual activists and leaders returned to the White House to

talk with administration officials about bisexual policy issues for the first

time.57

The bisexual movement in the United States has been built on

conferences that knit and weave and sew the experiences of local

communities together and make joint actions across state, and even

national borders, possible. One of the earliest recorded meetings on

bisexuality took place at a gathering of Quakers (Friends) in upstate New

York in the early 1970s. Bisexual activist Stephen Donaldson—the same

55 The San Francisco Bisexual Center was located on Hayes Street just north of the Golden Gate Park

panhandle, in the bottom flat of a two-flat building that is now a residence. The San Francisco Bisexual

Center was founded by Maggi Rubenstein and Harriet Levi. Before it closed in 1984, it provided a

newsletter, support groups, counseling, social activities, a presence in Pride marches, and was

internationally renowned. 56 The Harambee House Hotel was located on the 2200 block of Georgia Avenue NW, Washington, DC,

near the Howard University campus. It opened in 1978. In 1981, Howard University purchased the

Harambee House Hotel from the federal Economic Development Administration. Profitable in the

1980s, Howard University operated the hotel until 1995, when they closed it after continued financial

losses. See Ronald Roach, “The Promise and the Peril – African American Colleges and Universities’

Hotel and Conference Center Ownership,” Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, July 5, 2007,

http://diverseeducation.com/article/8075. 57 Bisexual leaders have met twice with Obama Administration officials for roundtable consultations

focused on the specific needs of bisexual people regarding health, education, employment, and

immigration, among others. See Amy Andre, “Obama Administration Invites Bisexual Leaders to the

White House,” Huffpost Queer Voices, August 27, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amy-

andre/obama-bisexual-leaders_b_3819857.html; Faith Cheltenham, “BiNet USA in the White House

Photo Blast #whatbilookslike,” BiNet USA’s Blog, September 4, 2014,

http://binetusa.blogspot.com/2014/09/binet-usa-in-white-house-photo-blast.html.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-25

man who founded the first gay student group in the United States—told

The Advocate that he had organized an impromptu workshop on

bisexuality at the 1972 Friends General Conference in Ithaca, New York.58

Donaldson, whose birth name was Robert Martin, said the workshop

involved over one hundred participants and overflowed into several

different meeting rooms over two days, resulting in what has become

known as The Ithaca Statement on Bisexuality, which may have been the

first public statement on bisexuality by a religious or political group.

From the 1970s, one bisexual man, Dr. Fritz Klein, has helped perhaps

more than anyone else to facilitate bisexual networking and conferences.

Dr. Klein was a psychiatrist who did early research and publishing on

bisexuality. He also traveled widely, especially in the 1980s and 1990s,

connecting bisexual communities around the world with each other, and

helping to start international bisexual conferences in London, Amsterdam,

Toronto, and Vancouver. Klein himself was bicoastal, living for a long time

in New York City and then moving to San Diego. He started the first peer-

reviewed scholarly journal on bisexuality, The Journal of Bisexuality. Klein

founded the American Institute of Bisexuality in 1998 to encourage

research and education about bisexuality. He served as Chairman of the

Board until his death in 2006.59

58 While efforts to find records of this meeting in Friends’ archives have been unsuccessful, there are

mentions of it in the August 8, 1972 Advocate article, and in a number of anthologies chronicling

bisexual history. Stephen Donaldson, “The Bisexual Movement’s Beginnings in the ‘70s: A Personal

Retrospective,” in Bisexual Politics: Theories, Queries, & Visions, ed. Naomi Tucker (New York:

Harrington Park Press, 1995), 31-45; Robert Martin, “Quakers ‘Come Out’ at Conference,” Advocate,

August 2, 1972, 8. The Friends General Conference took place in June 1972 at Ithaca College, 953

Danby Road, Ithaca, New York. 59 The American Institute of Bisexuality was located at 8265 West Sunset Boulevard, West Hollywood,

California. Fritz Klein also developed a variation of the Kinsey Scale called the Klein Sexual Orientation

Grid which built upon Kinsey’s zero to six scale. His book, The Bisexual Option, was one of the first

studies that did not pathologize bisexuality, and that gave the identity legitimacy. See “About Fritz

Klein,” American Institute of Bisexuality website, http://www.americaninstituteofbisexuality.org/fritz-

klein. Klein lived with his partner, Tom Reise, in the Emerald Hills neighborhood of San Diego,

California from 1995 until his death in 2006.

Loraine Hutchins

08-26

One of the most catalyzing and foundational conferences of the US

bisexual movement took place in June 1990 at San Francisco’s Mission

High School (Figure 8).60 The conference was the result of outreach done

during the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights

mentioned earlier, and drew over 450 people from twenty US states and

five countries. The school is located directly across from Dolores Park in

the Mission District, and in the beautiful weather that weekend, many

conference goers took their conversations out onto the grass across the

street and created impromptu workshops on the balconies and in the

courtyard of the old school. It was at this conference that BiNet USA, the

oldest national bisexual organization in the United States, was

inaugurated.61

60 The Mission High School is located at 3750 Eighteenth Street, San Francisco, California. 61 BiNet USA facilitates communication and networking among bisexual communities, promotes

bisexual visibility, and distributes educational information about bisexuality, see BiNet USA website,

http://www.binetusa.org.

Figure 8: Participants of the first ever National Conference on Bisexuality sit on the steps of the

Mission High School, San Francisco, California, June 1990. Photo courtesy of Efrain Gonzalez.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-27

Other regional bisexual

organizing conferences have

been held, including Washington,

DC’s Embracing Diversities

Conference in fall 1991; the

BECAUSE Conference that has

been an annual convening in the

Midwest since 1992; and the

Transcending Boundaries

Conference created to bring the

bisexual and transgender

communities together that has

taken place since 2001 around

New England.62

Much has changed in the way

municipal, state, and federal laws

deal with same-sex relationships

over the years, yet in some ways,

much remains to be done. Years

before bisexual people, along

with their lesbian, gay, and queer

siblings, became active in

marriage equality efforts,

bisexuals were also active in organizing for veterans’ rights and for the

rights of those in the military. One of the most prominent was Cliff Arnesen,

who was dishonorably discharged from the military for being bisexual

(Figure 9). Afterwards, he went on to become an activist for all LGBTQ

people in the military and was the first LGBTQ veteran to testify before a

62 Embracing Diversities was sponsored by AMBi, Washington DC’s bisexual political action group at

the time, and was held at St. Thomas’ Parish Episcopal Church, 1772 Church Street NW, Washington,

DC. The BECAUSE conference is usually held on the University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis. 63 Val-Kill is part of the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York. The NPS unit

was established on May 27, 1977. Val-Kill was added to the NRHP on March 20, 1980 and

designated an NHL on May 27, 1977.

Figure 9: Cliff Arnesen (age 12) and Wiltwyck School

for Boys Chairman, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt at her

estate in Val-Kill, Hyde Park, New York, July 1959.

Photo taken during Mrs. Roosevelt’s Annual Picnic

for the 100 boys of the predominantly African-

American Wiltwyck School for Boys, Esopus, New

York. Photo courtesy of Clifton Francis Arnesen, Jr.63

Loraine Hutchins

08-28

congressional subcommittee about the health needs and rights of his

fellow service members.64

In 2013, a group of activists at the Lavender Law Conference, hosted

by the National LGBT Bar Association, formed BiLaw, the first national

organization of bisexual-identified lawyers, law professors, law students,

and their allies.65 In 2015, the Lavender Law Conference programmed its

first panel on issues of bisexual jurisprudence, bisexuality, and the law.

Protesting Amongst Our Own

As mentioned earlier, a lot of the hard work of bisexual organizing

occurs within non-bisexual organizations. These may not be openly

welcoming to people with bisexual identities but may include many

closeted bisexuals among them, whether passing as heterosexual,

lesbian/gay, or both. More explicitly, the work of dismantling bisexual

erasure and invisibility is constant. It takes place not only in the energizing

bisexual conferences and meetings held around the country, but is also

alive within professional organizations like the National LGBT Bar

Association (mentioned above) and professional organizations such as the

American Library Association, the American Psychological Association, the

National Association of Social Workers, the National Women’s Studies

Association, the American Historical Association, and more. When LGBTQ

caucuses are formed within these groups and gay/lesbian specific

presentations and panels are scheduled at annual conferences, bisexual

topics are often left out. This, alas, is almost as likely to occur within gay

and lesbian oriented organizations as it is within those more in the

mainstream. For example, in 1989, the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a

nonprofit organization serving the needs of LGBTQ youth, advertised a

workshop to be held at their Harvey Milk High School.66 The workshop was

64 Bi Any Other Name 65 The Lavender Law Conference that year was held at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis Hotel, 55

Fourth Street, San Francisco, California. 66 Harvey Milk High School was founded in 1985 by the Hetrick-Martin Institute to provide a safe place

for LGBTQ youth to get an education (threats and instances of violence, bullying, and harassment

affect the ability of many LGBTQ youth from succeeding in school). It is located at 2-10 Astor Place,

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-29

called, “Bisexual Men: Fact or Fiction?” In response to the workshop title,

which challenged the very existence of bisexual men, BiPAC New York, a

bisexual political action group, protested. In response, institute staff

agreed to withdraw the workshop from their curriculum. This is but one

example of instances like it around the country.

On a national basis, many national LGBTQ gatherings have been sites

of protests focused on bisexual rights. Two historic examples from the

early 1990s concern bisexual activists and the National LGBTQ Task

Force—then known as the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.67 The

Task Force began its historic annual Creating Change conferences in

Washington, DC, in 1988, the year after the 1987 March on Washington

for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Since then, Creating Change has become the

largest annual gathering of LGBTQ activists and leaders in the United

States and bisexuals have been there from the beginning, often fighting

for recognition and space on the program, sometimes recognized and

sometimes not. In November 1991, Creating Change drew almost one

thousand participants to Alexandria, Virginia.68 For the first time at

Creating Change, bisexual activists held a workshop for gay and lesbian

leaders to talk with bisexual activists about tensions between the groups.

Creating Change returned to the DC area again in November 1996,

when two thousand people again convened in Alexandria, Virginia.69 In the

intervening years, the bisexual community had continued to hold separate

women’s and men’s dialogues across orientation lines at each annual

Creating Change, initiating and fostering difficult communication between

New York City, New York. The Hetrick-Martin Institute operated the school until 2002, when it became

a fully accredited public school under the jurisdiction of the New York City Department of Education. 67 The National LGBTQ Task Force was founded in 1973 as the National Gay Task Force; they changed

their name to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1985, and to the current name that

includes bisexuals, transgender people, and queer/questioning people in October 2014. Lani

Ka’ahumanu was the first openly bisexual person to serve on the board of the National Gay and

Lesbian Task Force, completing her term in 2000. The National LGBTQ Task Force headquarters are

located at 1325 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC. 68 The 1991 Creating Change Conference was held at the Best Western Old Colony Inn, 1101 North

Washington Street, Alexandria, Virginia. 69 The 1996 Creating Change Conference was held at the Radisson Plaza Hotel at Mark Center, 5000

Seminary Road, near the Crystal City neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia. In 1999, Hilton Hotels and

Resorts bought the hotel; it is now the Hilton Alexandria Mark Center.

Loraine Hutchins

08-30

those who identified as gay or lesbian and those who identified as

bisexual. Things came to a head at the 1996 conference when the

number of discriminatory acts and remarks against bisexuals and

transgender people reached such a peak that a Bi/Trans Action at the

main plenary on Saturday morning was planned. Before the keynote

speeches began, activists took to the stage recounting examples of

biphobic and transphobic offenses committed against them during that

weekend conference. They asked everyone in the room who identified as

bi and/or transgender, and/or who was an ally, to stand up and be

counted and to vow to confront biphobic and transphobic actions and

attitudes in the future. Although the Bi/Trans Action was not included in

the Gay and Lesbian Task Force press release following the conference,

they did note that the first significant conversation between bisexual and

transgender activists and members of the administration had occurred

that weekend:

…Representatives of the bisexual and transgender community

held a first-ever meeting at the Conference with a White House

representative to discuss discrimination, violence, ENDA, bi and

trans visibility and inclusivity in the Administration and other

issues. Richard Socarides, outgoing White House liaison to the

g/l/b/t community, met with the bi and transgender leaders to

hear their concerns in a meeting that was described as productive

and promising….70

That meeting laid the groundwork for White House meetings that would

take place in the new century.

70 “Creating Change Wrap-up,” National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Press Release, November 19,

1996, http://www.qrd.org/qrd/orgs/NGLTF/1996/creating.change.wrap-up-11.19.96. Richard

Socarides, ironically, is an out gay man who is the son of Charles Socarides, a psychiatrist who worked

to “treat” homosexuality beginning in the 1960s. In 1992, he helped found an organization offering

conversion therapy to change the sexual orientation of people with same-sex attraction. See “Deaths:

Socarides, Charles William, MD,” New York Times, December 27, 2005,

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEED91230F934A15751C1A9639C8B63. Use

of conversion therapy on minors is currently banned in California, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon, and the

District of Columbia. It is considered unethical by the American Psychiatric Association.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-31

Political Activism as Celebration

Sometimes political victories are the cause for much celebration and,

in fact, inspire sites of rejoicing and festivities in and of themselves. Such

was the case with the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi

Equal Rights and Liberation the last weekend in April. The 1993 march

was the third of a total of five marches held on Washington for LGBTQ

rights and, in many ways, the most grassroots and inclusive of all of them.

The “bi” word was included, after much debate, in the title of the march

for the first time and a bisexual speaker, Lani Ka’ahumanu, was invited to

speak from the main stage

on the National Mall for

the first time as well.71

Bisexual activists

converged on Washington,

DC, a week before the

march to staff an

impromptu bisexual

coordinating center

located in donated office

space in the Dupont Circle

neighborhood (Figure 10).

They camped out in the

homes of local bisexual

activists in the Mt.

Pleasant, Adams Morgan,

and Takoma

neighborhoods; organized

the Second National

Conference Celebrating

Bisexuality that took place

two days before the march;

71 The National Mall was added to the NRHP on October 15, 1966. It is part of the National Mall and

Memorial Parks NPS unit.

Figure 10: Bisexual activist and reproductive justice and rights

activist Laura Perez at the 1993 March on Washington for

Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation. Photo

courtesy of Efrain Gonzalez.

Loraine Hutchins

08-32

and held a national meeting of BiNet USA, followed by a Bi Dance at

George Washington University’s Marvin Center, the night before.72 The

march itself had been organized with 50/50 gender/racial parity, meaning

that there were many more women and people of color involved in

leadership roles determining the platform demands of the march as well

as traveling to Washington, DC, as participants.

First observed in 1999, Celebrate Bisexuality Day was started by three

BiNet USA activists, Wendy Curry from Maine, Michael Page from Florida,

and Gigi Raven Wilbur from

Texas. It has been celebrated in

small towns, large cities, and

internationally, on the internet

and at many events, usually

around September 23, the date

of the first event. A 2013 White

House meeting between federal

officials and bisexual activists

to discuss bisexual issues was

scheduled for September 23 in

recognition of the day.73 Since

2013, BiNet USA working in

coalition with other bisexual

and LGBTQ organizations, has

expanded Celebrate Bisexuality

Day to cover a whole week. The

Bisexual Resource Center in

Boston has also designated the

72 The Second National Conference Celebrating Bisexuality, organized by BiNet USA, the Bisexual

Resource Center, and the Washington, DC, organization Alliance of Multicultural Bisexuals (AMBi) was

held at American University’s Ward Circle Building, 3590 Nebraska Avenue NW, Washington, DC. The

Bi Dance was held at George Washington University’s Cloyd Heck Marvin Center, 800 Twenty-First

Street NW, Washington, DC. 73 The informal meeting took place in the Indian Treaty Room of the Eisenhower Executive Office

Building (then the Old Executive Office Building) at Pennsylvania Avenue NW and Seventeenth Street

NW, Washington, DC. The building was added to the NRHP on June 4, 1969 and designated an NHL

on November 11, 1971.

Figure 11: Faith Cheltenham, president of BiNET

USA flies the bisexual pride flag outside the White

House following the September 2015 bisexual

issues policy roundtable with federal officials. Photo

courtesy of Kevin Hogan.

Making Bisexuals Visible

08-33

month of March as Bisexual Health Awareness Month, focusing on raising

awareness about bisexual health issues, nationally and locally.

Two years later, many of the same leaders who had been at the 2013

meeting returned that same week in September to meet again with

representatives from federal offices to discuss bisexual concerns. When

leaving the meeting, many participants pulled bisexual pride flags out of

their backpacks and briefcases and created an impromptu celebration in

front of the White House (Figure 11).

Conclusion

Bisexuals have chosen many different names for themselves through

the years. Many people whose lives encompass loving more than one

gender never openly call themselves bisexual, or even queer or gay or

lesbian, or any other label that describes a sexual minority. Yet, bisexual

people continue to exist, to make families and communities, and to

organize—among themselves and with others—for better acceptance and

understanding. Did bisexuals help build the United States of America? You

bet. Have we discovered all the places they have lived and worked and

loved and where they continue to do so? Not a chance. And that’s

beautiful. Discovering more of the history, seeing them clearly, are the

next steps.