Does Lil Nas X Coming Out Bisexual Matter?
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Lil Nas X hinted in a tweet last week that he may be bisexual.
be fr would y’all be mad at me if i thought i was a little bisexual
— i am reading all that (@LilNasX) January 9, 2023
that was my last time coming out the closet i promise
— i am reading all that (@LilNasX) January 10, 2023
Does it matter?
According to Vaneet Mehta at Men’s Health magazine, yes.
The first time I had feelings for a boy, I was 11 years old. I already had crushes on girls in my class and wasn’t yet aware of bisexuality, so I had no clue what this meant. As far as I was concerned, there were only two options: straight or gay. I tried to fit my feelings into one of these labels, so I hid my attraction to men and identified as straight.
It wasn’t until I turned 17 that I learned of the term “bisexual.” Someone in my class had come out as bicurious, and that opened up my world. However, my world quickly closed up again once I saw the reaction she received from classmates. She was ridiculed, mocked. Everyone thought she was seeking attention. They said that if she was gay, she should just say it.
I internalized this moment for years. I couldn’t see bisexuality as valid if no one else did. I didn’t see myself reflected in society either, as there were little to no bisexual people in the public eye (or at least none that I was aware of). I didn’t see bisexuality in any of the shows I watched or the books I read. I felt alone and it nearly killed me. I didn’t come out as bisexual until 2017, at age 25, when I determined that there was no way to deny my feelings anymore.
This is an exciting moment for Lil Nas X, who’s embracing his sexual fluidity, but it’s also a significant moment for the bisexual community—in particular, bisexual men like myself. According to the Pew Research Center’s 2013 survey on LGBT Americans, only 28 percent of bisexual people are out to the most important people in their lives. That number is even smaller for bisexual men at a staggering 12 percent. (It’s unclear if this number has since increased as there’s been limited data published on the topic in recent years.) When you compare this to gay men at 77 percent and lesbian women at 71 percent, bisexual men are distinct outliers.
There are several reasons for this. In general, bisexuality is often delegitimized—even within the LGBTQIA+ community itself. Despite countless studies conducted that confirm bisexual people are nearly as numerous and, as of 2022, even outnumber gay and lesbian people in the U.S., bisexuality is seen as invalid or a phase. This leads to bisexual people constantly having to deal with bi erasure.
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The way this erasure typically manifests with bisexual men is through the idea that we’re actually gay men and just in the closet. There is a very cisnormative concept called phallocentrism, which perpetuates the idea that a person’s sexuality is defined by their sexual activities with a penis. So the fact that bisexual men are attracted to men, and therefore are assumed to have had sex with a penis, means that they are supposedly gay. Their sexual experiences with people of other genders and how they describe themselves and their sexuality are completely ignored.
