All straight girls spent hours on Tumblr looking at paparazzi pictures of Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson. My obsession with Mary Kate Olsen was because I wanted to be like her-obvi not because I wanted to kiss her. I was the queen of finding fake justifications for my same-sex attraction, rationalizing that my attraction to girls was simply an intense desire for female friendship. The phrase “girl crush” is a great example of this. Mocking or invalidating bisexuality leads bi folks to question their attraction toward genders beyond the opposite sex, or label desire as something else entirely. While I’m sure Carrie’s comment got a few misguided laughs, it’s a prime example of bi erasure, or the tendency to disregard, ignore, or falsify the existence of bisexuality.
In one episode of Sex and the City, Carrie (a self-proclaimed sex expert) dismissed a potential partner because of his bisexuality, quipping to her friends that the man was probably confused, as bisexualty was merely “a layover on the way to Gaytown.” Miranda nodded her head in solidarity, and my inner queer child lodged herself deep into the closet. The only time I’d ever heard of a person liking more than one gender was on television as the butt of a joke. In fact, almost every queer person I knew presented as purely homosexual.
