What is Pride to the Lapsed Bisexual?
An essay on identity, immutability, liberation, and liberalism.
I came out in my sophomore year of high school. It was September 2019: a transitional period in my life, as all periods somehow are.
Just prior to my freshman year, I moved to Lawton, Oklahoma. In the ensuing school session, I experienced a deep and prolonged depression that involved multiple suicide attempts and climaxed in a brief institutionalization at a mental hospital. I only slept a few nights in the hospital before I was able to charm my way out, or at least that's how I tell the story. The reality is more that I told my parents about the pills they tried to put me on after one night, and they pulled me out. The myth isn't entirely a lie, though: it seemed that I had left a positive impression on the staff, which seemed to give them license to expedite my departure. In the hospital, I was happy, though I wouldn't have admitted it, for it was the first time in a long time that I had a purpose for my strife: to get out.
So I got out, and I returned to the miserable environment from which my imprisonment had liberated me. I returned to a school where I hated my peers, and my peers regarded me strangely. I hated my classes, for they were largely remedial, boring, or both. I hated its culture, defined in most classrooms by the chronic laziness of instructor and student alike. Today, I call it a first-hand lesson in the failures of public education in Oklahoma. Back then, I wouldn’t have been so sharp.
Of course, I denied my misery. After my institutionalization, I began going to therapy, and my therapist, lovely as she was, hardly got through to me. For every point she raised on how I might improve my life, I had a counter. I didn't need friends at a school I despised — I had online friends in communities reflecting my intellectual interests. I confidently asserted my satisfaction with my life. She didn't buy it, but what could she do? I was a stubborn horse in a deep lake.
The man to whom I owe my eventual rise from misery is a classmate who would become my closest friend. Taking an irrational interest in me in a nothingburger class on "ethics" that primarily served to fill seniors' schedules and give them a field trip to OKC on the school's dime, he invited me to a Discord server with a plethora of largely LGBTQ people who attended our school. Initially, I exploited the server's security vulnerabilities to send everyone vulgar messages. After they patched the holes and I realized they weren't bothered by my childish games, I relaxed. Over the summer, I came to know the people who used the server. When I returned to school in August, I was able to meet them. Suddenly, I had friends. One of them was another boy whom I'd been uncomfortably eyeing for the previous year. We got to know each other and started to like each other, and a mutual friend intervened to play matchmaker. Suddenly, I had a boyfriend.
That is why, in September 2019, I came out. I suppose I did, anyway: by implication. What other message is a mother supposed to derive when her fourteen-year-old son waltzes out of his therapist's office and declares that he'll be going to Homecoming with his boyfriend? She asked if I was gay. I said bisexual. My parents were accepting, as accepting as they would ever be of any of their children's decisions, anyhow.
II.
Born in 2004, my political memory begins around the time of the 2008 election. I remember watching election day coverage on MSNBC with my parents. The talking heads called it a "Race for the White House", and I believed them. I imagined McCain and Obama dashing through the woods, catching glimpses of a white manor obscured by dense, green forest. A few months later, I watched on TV as the United States inaugurated its first Black president. When my grandparents came to visit, they gifted me with a globe, an atlas, and a book on Presidential history, featuring the newly inaugurated President Barack Obama. They gave my mom a commemorative plate for the occasion of his victory, emblazoned with gilded text reading:
"CHANGE HAS COME"
My liberal, middle-class, suburban family was happy to embrace this change. Amidst chores, my mom passed the time watching Oprah Winfrey, The View, and Dr. Phil.1 When the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that there is a constitutional right to marry without discrimination, I remember my parents using Macklemore's chart-topping hit SAME LOVE to explain what this meant and why it was right. I remember when the studio audience on The View applauded wildly at the news that Caitlyn Jenner had come out as a transgender woman as her Vanity Fair cover feature filled the screen. I remember one evening, Nickelodeon interrupted its regular programming to play a documentary about how schools had been addressing the bullying of LGBTQ adolescents.
During this period, public attitudes towards LGBTQ people liberalized substantially as this once marginalized, ghettoized population became a part of the mainstream of American civic life. Same-sex marriage turned from a concept widely maligned to one widely endorsed. By 2010, student-led Gay-Straight Alliances had become a mainstay in public schools. In 2014, TIME Magazine declared the transgender tipping point. In 2016, Netflix's most-watched show of all time was an LGBTQ dramedy set in a women's prison. The list of LGBTQ firsts in the 2010s is so long that Wikipedia felt obliged to make it its own article. As I began to regularly use the internet in 2017, I stumbled into a world saturated with rainbows, a digital youth culture constructed in the image of a generation increasingly willing to identify with their sexuality first. Bisexuals, transgender people, and young queers chasing gender in the clouds, congregating in online spaces untethered to geography and bound by common ideology.
This was the social and cultural environment in which I was raised, and its notions shaped how I interacted with my sexuality.
In 2011, Lady Gaga released "Born This Way." A self-described "freedom song", it has become the most prolific LGBTQ+anthem of all time, selling 8 million copies worldwide. In 2023, Rolling Stone listed the song as the #1 most inspirational LGBTQ anthem of all time: a testament to its cultural footprint. Per the title, Lady Gaga argues that one should take pride in their identity, whatever it might be. She says we were born this way. "We are all born superstars," she tells us. "God makes no mistakes," she insists. "I must be myself, respect my youth/A different lover is not a sin."
In more legalistic, scientific terminology, she argues for immutability, the idea that some predisposition compels LGBTQ people to identify and behave as they do, and that if this compulsion is suppressed in any way, it is a form of oppression. This is a theme so common in LGBTQ discussions that it's become a trope: “I always felt that something was different about me”. Transgender figures discuss how they had been discreetly trying on clothing from the opposite sex since they were children. A father says he had suspected his son was gay since the time the boy, as a toddler, told his mother that he would like to marry him.
This belief has become embedded in how we discuss LGBTQ identity. To refer to "self-discovery," for instance, implies the existence of a coherent, unchanging, and immutable self. It implies something tangible, a hero's journey with a treasure at the center of a jungle temple. It's very useful. If sexuality is immutable, then discrimination based on sexuality is no different than discrimination based on race or sex, and non-heterosexual identification is not a moral failure, but an inevitability. In our society, we regard it as just to punish moral failures, but to punish a birthright? Unconscionable. At worst, homosexuality becomes a disease with no cure, a plight for which humanitarians should offer sympathy, not condemnation. At best, it becomes a queerness in which one can take pride.
III.
Following the cues of society and my friend group, I took pride. When referring to this period, I often use the term "aggressively bisexual", and it was defined by excessive PDA, a disproportionate interest in (rumored) closeted figures from world history, and a fascination with bisexual symbols and stories. Lasting from 2019 to 2021, it coincided with the era when my politics were most left-wing and, not coincidentally, when my rhetoric was most vulgar. My favorite book was "It's Me, Eddie", a semi-autobiographical account of a bisexual, Trotskyite Soviet expat attempting to cope with his divorce by relying on the kindness of strangers. An avant-garde, stirring, yet edgy work, it featured radical leftist idealism, intense pessimism, and masturbation: a perfect summary of my philosophy in this era. As much as my parents might have embraced my bisexuality, it was nonetheless a rebellion against their authority, their ideas, and my suburban upbringing, which had become all too normal for my increasingly radical tastes. I watched video essays on queer liberation and hung out in Discord servers with Eastern European teens who romanticized the USSR and freely used slurs. I glorified anarchism, the 1980s English gay clubbing scene, gender-bending fashion innovations, and political violence.
I was under the impression that this is who I was and who I would, in large measure, always be. After my lost freshman year, I was thankful for what I perceived as being the stable ideals of the radical left. I was impressed by clip compilations wherein Bernie Sanders would advocate for the same policy positions in the 1990s, the 2000s, and the current year. I was similarly enthralled with "BreadTube", a loose cohort of far-left YouTubers who provided counterarguments against liberalism, conservatism, and right-wing populism. They exuded a confidence in their beliefs that left a strong impression on me, and so I too became confident in mine, uninformed and juvenile as they might have been. I didn't perceive a need for growth beyond refinement of the person I already was. In a deeply adolescent way, I figured that I had found the truth and myself, that this was not a phase, but it was who I was.
Of course, this misconception is a common delusion. Beginning in mid-2020, accelerating after the January 6th riots, and reaching its zenith during my first years in university, I began to unevenly moderate in my disposition, rhetoric, and ideology. Part and parcel with this process, I became straighter. In my sophomore year of high school, I performatively flouted that I would "fuck whoever I pleased [sic]". By my junior year, I identified as a bisexual who leaned in one direction. By senior year, I increasingly dodged the question, recognizing that my preferences were so heavily tilted towards heterosexuality that the label was awkward. By university, I was half-jokingly referring to myself as an ex-bisexual.
Underfoot, I was slowly realizing that I had bought into a series of half-truths about society and identity because I had never bothered to seriously interrogate my biases. I grew up in a strongly left-leaning household, and during my teenage rebellion, I only ever took my instilled beliefs to their most extreme. My parents supported the Black Lives Matter protests, so I supported the riots. My parents supported gay rights, so I supported gender abolition. My parents favored progressive economics, so I favored the abolition of capitalism. I increasingly came to recognize a simple truth: that while I may have been born with some bisexual potential, it was the society of which I was a member that permitted me to explore this potential, and I alone who endowed this bisexuality with its aggressive character. I endowed it with meaning. I made it a part of my identity.
I have often remarked that, if I had not found social spaces so stridently in favor of LGBTQ people, I likely would not have come out. I would have skipped over this phase of my life with some degree of repression. Today’s youth culture is extraordinarily tolerant of LGBTQ behavior and identification. Today, nearly a quarter of all high schoolers identify as LGBTQ. As grateful as I am to have grown in a garden so accommodating of variety, I am compelled to wonder if our narrow conceptions are sufficient to account for the growing range of sexual experiences that today’s young people have. They weren’t for mine.
Contrary to Lady Gaga, modern scientists recognize that sexual identity is not immutable. While there is no consensus as to what causes sexual orientation, there are few who still cling to immutability. Genetic predisposition, prenatal hormone exposure, childhood socialization, and individual preferences all play a significant role in determining sexual orientation. The emerging consensus is that, while certain immutable traits predispose people to certain preferences, these immutable traits are no guarantee of an immutable identity. To the contrary, numerous studies over decades have found that bisexuals in particular tend to move towards the poles over time, adopting either entirely homosexual or entirely heterosexual preferences, identities, and lifestyles as they mature.
I am a case study of the latter camp, but as I joined this camp, I didn't realize it even existed. All I had been taught was immutability. All I knew was immutability. I felt shame and awkwardness around my changing preferences, for what room does immutability leave for the typical bisexual? In a framework of immutability, a bisexual with changing preferences is either repressing part of their identity or, worse, was lying about their preferences all along. I knew I wasn't a liar. I figured that what I had felt with my boyfriend was real. It is difficult to argue for the unreality of one's own experiences. But could I have been oppressing myself? And if so, what self was I repressing if I could not see it or feel it?
One evening in my freshman year of university, a handsome gentleman insisted on joining me in my room one evening, and the next morning, we went on a date. Was I repressing myself when I felt repulsion? When I rejected his polite advances? When I zoned out during the date, intentionally answered inquiries in the most off-putting ways, and then declared that I was going to take an eight-hour walk into the middle of nowhere, and then did so? Why should I have felt guilty?
IV.
At the beginning of last June, Pride Month seemed like a recommendation. Eerily absent from many corporate logos that would have once flown the rainbow flag, its arrival was greeted with little fanfare, the least that I can recall since I began using the internet in 2017. Corporations have retreated from explicit marketing towards LGBTQ people and ceased sponsorship of Pride events. The new President has declared that the United States will henceforth only recognize two genders, and he has prohibited transgender military service. 2025 has been the year of the vibe shift.
At the time, I was in Mexico City taking a class on history and politics, and we had the opportunity to sit down with a professional advocate for LGBTQ issues in that country. A trans woman in our group asked about how he copes, as a homosexual male, with living in such a culturally conservative country. He answered that "we resist by existing." The trans woman offered emphatic agreement with this sentiment. In my teenage years, I would have found such a sentiment inspiring. Today, I find it annoying.
In his 1995 book on the gay rights movement Virtually Normal, Andrew Sullivan defines four factions in American queer politics: the prohibitionists, the conservatives, the liberals, and the liberationists, criticizing each in turn. He defines the liberationists as a faction of zealots, a near-perfect mirror image of the prohibitionist right, with whom they see themselves as locked in an existential ideological war.
Per Sullivan:
“For the liberationists, the full end of human fruition is to be free of all social constructions, to be liberated from the condition of homosexuality into a fully chosen form of identity, which is a repository of individual acts of freedom. It is not only to rebel against the fiction of nature but to rebel against the rebellion against nature, to defy the ways in which human thought seeks to constrain and control human freedom.” (57)
Sullivan’s descriptions of the liberationist movement of the 1990s retain a certain timeless quality, for as that brand of radicalism has been imported to the digital medium, it has scarcely changed. He points out an obsession with language that can manifest itself in authoritarian behaviors, performative activism that exhibits a dangerous lack of interest in state power or institutions, and intramovement competition between rival oppressed peoples, each one seeing its strife as more essential and severe than the next.
He argues that, while liberationist movements can work, their function is highly particularistic. While the flamboyant, performative activism of ACT UP successfully raised awareness of the AIDs epidemic, which forced political action, liberationist movements struggle with reforming existing institutions since they see institutions themselves as oppressive. Liberationist movements struggled to successfully agitate for gay marriage or the end of “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. Why would a real queer wish to enslave themselves in such a normie institution as marriage? Why would a real queer wish to subjagate themselves to the imperialist army of the country that is oppressing them?
The liberationists play a significant role in defining the modern LGBTQ movement, especially in the eyes of young people. Today, these are its neo-pronoun users, its anti-gender contrarians, and its paranoid adolescents. Liberationist spaces are permeated with narcissism and childish infighting. At once, there are vapid calls for universal toleration, bad actors who take advantage of universal toleration, and those who call for arbitrary purity tests to evaluate people’s worthiness of being included within such spaces.2
This chronically online, immature movement is not interested in integration and normalization. It is not primarily interested in greater personal freedoms for all, but in gatekeeping and labels. It is interested in self-segregation under the guise of "community building," premised on the belief in some coherent self. Still perceiving itself in an existential battle against the forces of reaction, the modern observer will easily find widely-accepted arguments that the queer community in the United States faces an existential threat from without, generating a unique sense of xenophobic paranoia, that anyone outside the community is against it and wishes to destroy it.3
I fear that the movement for rights for sexual minorities, which began as a movement of people who were tired of being reduced to their sexuality and pressed to the edges of society, has boldly transformed into a movement of people who take perverse pride in reducing themselves to their sexuality and positioning themselves at the edge of society.
In modern liberationist media, fringe arguments to this effect are easier to find than a hook-up on Grindr. In a widely-viewed podcast interview of the social psychologist Dr. Devon Price by the prominent, queer video essayist Matt Bernstein, they make the argument that respectability politics is a form of self-imposed stigma deriving from insecurity rather than political strategy, as they seek not to understand, but to “psychoanalyze” their opponents. They argue that the LGBTQ movement should not seek to distance itself from fringe, unpopular sects such as polyamorists, neo-pronoun users, or scat fetishists. They make the slippery, fallacious argument that the only logical end of drawing red lines is that the only valid queer is Pete Buttigieg. They lament that people make decisions about their body and their hair based on how they want people to perceive them, and they characterize requests to explain one’s boutique identity as a “foundational queer trauma” and that, accordingly, being demisexual is “the height of disenfranchisement”.
In a discussion of an incident where someone leaked a sex tape of a man having sex in a Senate hearing room, the guest described the broad condemnation of his behavior in queer political circles as “the worst form of respectability politics”. The host smartly replied, "So what you're saying is we need to have more sex in the Senate chamber," to which the guest replied, with a straight face, “I do think so, yeah, because the Senate doesn’t have any respect for our bodies.” This is the same Senate that, at the time of recording, had passed the Respect for Marriage Act by twenty-five votes just two years prior. In the ensuing discussion of the Senate’s crimes against queerness (which, at this time, was controlled by the Democrats), the best the pair could muster was a renunciation of America’s policy towards Israel. This is not a politics of reason, but a politics of ambiguous resentment.
Does queer liberationism work to achieve those things sought by sexual minorities? I'm a skeptic. In the past few decades, it didn’t bring about the end of "Don't ask, don't tell", it didn’t bring about same-sex marriage, and it certainly didn't make any of these changes popular. These reforms were instead wrought through the hard and bland work of legal reform and coalition-building carried out by those who did not view the straight world from a straitjacket. This — combined with social changes like increased urbanization and, frankly, cohort replacement — was what made my childhood possible. Earnest, loud, concentrated pride will not be sufficient to liberalize gender norms to accommodate transgender and nonbinary people, the primary battleground for LGBTQ rights today.
No mere innocuous thing, liberationism may undermine the broader movement. Its dogmatism can lead to what Representative Sarah McBride derides as a lack of grace in LGBTQ politics, a sort of excessive confidence that leads to exclusionary practices, extremism, and self-righteousness in a system that rewards coalition-building, moderation, and humility. Maladaptive political performances do not promote acceptance and assimilation of queer people, but undermines it by its very design, for the point of liberationism is not to win arguments and change laws. It is to annihilate social constructs. It is to rebel.
On account of their counterproductive ideology, liberationists operate with incentives that put them directly at odds with the aim of full citizenship for LGBTQ people, for it is when people are disillusioned and isolated that they turn to extremists. Liberationism is a primary beneficiary of queer marginalization, and it is no wonder that they would defend or advocate for weird or even offensive behavior among their young followers. What better way to marginalize your followers than to convince them to marginalize themselves? It is likewise not surprising that liberationists habitually engage in fearmongering and spread misinformation like “Trans people are no longer allowed to leave the country”. The more awkward, maladapted, and lonely LGBTQ teens are, the more they are convinced that society at large violently despises the person that their biology or their soul compels them to be, the more the ranks of this movement swell. Liberationists benefit from miserable, misinformed teens.
I am not a revolutionary. I am sympathetic to Andrew Sullivan’s position that an objective of the movement should be to so thoroughly integrate its constituent identities into mainstream culture that they dissolve themselves as important markers: equality without distinction. This position has never been without controversy. Liberationists disliked Sullivan in the 1980s for his stalwart advocacy of gay marriage, a bland, conservative policy that would undermine the uniqueness of queer identity. For Sullivan, this is part of the point. One day, there should be a farewell to arms, a day when LGBTQ people are fully and unquestionably integrated into society on equal footing with equal rights. For me, rebellion is a means to an end, not an existential meaning in and of itself.
I am likewise sympathetic to J.J. McCullough’s position, whose primary gripe with being a homosexual in modern North America is that others insist on this fact’s centrality. I am annoyed that the mere revelation that I am or was once a bisexual will tint how others see me. I am annoyed that potential romantic partners may regard this irrelevant fact as a plus or a disqualification. I am annoyed that I feel compelled to disclose my personal sexual history to be taken seriously when discussing what is properly a matter of universal human rights.
After an adolescence defined in no small part by my emerging, shifting sexuality, I would prefer to live in a world where my sexual preferences play little role in the way that people think about me. I do not resist by existing. I resist by resisting, and I exist by existing. Sometimes, when I exist, I am also resisting, but other times, I am typing on a computer, eating a shawarma sandwich, stocking shelves, cleaning my room, or expressing my personal sexual preferences as I feel appropriate. I am not, by nature of my mere existence as a person who has fornicated with members of each sex, a rebel. My sexual preferences imply no other preferences.
My sexuality is not an immutable element of my identity, but one shifting trait that exists alongside a million and one other traits of greater and lesser importance. In a post-sexual revolution world where sex is primarily pleasurable rather than disproportionately functional, there's no reason why sexuality needs to be any more important than one's taste in music or cinema. There is no reason to define oneself in opposition to society on the mere account of one’s sexuality. There is no reason to position how one gets off at the nucleus of one's identity. Your preference for putting your fleshy parts in the fleshy parts of others of a given sex should not be the thing for which you are most proud in your life. In a society as liberal as the United States, where people are largely afforded the opportunity to define themselves according to their deeds rather than their identities, it need not be the first flag in your bio or your first introduction to a stranger. In a world of bravery, empathy, diligence, wisdom, creativity, and virtue, in a world of science, art, technology, industry, and commerce, there is no reason to base your identity on sexual preference.
V.
If one should insist on having it, pride should come second to principles. John Locke was the father of liberal philosophy, and as it so happens, a leading inspiration for the Constitution of the United States, in whose preamble he is paraphrased. Anyone who believes in the concept of individual rights today owes that idea, in large numbers, to John Locke. In one of Locke’s seminal works, the aptly named Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Locke argues that
“The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.”
While even Locke was a hypocrite for his refusal to afford the same toleration to Catholics and atheists, the principle he describes has become embedded in America’s culture: liberal toleration. Practically every American argument is a liberal argument, a dispute between what types of rights and whose rights should take priority in any given case. The principles of individual rights, of toleration, of the freedom of peoples to associate and behave however they should so please are stable, unifying principles.
In a time of grand upheaval, as every period somehow is, it is on these universal principles that we should redouble our efforts, not bickering over terminology nor appealing for special validation, but ensuring that the basic rights guaranteed to all members of our society in theory are protected in practice.
When schools ban student newspapers for using students preferred names and publishing LGBTQ friendly pieces or shut down student-led LGBTQ groups; when LGBTQ couples face discrimination in the adoption process as they attempt to satisfy their duty to rear the next generation of our species; when legal adults with their full legal rights struggle to obtain medical care on account of an executive order that only applies to minors; when American citizens are subject to targeted permit denials, not for the time, place, and manner of their protest, but for their identity, everyone who believes in freedom, rule of law, and the noble cause of this nation should be incensed.
Pride, to the lapsed bisexual, is whatever I want it to be. It’s a quirk of the personality, a political tool, or an alien concept vested in others’ passionate souls. It’s an aesthetic, a fashion, a rhetorical turn of phrase. It’s a wisp of candle smoke or a burning cigar, a dewy morning fog or a puffy white cloud. It’s drips of water on a thin wooden paintbrush, or it’s an Indian Ocean tsunami crashing into a wooden hut. The only important thing is that I choose what it is, whenever I want. I choose whether to believe it, and I choose whether to use it: not for the ideologues, but for me.
I’d like to offer a special thanks to my friend Nico W. for her help in researching this subject and editing the piece.
All views are my own.
Subscribe for future essays delivered straight to your inbox.
To reach me for inquiry, just email braydenjohnson@onlytothinking.com
Dr. Phil was respected in liberal circles at this time for his role in drawing attention to mental health.
For your own good, please do not search “#radqueer” on Tumblr.
You wouldn’t believe the first thing I saw when I opened Tumblr today. Here’s a less existential variation on the same theme. Here’s a more existential variation.