[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/equallywed.com\/what-happens-when-bisexuals-marry\/#BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/equallywed.com\/what-happens-when-bisexuals-marry\/","headline":"What Happens When Bisexuals Marry?","name":"What Happens When Bisexuals Marry?","description":"I didn\u2019t stop being attracted to men or transpeople when I married a ciswoman. ","datePublished":"2015-09-21","dateModified":"2015-10-02","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/equallywed.com\/author\/contributor\/#Person","name":"Guest Writer","url":"https:\/\/equallywed.com\/author\/contributor\/","identifier":4969,"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/bfa44c65dd85c24f1064c7fb24017ff9bf74e19d9fc4aebad4cb90210213412e?s=96&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/bfa44c65dd85c24f1064c7fb24017ff9bf74e19d9fc4aebad4cb90210213412e?s=96&r=g","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Equally Wed","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"http:\/\/equallywed.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/equally-wed-lgbtq-weddings-logo.jpg","url":"http:\/\/equallywed.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/08\/equally-wed-lgbtq-weddings-logo.jpg","width":218,"height":60}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/equallywed.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/breken-carter-gay-wedding-toronto-canada-pride-rainbow-umbrella-photography-brit-blonde.jpg","url":"https:\/\/equallywed.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/breken-carter-gay-wedding-toronto-canada-pride-rainbow-umbrella-photography-brit-blonde.jpg","height":439,"width":659},"url":"https:\/\/equallywed.com\/what-happens-when-bisexuals-marry\/","about":["Community","Planning","Viewpoints"],"wordCount":1085,"keywords":[" lesbian","A Practical Wedding","bisexual","butch,","cisgender","essays","gay","LGBTQ weddings","marriage","queer weddings","writing"],"articleBody":"Do I have to choose sides?by Jennie Gruber for A Practical Wedding (where this post first appeared)[dropcap letter=”I”]\u2019ve always been uncomfortable with the word \u201cbisexual,\u201d even when \u201cequally attracted to men and woman\u201d was obviously the kind of person I was, from mischievous childhood through horny adolescence and into my adult love life.In retrospect, I am able to admit that my aversion to the word was based on a very \u201990s mainstream conception of sexual orientation. When I was a teenager, my peers and the media told me that bisexual people were flaky sluts who didn\u2019t really belong anywhere. Bisexual desire wasn\u2019t real. Bisexual identity wasn\u2019t legit. Sadly, I bought into those myths early on by reinforcing hierarchies: I might be attracted to everyone, but I wasn\u2019t one of those bisexual people.\u00a0I claimed I didn\u2019t like labels, but I really just didn\u2019t want to be judged.Everyone assumed I was a lesbian before I could define my own identity, and I resented that. Both culturally, and gender-wise I was very queer, running with the theater kids and favoring Winona Ryder pixie cuts. Yet I took refuge in my potential for hetero privilege. I mostly dated, slept with, and loved cisgender men from my teens through the age of twenty-five. I was, frankly, being a punk ass, defiantly responding to everyone who assumed I was gay by demonstrating: \u201cYou think you can put me in a box! I\u2019ll show you by sucking all the dicks!\u201dAs a young adult, I chased sex, community, romance, partnership and adventure.\u00a0I never, ever dreamed of marriage.Around the age of twenty-six, I discovered the identity queer. Suddenly I had a word for what I was: an anti-conformist who desired relationships with people of all genders. In the mid-aughts Bay Area where I lived, queer was a word that could mean bisexual or pansexual or kinky. It was a term for iconoclasts, a term that welcomed sex workers and exhibitionists. It was the identity that declared: \u201cNot gay as in happy; queer as in fuck you.\u201dI was thirty when I met my future wife, at Bluestockings, the anarchist-feminist bookstore in Manhattan\u2019s Lower East Side. Genderwise, she\u2019s got it all. She\u2019s a butch lady with a tie collection, who can hit all the high notes when she sings Cyndi Lauper at karaoke. A mutual sexual obsession grew into love, and then conversations about commitment; and then, a proposal in a gritty downtown park with a gold-plated cock ring, the perfect confluence of rational pragmatism and filthy romance.We love to joke about the fact that homo means same, and that we\u2019re not so much attracted to each other as women who love women, but as women who love people of all genders.\u00a0A huge part of my attraction to my wife\u2014who I married one year ago in a NYC civil ceremony\u2014is a kindredness in queerness. My wife and I are both dykes who feel like gay men, butch-leaning women who love flamboyance and sparkly things and spontaneous disco dance parties. If I can explain why I knew I wanted to marry her after never wanting to get married, this is why: I fell in love with her but I also fell in love with the prospect of a\u00a0queer life and marriage together.Our wedding\u2014which we are calling our Lovefest to try to banish words that limit us\u2014is this month on a farm in Maine. It\u2019s going to be a queer wedding, and it doesn\u2019t confirm or deny our sexual identities. It just means we\u2019re going to continue to grow in them together. It\u2019s going to be a wedding with trans*, cis, and genderqueer guests, hetero couples and queer triads, and a gay officiant. A lot of our exes will be there. I\u2019m going to wear a custom blue dress in the afternoon and a three-piece suit at night, because complicated genders require costume changes.Being queer, and unquestionably anti-establishment, my wife and I have had to field a lot of questions about our decision to get married and what it says about our identity. Does this make us \u201cofficially\u201d lesbians? Are we \u201cover\u201d our bisexual \u201cphase\u201d? Do we have to turn in our queer cards because we decided to \u201cassimilate\u201d?Of course the answer to all of these questions is, \u201cNo and fuck you very much.\u201d I identify as queer because I get to decide what it has meant and continues to mean to me. Committing to my wife does not mean abandoning my community. Sharing a bed and home with a woman doesn\u2019t mean I\u2019m abandoning my love of other genders.Brekken + Carter’s Wedding | Photography by Jessica Hill, A Brit and a BlondeIf my wife and I decide to be monogamous, or if in our monogamishmash I never end up playing with another cis man, trans man, trans woman, or genderqueer person, I\u2019m still bisexual. Or queer. Or whatever I am.I didn\u2019t stop being attracted to men or transpeople when I married a ciswoman. It\u2019s also not a problem if I \u201cmiss\u201d other genders.\u00a0 I love my lady because she loves men and people of all genders too. I could never be married to someone who excluded an entire gender, socially or sexually. I can check a man out on the street and murmur dirty things to her\u2014if she didn\u2019t notice him first. That is more important to me than actually sleeping with anyone else\u2014the ability to be honest about my erotic imagination, to be funny, to acknowledge attention and share fantasies. My wife is secure in our love, commitment, mutual lust, and she isn\u2019t threatened by my male friends or the ex-boyfriends I\u2019m close with.Also my wife\u2019s gender contains multitudes: A doting wife. A stern husband. A playful girl. A dirty pig. She\u2019s a Gemini. In that way, she is the perfect match for a queer girl like me: she can be all the genders I\u2019m hot for and wired to love, all wrapped up into a perfect package that I\u2019ve been lucky enough to marry.\u00a0About the Author | Jennie GruberJennie Gruber is an author, podcast producer, queer punk, and true karaoke believer. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Sarah Lawrence, and is a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction.\u00a0\u00a0"},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"What Happens When Bisexuals Marry?","item":"https:\/\/equallywed.com\/what-happens-when-bisexuals-marry\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]