Editor’s Note: This month, that is September 2020, FII’s #MoodOfTheMonth is Boys, Men and Masculinities, where we invite various articles to highlight the different experiences of masculinity that manifest themselves in our everyday lives and have either challenged, subverted or even perpetuated traditional forms of ‘manliness’. If you’d like to share your article, email us at pragya@feminisminindia.com.
Posted by Snigdha Bansal
It’s bisexuality awareness week, and as accounts of bisexual men suggest, we surely do need more awareness about it in India. Ask any bisexual man and they will tell you the bizzarre interactions they’ve had to be part of. There are certain common reactions that occur when people come to know of their sexuality, ranging from dismissal to disbelief to even disgust.
Manan Kacheria, a 24-year-old student and former financial analyst, shares, “I’ve had friends try to force me to make out with another guy by pushing our heads together, assuming that I should be okay with it because I’m bisexual.“
“In University, I told a very close friend that I was finally comfortable with sharing the fact that I’m attracted to men. She said that she loved me and was very happy for me. However, she also felt the need to tell me that as a Catholic, it did not align with her beliefs and that she did not encourage it,” says Sadiq (name changed), a 24-year-old mechanical engineering student. ,
While there is widespread stigma and ignorance among heterosexual people who often fail to understand what bisexuality means, what’s shocking is that negative attitudes towards bisexual people also exist within the queer community.
Shibanshu Mukhopadhyay, 27-year-old student and startup founder, had to deal with biphobia from men he was interested in, with queer men refusing to meet him because they didn’t ‘trust’ bisexual people. The most emotional instance was when someone, he had been seeing for two months, backed out of a more serious relationship simply owing to his bisexuality.
“That was the most intimate form of biphobia I have faced, it was very strange. Because I faced so much biphobia, it also made me uncomfortable with my own identity, because I felt like there was this wrong notion of bisexuality that I had to prove wrong,” he says.
Ask any bisexual man and they will tell you the bizzarre interactions they’ve had to be part of. There are certain common reactions that occur when people come to know of their sexuality, ranging from dismissal to disbelief to even disgust.
But not only is the community rife with biphobia, bisexual erasure is also a major issue bisexual men often have to deal with. Bisexual erasure means the tendency to ignore or cover up evidence of bisexuality in the society, sometimes going so far as to suggest that bisexuality isn’t even a ‘thing’.
Sadiq talks about the time he was catching up with an Internet friend, who was gay, and the friend asked him if he was “still bi.”
“He treated being bisexual as a stepping stone to eventually becoming gay… and when queer people perpetuate these stereotypes, straight people also believe it’s okay to say these things because ‘the gays’ say it,” he says, emphasising that the queer community might also have a hand in the unfair societal perception of bisexuality.