Jennifer Baumgardner > Quotes

“What I'm asserting is that we are looking at bisexuality the wrong way, making the identity entirely dependent on someone other that the bisexual person him- or herself. If I'm dating a man, I'm straight. If I'm dating a woman, I'm a lesbian. But sexuality is not who you sleep with, it's who you are. It doesn't change according to who is standing next to you.”
― Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics

“As it turned out, my perception was so much more intimidating than the reality.”
― Jennifer Baumgardner, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future

“The term bisexual has ended up as the ugly stepchild of sexuality, in both name and meaning. Its fate is symptomatic of the bisexual's own lot in life: to be as common as can be, but unacknowledged.”
― Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics

“As we said, consciousness is everything. Even now, acknowledging inequality begs one to do something about it--and that is a daunting, albeit righteous, responsibility.”
― Jennifer Baumgardner, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future

“Freud's most radical legacy is the one that is the least actualized. After years of evolution on the topic, he came to the conclusion that any exclusive monosexual interest - regardless of whether it was hetero- or homosexual - was neurotic. In a sense Freud is saying what second-wave critic Kate Millet said a half-century late: "Homosexuality was invented by a straight world dealing with its own bisexuality." By the end of his writings, in 1937, Freud was downright blythe about bisexuality: "Every human being['s] . . . libido is distributed, either in a manifest or a latent fashion, over objects of both sexes.”
― Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics

“Bisexual people are the primary conduits for the cultural conversation that America is having about gay rights.”
― Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics