Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much

by Jen Winston

Sure, bisexuality means said queer truth can still encompass men, but let’s be real: If you keep hooking up with dudes, no one will believe you’re queer (least of all yourself).

Coming out as bi was intimidating, but coming out as lonely? Terrifying.

You act unfazed, like they’re all beneath you, but you know men are the romantic equivalent of shishito peppers—one out of every twelve will fuck you up.

Apparently he doesn’t need alcohol to monologue—he talks first and goes on forever, using plenty of ten-dollar words like “loquacious” and “capitulate.” An English instructor once scolded you for writing equally pretentious dialogue, saying, “No one actually talks like that.” No one, meet Jen.

But in your heart, you can’t deny that bisexuality has never felt queer enough. It’s never felt queer enough to talk about. It’s never felt queer enough to take up space. It’s never felt queer enough to lead you to community, or to show you who you are.

While normalization has many upsides, it can also have a silencing effect, perpetuating the assumption that being bi is “not a big deal.” Bisexuality tends to feel ubiquitous and thus irrelevant, as if the subject isn’t worth our time.

The reason people think bi women are “just experimenting” and bi men are “actually gay” is because patriarchy has manipulated us into thinking that everyone must be attracted to men.

Bisexuality is not a privilege, but my other privileges certainly paved the way for me to write a book about it. My perspective will always be shaped by this experience, so if you’re wondering whether you should be reading something by a Black, Latinx, Asian, trans, fat, and/or disabled author right now, the answer is yes.

If we’re saying, ‘No, we’re not confused; no, we’re not promiscuous; no, we’re not greedy,’ then we accept that it’s wrong to be confused, it’s wrong to be greedy, it’s wrong to be promiscuous. And I want to ask, why do we have to work by their rules? The problem isn’t promiscuity—it’s patriarchy, which vilifies sex and dismisses non-monogamy. The problem isn’t confusion—it’s binaries, which encourage us to make finite decisions (usually between two constructs that we never got to choose in the first place). The problem isn’t being greedy—it’s that systems function better when we don’t demand what we deserve.

As it turns out, I’m not straight. I’m not gay. The only thing I am is a threat. Because now I understand that bisexuality isn’t just an identity—it’s a lens through which to reimagine our world.

Bi culture is everything. Which means bi culture is nothing. As annoying as this logic loop might be, it reflects exactly what it’s like to be bisexual: to be told simultaneously that you are asking for too much and that you don’t exist.

Don’t even get me started on your parents. They love you. If you love them, why would you force them to think about your sex life? You’d call and say: ‘Mom, Dad, remember my Barbies? FYI, I made them scissor.’

The five of us considered ourselves independent thinkers (as middle schoolers who dress identically are wont to do),

To this day, it can be hard to tell where I end and the male gaze begins.

It began in middle school, an era of spaghetti straps and gel pens, when no adrenaline rush quite compared to logging on to AIM.

So I did what white women tend to do when we show up late to a movement: I took up space, eager to relay the recent revelations that had changed my life. Online, I evangelized my new knowledge through the noble pursuit of posting progressive memes. Yet behind the screen I hadn’t made nearly enough progress—I still spent exorbitant chunks of my salary on skincare products, felt naked without my lash extensions, and scooped out my bagels while pretending that wasn’t fatphobic as hell. For as much as I’d learned about the emptiness of beauty’s ideals, I still felt terrified that I’d fall short of its expectations.

I loved MGMT and played cornhole—how could I not be straight?

we refer to ourselves as bi over drinks and in private text threads with ease, but never claim the label in public. “Bisexual” is another word that feels dramatic—we’re not sure if we deserve it. On top of that, it’s impossible to separate our queerness from Cole Craig’s backyard—to know if we’re attracted to women because of the male gaze or in spite of it; to determine whether our impulses stem from lust, objectification, a feeling of sisterhood, or all three. It’s hard to tell if we lost our agency, or if, as young women, agency was never really within our reach.

Accountability? Psssh. That was just an apology, and an apology without change is just manipulation. True accountability requires action.

homonormativity. (At least it’s slightly catchier than, say, “neoliberal hegemony of the queer community at large.”) Professor Lisa Duggan popularized the term, writing, “We have been administered a kind of political sedative—we get marriage and the military, then we go home and cook dinner forever.” Her point was that if we only focus on equality, we’ll only end up achieving assimilation. While that’s still a form of progress,V there’s a blatant cognitive dissonance in associating “queer liberation” with access to straight white institutions.

I would eventually realize that the thing making me so uncomfortable was “femme invisibility,” a tendency for femme-presenting queer people to be overlooked and invalidated, even within queer contexts. I’d learn that even though the issue transpired in spaces where men weren’t usually present, it still stemmed from sexism—butch lesbians were often perceived as more “valid” because of the arbitrary value patriarchy places on masculinity.VIII But at the time, my own femininity felt like an enemy, impossible to reconcile with my yearning to be gay. In the long term, it seemed like I had only two options: stifle my girlie side or keep feeling erased.

“Not gay as in happy—queer as in fuck the police.”

Every time I tried, I got caught in a paradox: Talking about bisexuality felt performative, but staying silent felt like self-erasure.

Combine that aspect of my personality with the dopamine rush of getting likes (a high I’m clearly not above chasing), announcing my bisexuality through the megaphone of social media seemed like the right choice for me. It did feel grossly millennial to ascribe so much weight to the internet, but something inside me said it might work—that my grid could serve as a contract I’d have no choice but to live up to. I needed to write my fluidity in stone (irony! cute) and an Instagram post was the closest thing I could get to an engraver—if I ever forgot who I was, I could scroll back through my feed and find myself again.

English is far from a perfect language, but could there be a more perfect encapsulation for loss of individualism than this shift from one letter to two? The “I” character stands tall and defiant. It autocorrects itself to being capitalized, no matter where in the sentence it lives. But when transformed to “we,” it shrinks down, both letters making themselves smaller to meet at the other’s eye level. Sure, w and e are still unique—a consonant toward the end of the alphabet and a vowel near the top certainly make an unlikely pair. But no matter who these letters are by themselves, at this point they’re nothing without each other.

While heroes often do seek out love itself, the juiciest parts of those stories will always be the chase. Resolutions masquerade as critical plot points but they’re usually preordained throwaways, driveways that we already know we’re going to pull into. It’s why so many rom-coms put the much-anticipated kiss right before the credits: No one wants to see the protagonists cook a healthy dinner and go to bed by nine.

realized how deeply the idea of True Love had manipulated me. For women, the indoctrination starts early and never lets up—one minute we’re watching Sleeping Beauty, the next we’ve finished nineteen seasons of Say Yes to the Dress. The True Love industrial complex feeds us grandiose dreams to occupy our dainty brains, hopeful that wedding planning will distract from thoughts of uprising and masturbation.

Romance and capitalism are so enmeshed that our aspirations of love often include aspirations of money.

Queer Love, it turns out, is everything True Love wishes it could be, and the same goes for Queer Love stories—they’re the best kind of love stories because they’re forced to self-determine, which means they do their own world-building (Lord of the Rings, but make it gay… er than it already is).

You don’t have to be an LGBTQ+ person to experience Queer Love. The only thing queer love requires is authenticity, and you can have that no matter who your partner(s) is/are.

But as I said, a Queer Love story isn’t just a straight love story featuring queer people—it’s about a love that is rooted in radical, asymmetrical truth. Queer Love is inherently political—an action that bell hooks defined as “the practice of freedom.”IX Queer Love takes up space—it is earth-shattering and expansive, yet somehow remains vulnerable even in its strongest form.

When I say Queer Love, I mean love that makes its own rules. Love that exists without borders and thrives without clean lines. Love that creates more space than it takes up.

They’re always lucid, able to articulate their feelings: “I’m anxious,” “I’m overwhelmed,” “I’m stressed,” “I’m pleased.” You envy them for this, especially since years of dating men trained you to do the opposite: under-communicate until the relationship implodes. It may be a queer stereotype to fall in love fast, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe it means you’re more in touch with yourself and your feelings. Maybe we’d all fall in love fast if we

Andrea Long Chu writes, “If there is any lesson of gender transition—from the simplest request regarding pronouns to the most invasive surgeries—it’s that gender is something other people have to give you. Gender exists, if it is to exist at all, only in the structural generosity of strangers.”