Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

by Julia Shaw

“Queer theory” is an academic term which, as queer theorist Annamarie Jagose has explained, is committed to “demonstrating the impossibility of any natural sexuality.” In other words, it challenges the idea that any sexuality, but most notably heterosexuality, is somehow better or more natural than any other.

The main thing that queer theory does is to help us queer things, to estrange them, and to look at issues like power and social dynamics that underlie our assumptions about the world.

As a friend of mine, a Black gay man in his sixties, recently told me when we were discussing his life during the AIDS crisis, “I have whole phonebooks of people I lost.” He said it so matter-of-factly. Every time I think of this conversation a profound sadness overcomes me. The unfairness of it, the tragedy. When I meet gay people now, and specifically gay men who are old enough to have been teenagers or adults through the 1980s and the 1990s, I have an immediate sense of respect. It’s possible that this is a similar feeling that others get when they meet a war veteran. Many of our queer elders fought for their lives, and for our rights, and only some survived to tell the tale.

There is a culture of disbelief, with the UK Home Office often simply not accepting that people are homosexual or bisexual as they claim. If they conclude that a person is not queer and that is the basis for the asylum claim, it is likely to be rejected on the grounds that they do not therefore have a well-founded fear of persecution. Here are some examples of what it sounds like: “The Judge found . . . that he was not bisexual,”14 or “the SSHD [Secretary of State for the Home Department] took a further decision to refuse JS’s protection and human rights claims and disputed both JS’s account of his mistreatment in Uganda and his bisexuality.”