Based on a true story…
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This bisexual walks into a bar…
Says, “Can I have a cosmo?”
Bartender says, “You got it.”
When it arrives, the bisexual stirs the cocktail, her manicured nails flashing in the twinkle lights strung up around the recessed mirrors behind the bar. She takes a sip from her big pink drink, the martini glass still cold and fogged.
They get to talking. Nothing earth-shattering. It’s hot outside. The bar is dead. Her friends bailed on her. She’s on her way home from her part-time job.
A movie plays on the flatscreen TV above their heads.
The bisexual girl stares at the screen, says, “Margot Robbie is so hot.”
The bartender looks over her shoulder at the television. Margot Robbie is sitting in a bathtub explaining subprime bonds. She decides to take the opening and says, “Are you equally attracted to men and women?”
“How did you know I’m bi?” says the bisexual girl.
Bartender points at the screen, says, “Aren’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
Bartender says, “Plus you’re in here all the time. I overheard you with a guy you were with, when was it, Saturday? Was he your date?”
The bisexual girl says, “Hinge,” rolls her eyes. “But I don’t call myself bisexual anymore.”
“Oh no?” says the bartender, thinking she’s going to admit she’s straight. Maybe the spell is broken and she’s returning to reality. So many straight girls these days calling themselves bi.
“I tell people I’m queer now.”
“But you’re attracted to men and women,” the bartender clarifies.
“Right.”
“Then why say queer? Isn’t that vague? Why not just call it what it is?”
The bisexual/queer girl says, “There’s so much biphobia.”
The bartender nearly spits out her Diet Coke. “Biphobia?” she says, wondering, if there’s so much biphobia, why are so many girls announcing their bi-ness all the time? There were three of them in the past week. It’s like a virus. Meanwhile you wouldn’t be able to tell this girl was bisexual—or queer—by looking at her. She looks like she stepped straight out of a casting call for Gossip Girl.
“Oh yeah,” says the bisexual/queer girl. “If you tell a guy you’re bisexual he thinks he’s going to get lucky, have a three-way.”
“How is that phobic?” asks the bartender. “A phobia is an irrational fear. Your dude thinks he just won the lottery. He’s not running away screaming. He’s into it.”
“That’s not how bisexuality works,” says the girl.
“Okay, but you’re describing a stereotype.” The bartender thinks of that other misnomer, trans genocide. Phobia. Genocide. Words whose definitions have broadened to the point of bursting. If every slight, every side-eye, every disagreement is considered fatal, then Aspirin is just as lethal as Cyanide. A paper cut becomes an amputation. Scale and proportion are destroyed, and with them, all sense of solid ground—of reality.
“Well,” explains the bisexual/queer girl, “If someone hears that a guy is bisexual, everyone thinks it’s a cover for him being gay. If they hear a girl is bi, they think she’s straight.”
The bartender actually agrees with this assessment. She says, “Yeah, but phobia?”
“It’s disrespectful,” says the bisexual/queer girl.
“Fair enough. But so wouldn’t you rather explain what bisexual means for you rather than change the word that describes your sexual orientation just to avoid getting disrespected? Also, that way you’ll know if a guy is worth dating. It’d be like a secret test.” The bartender smiles. She’d wink, but it would be cliche.
“Maybe?” The girl shrugs, looking suddenly tired. “Can I have another cosmo?”
Bartender grabs the well vodka, says, “Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure.”
“Do you fantasize equally about men and women?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you, like, get off equally whether it’s a guy or a girl?”
“Totally.”
“Yet you call yourself queer,” the bartender says, still trying to make sense of the matter.
“It’s an umbrella term.”
“But queer used to be a slur.”
“It’s been reclaimed,” says the bisexual/queer girl.
“Queer means the upending of every norm—including that sex is binary.”
“Yeah I know. I’m minoring in gender and sexuality.”
“Oh,” says the bartender, straining the cocktail into a fresh martini glass and fixing her with a stare. “So Michel Foucault? Simone de Beauvoir?”
“Simone de Beauvoir is my favorite.”
“Hmm,” says the bartender. “So what about gay people?”
“I love queer people too,” says the bisexual/queer girl, as the drink is placed before her.
“Not queer people. Gay people. Homosexual men and lesbians who refuse to call themselves queer, since without the sex binary, there is no same-sex attraction. Do you discuss this in your classes?”
“It hasn’t come up.”
“Are you encouraged to debate the issues? To think critically about them?”
“I mean, I guess you could. But it would have to be done in a scholarly way.”
“You mean use big words?” The bartender stifles a laugh.
“I guess,” says the bisexual/queer girl. She stirs her cosmo, takes a sip. “Why do you care so much?”
“My daughter,” says the bartender, and explains what happened with her family over the past two years.
“Maybe you just had the wrong introduction,” says the bisexual/queer girl.
The bartender thinks back to the mid-nineties, when she knew a Born Again Christian—a squeaky clean music teacher who wore swingy floral dresses and smiled all the time. She’d said those exact words when she learned the bartender didn’t believe in God. Maybe you had the wrong introduction. Like Mozart, she’d explained. If you hear it played terribly the first time, you might hate it forever.
But introductions in real life, to music and ideas and religions and philosophies—to food and drink—can sometimes take years, because we are simultaneously being introduced to ourselves every minute of every day. Each year is like a page being turned. Introductions arrive as cyclical offerings, lazy Susans of spinning dim sum. Taste, chew, swallow or spit. Whiskey, sushi, God, jazz.
But trans? Trans used to be, when the bartender was in her twenties, a mental distress that urban gay boys suffered. Trans struck a tragic pose in the gritty city streets. Paris was burning.
There was another kind of trans too, but that one didn’t inspire Madonna. Autogynephilia wouldn’t find prestige in pop culture at all, except in movies about deranged serial killers.
By the time our sweet young bisexual/queer girl approached adolescence, trans had already been Disneyfied by billionaires—just like Times Square was in the nineties.
It got repackaged and resold—to children—like so many treacle tarts.
The promise of trans grew from something tragic and fringe into a technicolor dreamcoat—impossibly sublime—and it gathered thousands of kids in its greedy, deceitful arms.
The bartender says, “I’ve had many introductions. They had their chance.”
“Do you think you’re, I don’t know, obsessed?”
“It’s my kid. Plus, you’re the one spending thousands of dollars to minor in the subject.”
“I just hope you accept them.”
“Her. She’s a girl. I love her more than anything, but that’s what people don’t understand. What I accept is the reality that she’s a beautiful young woman who’s been fed an ideology that could make her life a complicated mess, ruin her fertility, her health—it could kill her and probably will kill some of her friends.”
“What if she were bi?”
“She has a girlfriend!” the bartender says, laughing. “I don’t care who she loves as long as they’re not an asshole. But I won’t lie to her about identity politics and the medical scandal that’s happening all over the Western world. And guess what? She accepts that. And we’re good.”
“Well then I’m happy for you. But maybe, I don’t know, you put too much energy into it?” The bisexual/queer girl peers into her empty glass, as if she could dive in and hide there, away from this argument. She’s just trying to be nice. Trying to be safe, and kind—and queer.
“I’m sorry,” says the bartender. “I don’t mean to ruin your night. I appreciate you listening. You’ve got a generous heart. We can talk about something else, or not talk.”
“Maybe a little less conversation,” says the bisexual queer girl, daring to be a little unkind, and the bartender smiles. “And one more drink.”
“You got it,” the bartender says.
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Do you think you’re, I don’t know, obsessed?”
“It’s my kid. Plus, you’re the one spending thousands of dollars to minor in the subject.”————————————————————————-
The reason for the gratitude that I feel for your courage and resolve to share your story (I have great respect for the strength it takes to share your dreams and fears so nakedly, Mrs. Miller) can be distilled into the lines you wrote above.
It is in the foil of motherly love so strong that it’s inextricable from Truth, against a professed compassion so fake that it’s deaf, dumb, and blind to the such a love.
I look forward to your book.