Pride, Why Bother?

Since I came out to my family in February, I have been excited about attending my first Pride this year. My state has two major metropolitan cities.  The city I live in has a Pride Festival this weekend, without a parade, and the city on our state’s eastern boarder has a Pride Festival at the end of the month, with a parade.

As I visited each festival’s website, as I expected, I found they were both very heavily centered around gays and lesbians, with a sprinkling of transgendered focused content and activities. Of course, there would also be venders and the like, but I could find nothing that was specifically geared to or representing anything at all bisexual, period. My excitement quickly began to dissipate as I began to wonder if there was even a reason for me to go.

Then I remembered some of my previous posts where I discuss the importance of being out and proud in an effort to make bisexuality visible to the world so people will begin to see that we really do exist! It was at that point I saw a link where I could shop for all sorts of Pride Gear so I would be able to show my bisexual pride and do my part to ensure bisexual visibility in my city.

The home page had links to several pride gear for specific pride festivals around the country. You could also click on links such as “Jewelry”, “Men,” “Women,” “Transgender,” “All T-Shirts,” etc. I clicked on the “Men” link. There were many wonderful designs. I counted nearly 60 different T-Shirts in all. Some were generic designs that said things like, “We the People, Means Everybody.” Most were specific to gay men with the Gay Pride flag or colors on them. Only one of the shirts was actually for Bisexuals. It had a Best Buy Logo (Yellow Price Tag) that said, “Best Bi.” I thought it was cute but there were no bi flag colors on the shirt anywhere.

When I clicked the “Women’s” link there were about 40 different shirts. Some were that same as the men’s shirts, some were specific to lesbians, and once again they had one lone shirt for bisexual women. You guessed it, it was the same exact shirt they showed in the men’s group. They couldn’t even come up with something specific for bisexual females.

Then I clicked the “Transgender” link. It was wonderful! They had 20 Trans specific T-shirts. All of which had the Trans flag colors on them. You could tell a great effort had been made to include the “T” in the LGBTQ+ queer alphabet soup. So what happened when I clicked on the “Bisexual” link? (Crickets Chirping… Fingers Tapping… Dead Silence…) Uh… I can’t find a link for “Bisexual” gear. Where is the link for bisexual gear? Well if there was a link to bisexual gear it certainly wasn’t on this website!

I know, I could go to the YouTube channel “BisexualReal Talk” and click his link to purchase some Bisexual Specific T-Shirts to wear, but that’s not the point of it all. To be totally honest, I don’t even feel welcome at Pride, at this point. How is it that bisexuals make up 52% of the queer community and yet we are so purposefully and blatantly erased, to the point of making it painfully clear we don’t even deserve a chair at the table, when it comes to Pride?

I know I said, we all need to do what we can to make Bisexuality as visible as possible, but visiting these pride websites makes me want to just give up entirely! I feel like no matter what we as bisexuals do to make ourselves more visible in a community, that we are already supposed to be excepted in to begin with, there will be 5,000 more gays and lesbians waiting to stamp out our voices.

I suppose the best thing to do is channel my frustration and anger into creating a thriving bisexual community in my metro so next year we can make ourselves known to the LGBTQ+ community at Pride. Then with hope, in a few years, we will be able to overtake Pride so the gays and lesbians who are in attendance will be in awe at our numbers and wonder where in the world we all came from.