#sometimes bi

[piperslovebot]

That 90s Show, except no one is straight

[rouge-the-bat]

person not involved in The Discourse: wow both sides on this need to touch grass lol theyre both wackos

side A on The Discourse: i would like to exist in peace

side B on The Discourse: everyone on side A should kill themselves

[steviesbicrisis]

Thinking about YouTuber Steve who’s gaining a lot of popularity with his weekly vlogs. The routine is very similar: he goes to work, hangs out with friends, acts silly for the camera, cooks for his roommate, watches movies with his roommate, goes out with his roommate.

His roommate is there a lot.

His new growing fanbase doesn��t take long to divide into factions regarding Steve’s dating life and sexuality; There are ships, OTPs, people who want him single so they can date him, and a surprisingly small portion which questions his heterosexuality, which gets always shut up by the following compelling arguments:

“stop assuming he’s gay.”

“Steve doesn’t look gay. He’s just a guy, a former jock, who loves to cook and hangs out with friends. A friend more than the others, but it’s his roommate so it makes sense, right?”

“And yes, they do cuddle while watching movies, but who doesn’t love a cuddle? You don’t have to be gay for that.”

“Sure, they hold hands when they go out but the city is crowded and they might lose each other.”

“Since when two male friends can’t be close without assuming that they’re gay?”

“Have you ever seen them kiss in ten minutes of weekly vlog? No, so drop your gay agenda already.”

And Steve Harrington, who started the whole vlog thing in the first place because he wanted to update his friends who live miles away and still doesn’t know how he got this much heteronormative bullcrap in his comments, has had enough.

One day, Steve Just-A-Guy Harrington, wakes up and chooses violence.

He replies to a tiktok comment that says “stop assuming he’s gay” with another video.

It begins with Steve glaring at the camera “oh yes please, stop assuming I’m gay.”

Then there’s a quick motion and Steve is pulling a curly haired guy into frame: Eddie, his roommate/platonic friend/totally not his boyfriend of 5+ years.

Eddie yawns, looking sleepily at the camera “are you vlogging?”

“I’m proving a point” Steve replies, then kisses him. They almost get lost into it, but Steve is a man on a mission, so he pulls back and turns to the camera.

“This is Eddie, my boyfriend. Not a friend who’s a boy, you delusional homophobes, we are together, a couple, in a relationship. We haven’t been just friends for over 5 years. We live together, he isn’t just a roommate.

And even if he was just my roommate, do you think I would live with this” he squeezes Eddie’s cheeks between his fingers and zooms in to show his face up close. Eddie blinks a couple of times, but let’s Steve do whatever he wants.

“Do you seriously think that I would live with this 24/7 and stay straight? Like, are you insane?” He gives Eddie a quick smack on the lips, leaving him blushing and more confused than ever.

Usually, it’s Eddie the one getting almost feral over Steve, not the other way around.

He doesn’t complain.

“So yeah, stop assuming I’m gay. Because I’m bi, you homophobic little shits.”

The video ends with Eddie pulling Steve for more than a quick peck on the lips, and Steve throwing the phone on their couch, face down.

Somehow, under Steve’s video, there’s still someone that comments “I mean, this doesn’t mean anything. It’s just bros helping bros, right?”

Steve is too busy making out with his “bro” to read it.

[royalarchivist]

Slimecicle: Whoever said "yaoi is dead" dude, I think you need to put on your freakin'– your bi-focal lenses. Anything's possible.

💗💜💙

[sarasade]

One of the most generally useful things to come out of Hbomberguy's plagiarism video and Todd in the Shadows' similar video on misinformation is how they bring transparency to the internet phenomenon of "I made up a guy to get mad at".

Seriously, I've seen people make up a lot of stupid shit on the internet over the years and it's often just a manipulative attempt to paint a group of marginalized people in a bad light.

That's the TL;DR version of this post. 

ANYWAY here is the long version

Those videos are mostly about James Somerton's plagiarism of other queer people's work. However I'd like to talk about that 20-30% of Somerton's original writing- and oh boy. It's mostly about complaining about White Straight Women and misgendering well-known trans creators such as Rebecca Sugar and calling Becky Albertalli a straight woman while it's pretty common knowledge that she was forced to out herself as bi because she received so much harassment over "being a cishet woman who appropriates LGBT+ stories".

One thing that irks me especially is how in his Killing Stalking and Gay Shipping videos Somerton brings up how straight women/ teen girl shippers exploit gay men for their personal sexual fantasies. This gets brought up several times in his videos.

Being all up and arms about Somerton being a "White Cis Gay Who Hates Women and Queer People tm" is not that useful because the kind of rhetoric he's using is extremely common in fandom and LGBT+ spaces on Tumblr, TikTok and Twitter. We really don't need to bring Somerton's identity to this since he is in no way an unique example.

It's hypocritical to make this about an individual person when I've seen A TON of posts, tweets and videos where queer people talk about these Sinister Straight Women who are supposedly out there fetishizing and exploiting queer men. It's pretty clear to me that this is just an excuse to shit on women and queer people for having any sexual interests. At worst these comments are spreading misinformation about BL, a form of media that has been excessively studied by both Asian feminists and Asian queer women.

This all sounds really familiar and I think it's good that people are calling it out as what it is: misogyny and transphobia. I'd also point out the potentially racist motives behind being this hypervigilant about Asian media.

People can absolutely be misogynist regardless of gender or orientation. I really don't know why we need to create some kind of made up enemy to get mad at. I actually think it's almost sinister how "anti-fujoshi" people call Slash shippers and fujoshi misogynists or claim that they have internalised misogyny while being dismissive about women's interests and creative pursuits under Japanese obscenity laws, China's censorship, book bans in American schools and various other disadvances that are part of being a queer and/or female creator.

I think we shouldn't be naive about the bad faith actors who want to turn queer people against each other. For example Fujoshi.info mentions anti-gender (TERF, GC etc) movement using this kind of rhetoric as well.

Anyway if you want to read more:

- about the false info around BL fandom fujoshi.info

-There is the scholar Thomas Baudinette who studies gay media in Japan. Here is a podcast with him and the scholar Khursten Santos

-James Welker is a BL scholar as well. Here is a podcast interview about the new international BL article collection he edited.

-I've already talked about this Youtube channel by KrisPNatz and his great Killing Stalking video that actually engages with the themes of the manhwa

- There is also HR Coleman's thesis DO NOT FEED THE FETISHIZERS: BOYS LOVE FANS RESISTANCE AND CHALLENGE OF PERCEIVED REPUTATION where she interviews 36 BL fans and actually breaks down why fetishization has become such a huge talking point in the fandom discourse. Spoilers, it's mostly about young queer people and women being worried that they will get judged and pathologized for their interest in anything sexual.

-Great podcast about Danmei and censorship with Liang Ge

[rwuffles]

chatters let's scare off the exclusionists together ♡

if you use good faith labels, whether you're usually open about them or not, share what they are! i'll start:

i'm a bi gay sapphillean!

[antiyourwokehomophobia2]

I genuinely really fucking hate how some bisexual women do not view relationships with women as valid in the same way m/f relationships are.

A bisexual woman at my work recently got married and she told me that she's told her husband "if you fuck up, my best friend (a woman) is on stand by, just so you know" and I KNOW she would never fucking say something like that about a man. She would never tell her husband that he better behave because she has another man on the back burner if he doesn't.

When I was in high school, one of my friends went back and forth between questioning and identifying as bisexual. Eventually she outright asked me if I wanted to have sex with her so she could explore that part of herself. That's an awkward spot to be put in no matter what, but it was made worse by the fact she was in a serious relationship with a man (as in, she is still with him to this very day). When I asked her why she'd make such a pass at me while having a boyfriend, she said that "he's okay" with her exploring that part of herself. And it's just like. Lmao. Okay. Tell him you want to explore with another man and tell me what happens. What is there to even explore? You are with HIM. Clearly you've made your choice. Your exploration is over, boo.

I know there are so many other examples out there. Some bisexual women outright say they will never marry a woman and would only ever fool around with one. It's sickening. f/f relationships are not lesser than m/f ones. Treat your female partners better (ESPECIALLY if they're lesbians) or don't disturb them at all.

[bisexualfagdyke]

I have always thought the way biphobia and transandrophobia work inside the queer community are rlly similar. I wish more bisexuals that r passionate abt bisexuality and combatting biphobia, also cared about transandrophobia!!

[mblue-art]

someone is having thoughts (he's trying sooo hard to be nonchalant and chill)

[rosetterer]

Still can't believe that this.... THIS is Buck's boyfriend

[sirlancenotalot]

[lastoneout]

I think the issue I have remembering that bitch is technically gendered is the same issue I have sometimes as a bi person where I just forget other people aren't all also bi, like I spend so much time around queer people using bitch as a gender neutral insult/term of endearment that when I go back into society and hear people be like "it's misogynistic to call a girl bitch" I have to like reformat my entire brain for a second like oh right yeah shit forgot that cishet society has different rules than the ones I live by goddamnit

[existingonthisplane]

Happy black history month to the siblings ever

[steviesbicrisis]

I saw someone complain that Steve has no lore and that he's in stranger things mostly as comic relief despite having so much trauma that never gets addressed and I immediately took offense to these because heyyy!!! what about his nightmares?? the migraines??? he can't swim in his pool because of Barb!!! and no lore??? he's our bisexual himbo abandoned by his parents, terrible dad, who's trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life while working on his personal issues! he has so many layers!!!

... then I realized we all collectively did that, nothing I thought about was canon 🧍‍♂️

[pizzaqueen]

A snippet from a future fic I'll probably never write, where Steve is a widower with two teenage kids, and he and Eddie randomly meet up, rekindling their old flame. This is when they've been together a while:

“Thank you,” Steve says, coming up behind Eddie at the bathroom sink.

Eddie pauses, catching Steve's eye in the mirror. “What for?” he asks, mouth foamy with toothpaste.

Steve slips his hands along Eddie's hips, hooks his chin over Eddie's shoulder. “For loving my kids.”

“You don't—” Toothpaste dribbles down Eddie's chin and he stoops to spit what's left in his mouth into the sink, gathering his hair to one side. He rinses his mouth out, wipes his face with a towel, then turns to Steve. “You don't have to thank me for that. Of course I love them.”

“Not everyone I've dated has.”

“They're idiots.” Eddie grabs the hem of Steve's shirt, pulling him close. “I mean, first of all, they're part of you, and I don't think I could love you and not love them. But...” He trails off, a small smile tilting his lips. “They're amazing kids.”

Pride swells in Steve's chest; he slides his arms around Eddie's waist and says, “They are.”

“And I'm pretty damn honored I get to be part of their lives,” Eddie says, “so thank you,” and he butts his head gently against Steve's.

Steve huffs and slides his hands up Eddie's back, pulling him into a tight embrace. “I love you.” He presses a kiss to Eddie's neck.

“I love you too.”

“And they both love you as well.”

Eddie lets out a shuddering breath. Steve knows how nervous Eddie was, when they started dating, that he wouldn't be welcomed, but it's almost like he's always been part of their family now. “Good to know,"”Eddie says.

Steve holds Eddie a little tighter. All those years ago, back in Hawkins, when they ended things, Steve thought he'd never see Eddie again. But here they are, together—a family—and Steve's never letting him go this time.

[feralforbeanix]

Phoenix actually has to be bisexual because Larry is the only canonically straight man in Ace Attorney and Miles is all but confirmed to have never been attracted to a woman in his life and only gets flustered/sexually frustrated by men.

Someone's gotta balance out the trio.