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Femininity and Forgiveness with JR Yussuf
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Music by Ross Mintzer
Graphic Design by Kaitlin Weinman
Edited by Moxie Peng
Produced by Moxie Peng, Matt Loomis, Alex Boyd, and Rob Cohen
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Transcript
Podcast Recording Challenges and Solutions
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I'm Rob, and thanks for discovering Season 1 of Two Bye Guys. We hope you enjoy it. So in Season 1, we recorded everything in person. It was pre-pandemic, and we used professional sound booths. And as you'll hear, the audio quality is pretty great. But it was also very complicated and expensive. And when the pandemic hit, those booths became impossible.
00:00:23
Speaker
So in season two, we tried recording interviews locally while chatting on Zoom, which kind of worked. But the audio quality was spotty. Sometimes people made manual mistakes with the recording. It was a huge hassle for me to receive the files, convert the formats, compile the audio, edit by hand. I knew I needed a better solution if I was going to continue the podcast.
00:00:46
Speaker
And Zencaster was that solution. The thing that was most important to me, knowing how the process works, is that the audio gets recorded locally, not over the internet like Zoom does. When you get up to seasons three and four, you'll hear how good the audio quality is. It rivals what you're about to hear from season one, which was recorded in professional sound booths. And it's so much easier and cheaper. Everyone can record from home with whatever equipment they have, even just a laptop's built-in mic.
00:01:15
Speaker
And then there's the editing and post-production. I used to have to go through every track manually, reducing background noise, mixing volumes and levels, making sure my guest and I were synced. Now Zencaster post-production takes care of all of that and delivers ready to upload files. So if you're thinking about starting your own podcast, I highly recommend Zencaster. It's easy, it's affordable, and it's very reliable, and the sound quality is great.
00:01:40
Speaker
And now if you go to zencaster.com slash pricing and enter promo code 2BUYGUYS, you'll get 30% off your first three months. That's z-e-n-c-a-s-t-r dot com slash pricing promo code 2BUYGUYS for 30% off your first three months. It's time to share your story with Zencaster.
Introducing JR Youssef
00:02:08
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Two Buy Guys. I'm Rob. And I'm Alex. And today we're here with a third buy guy, JR Youssef. Welcome. Thank you. What up, what up? Great to have you here, JR. It's great to be here. Thank you. So JR is a Nigerian American New York native. He is a writer, actor, and activist.
00:02:26
Speaker
who believes deeply in the importance of personal power. His book, The Other F Word, Forgiveness, won first place in the 2016-2017 Reader Views Literary Awards in the Self Help category.
Identity and Bisexuality Experiences
00:02:38
Speaker
His writing has appeared in the Best Buy Short Stories, Bisexual Fiction, and Double Consciousness, an auto-ethnographic guide to my Black American existence, as well as The Black Youth Project, Positively Positive, The Good Men Project, S-Carp,
00:02:54
Speaker
instigator zine and the culture LP jr maintains a youtube channel devoted to self-improvement emotional intelligence and forgiveness he created the hashtag bisexual men speak we will speak about that later welcome jr we're so excited you're here i'm excited thank you
00:03:13
Speaker
Yay. So maybe to get the conversation rolling a little bit, I'm curious kind of what are the things that you identify as on whatever spectrums maybe you want to refer to or what are the identities you ascribe to?
00:03:24
Speaker
Um, so I'm black and I'm Nigerian American, which is like a very specific thing. Oftentimes I get that I am not Nigerian enough and I get that I am not African American enough or black enough. Yeah. Um, and I am also bisexual. Um, normally I actually just say bi. I usually don't say the sexual part.
00:03:45
Speaker
because of bad experiences that I've had in the past. Normally I've noticed when I say bi, people are like, oh, okay. When I say bisexual, I often get questions about like how many women I've had sex with and like when I lost my virginity and shit like that.
00:04:00
Speaker
From like strangers or people who like I don't know their last name or like I'm just meeting them So I just say bye just leave off the sexual part cuz I don't want all of those questions, you know Yeah, I feel that yeah that emphasis on the sexual seems to be very specific on bisexual men. Yeah
00:04:20
Speaker
And I'm a native New Yorker. I'm from Queens. I'm from Far Rockaway. Those are some of the major ones. Yeah, I'm a man. Yeah. That too. We'll get into that too. So maybe you could talk a little bit about kind of how you came to that label of bisexual and what that journey was like for you. Yeah. So I remember being like super young. I'm talking like pre-K, right? And I remember having or wanting
00:04:47
Speaker
the prettiest girl in the class and the most handsome boy in the class to like be my best friend and only share their toys with me and like only want to play with me um and
00:05:02
Speaker
I also emulated them a bit. I wanted to look cool like they did, wear nice Jordans like they did, have nice clothes like they did. And I remember that. Those are some very strong early memories. And I look back on it now and I'm like, oh yeah, I just had a crush on them. I remember I was about 10 years old when I first said the word bisexual and said like, oh yeah, I'm bi. I'm bisexual. I grew up with a friend who is gay and male and we,
00:05:31
Speaker
kind of like helped each other in a lot of ways like with our sexuality and like having each other there because we knew oh like we're both like kind of feminine or both like kind of outsiders so we kind of like gravitated toward one another which was really really nice in a lot of different ways. So yeah I remember having that clarity at about 10 but then as I got older and I would say these things or as I got older in general it was like me being feminine was no longer like funny
00:06:01
Speaker
As I was a kid, at times it was like, oh, kind of funny. He's a comedian, he's a clown, a class clown or whatever. Even though I remember being called slurs, like negative negativity to me being feminine. And I remember people saying that I was gay and all this. But as I got older, that started to become more of a problem. The fact that I am feminine, I am a man.
00:06:23
Speaker
And I was trying to date women. That became more and more of a problem. It was always like, oh, no, you're gay and you're just hiding it. You're not comfortable yet or whatever. So for like a long time, I didn't use the label by I went back and forth to between saying bisexual and gay. And a lot of that, too, had to do with what I thought bisexual meant. I thought that if you were bisexual, I thought that meant you had to be attracted to men.
00:06:52
Speaker
and women equally, the same amount of times, the same intensity. And that wasn't how it was for me, or that's not how it is for me either. So yeah, I started comfortably using the label around the year, I was like 22, so about like eight years ago. Yeah, around like 22 is when I really started like, no, I'm bi. Yeah, I'm bi.
00:07:17
Speaker
So it sounds like you discovered this thigh label when you were 10, you said, and then didn't really feel comfortable until 22 or so. That is a long journey, and it sounds like there was kind of a lot of pushback. What do you feel like you needed through that time to reach that comfort with that label?
00:07:33
Speaker
I needed an understanding from the world that just wasn't there, that isn't there now, that bisexuality is normal. It's not this new thing. I needed people around me to not gaslight me and to believe me when I said I was attracted to girls.
00:07:54
Speaker
And not associate a man being feminine with a man being gay, not necessarily. It's not like conflating those two things, like how you perform your gender or present your gender is not the same as like your sexual orientation.
00:08:11
Speaker
You talked about identifying as like a feminine man. When did you sort of consciously start to realize that and how did that interact with realizing you might be bi? So, like I mentioned, some of my earliest memories were me being called the F-word, like the slur. And so I'm talking what, five, six, like I remember being that young, being called these slurs and being told that I was gay and things like that. So I always knew that I was
00:08:36
Speaker
quote unquote, different for a boy. Like a boy is not supposed to act this way. When I was a kid, I would always get questions of, why do you talk like a girl? And sometimes too, depending on what I was wearing, people would ask me like, oh wait, are you a girl or a boy? And sometimes they actually weren't being malicious, they were serious. So that was just kind of always reality for me. Everybody always was like, yeah, you feminine, yeah.
00:09:02
Speaker
So that wasn't really like a thing that I really consciously thought about like that. It was like, oh yeah, this sucks. Because I stand out in this way. This is not acceptable for boys to be like this. But then as I got older, like as a teenager, then I started to realize like the reason they're not believing that I'm attracted to women is because I am feminine.
Exploring Relationship Dynamics
00:09:22
Speaker
Partially also because people don't believe that bisexuality is a real legitimate sexuality. But a significant part of that is because I am feminine.
00:09:31
Speaker
You've talked a lot about your gender. What about the gender of your partner? What role has gender played in your relationships on that? Yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay, here we go.
00:09:43
Speaker
For a number of years I for like the last couple years actually I like consciously did not want to date women and did not want to engage sexually with women a significant reason for this is because I Was realizing that I have like a lot of like I'm a product of my environment there's so much misogyny that I need to unlearn and I wanted to distance myself
00:10:13
Speaker
And really understand that women are not my birthright. Women do not belong to me. Women are not property. And I have a lot more to learn, but I have learned so much. Another reason why I distance myself is because I have been rejected in certain ways by women.
00:10:34
Speaker
who I'm attracted to and they're like, wait, no, you're gay. And like trying to tell me. And also desire too. When I finally became more comfortable with my sexuality and like a lot was allowing myself to desire men and be excited about that. I wanted to be excited about that. I wanted to date men. I wanted to have sex with men, you know? But if I'm getting messages from society
00:11:02
Speaker
that say that my attraction to men is so wrong, so wrong, it affects my entire sexuality and my entire self-esteem. So when I came through working so hard on my sexuality and working to get a lot more comfortable with my sexuality, I wanted to explore the part and explore with people who it's like so shunned for me to be with.
00:11:24
Speaker
So yeah that was or those are the reasons why for the like the last couple years I've been like adverse to dating or having sex with women specifically. Now I am in a different place.
00:11:39
Speaker
that I was a couple years ago. Yeah, I'm in a place right now and I'm still working through this because I have been experiencing a lot of guilt because of it. I am in a place where I really want to explore sexually with women and with feminine bodies and for so long I've been
00:12:02
Speaker
very like stunted sexually and my default is kind of to go into like long stints of celibacy and things like that. I haven't engaged sexually with women since I was a teenager. I haven't engaged with women sexually as an adult, as an adult male. And I'm curious. I think about it and I dream about it and I'm curious and I want to do it.
00:12:22
Speaker
Yeah, there are things that you haven't had much of or haven't had at all. Maybe that's what it is. Yeah, maybe I want to experience it more in those ways. Maybe. I think for a lot of people, myself included in this, there's just so much fluidity in bisexuality because there's so, with kind of a lack of a specific image of what we're supposed to have and what we're supposed to kind of ascribe to.
00:12:43
Speaker
it gives us more room and more eagerness to kind of explore all kinds of things where some people I feel like feel comfortable having their like sexual journey kind of end around like their 20s or so. I feel like mine is very much so continuing through my 20s too like you're talking about and I think that's not so uncommon for bi people.
00:13:00
Speaker
I do want to kind of circle back to misogyny. So the thing about part of this that is problematic is that men get to assert our sexuality all the time. And it's always from the male point of view. And it's always from the male gaze and our desire sexually.
00:13:16
Speaker
in regards to women is always centered. Yeah, I think part of why I started realizing I might be bi was because I had a lot of that internalized misogyny. Also, I just didn't realize it for a long time. Like it was totally invisible to me. And that was just how I thought relationships work. And then I think as I started to notice that more relationships with women started to feel more fraught. And that was what made me want to sort of explore a relationship with guys.
00:13:44
Speaker
And so I identified with what you were saying, like from within a relationship or a sexual encounter, I found that it's so similar being with people of any gender. But the pressure from outside and that we get from society, it's like, it's a very different type of relationship. And I felt a lot of expectations. Have you felt those kinds of differences? Yeah, totally. Oh, my goodness. We're going in.
00:14:08
Speaker
We're going deep, yeah. Yes, totally. Like I kinda said, some of my reluctance to engage with women had to do with rejection and feeling like I wasn't man enough and feeling like I wasn't living up to this idea of how a man who is attracted to women should behave.
00:14:28
Speaker
And so I felt in a lot of ways more accepted when I would engage with men who liked men. Because even though there is this whole hierarchy, if you're more masculine or more feminine in same-sex male spaces, even though that still exists, it's still normal in a way. If you are a feminine man or a combination of feminine and masculine,
00:14:55
Speaker
and you're dating other men, it's like, oh yeah, yeah, that's normal here. That's fine here, that's normal here. That's not like a big deal at all. So yeah, I just felt way more comfortable. I felt like I didn't have to prove myself or I felt like if I got really excited if fucking Beyonce came on TV, then I would like, everything's fine. Like, oh yeah, duh, like, oh, you like Beyonce? Yeah, everybody does. That's not fucking like, that's not rocket science. Like, yeah, everybody loves Beyonce here. Like, you know what I mean?
00:15:19
Speaker
Whereas in straight spaces, I definitely felt like, okay, I need to like tone down my love for Beyonce or love for whoever, you know what I mean? Or I can't express myself in the same way. So yeah. Conformed to those expectations. Yeah. I hear you. Yeah. So it was just easier to go to men and men who like men spaces. Yeah. Yeah.
00:15:49
Speaker
So JR, you were also on the Slut Ever show with us. Yeah. That was fun. That was cool. When that aired, you posted something on Instagram. I'm going to read what you wrote. OK. You wrote on tonight's episode, I and other bi plus guys talk about the stigma around male bisexuality and how being sexualized as a bi plus man is also a racialized experience for me. So can you talk about that and what you meant by that?
00:16:13
Speaker
Yeah, totally. Oh, man. So this part didn't make the show. It didn't make Slut Ever. Slut Ever. So yeah, yeah. That is an amazing show. That was an amazing time we had recording that. And, you know, obviously for editing purposes and show time, run, all of that, it didn't make it fine. We recorded for like over an hour. They used about four and a half minutes. It's cool. It's cool. Still by visibility. Exactly. We're talking about it now. Yeah. Still by visibility, which is amazing. Yeah.
00:16:42
Speaker
So yeah, I was pulled aside and I was basically talking about how when I am in black circles, the black community, generally speaking, I'm seen as like, you know, on the feminine side, like I'm not really seen as like in between or as masculine. I'm really kind of seen as like on the feminine side of things, right? And so because of that, my sexuality as a bi man is not believed. It's like,
00:17:10
Speaker
Come on, we know that you're gay. We obviously know that you're gay. Come on, stop playing. Who are you fooling? Look at you, like, you know, look at how you act. Whereas in spaces or with people who are not black, because I am black, that's automatically like a masculine boost. It's like, oh, you're black, you're a black guy, you're masculine, or you're more masculine. So because of that, because they perceive me as more masculine because I am black,
00:17:39
Speaker
they are more willing or more likely to believe that I am in fact bisexual. So that definitely walks into the whole like problematic racial territory and it's something that I've observed and yeah it's really weird.
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah. In those situations where you're either kind of being viewed as this feminine gay man in black communities or this sexualized by masculine men in communities of other races, do you feel like that directly impacts the way that those people treat you and the expectations put on you?
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, expectations, man. They can definitely affect how you show up into spaces too. If there's an expectation for you to be a certain way, sometimes you will play into that, just ease into it. Sometimes you will rebel against it and that can come off sometimes as really weird and off-putting. Personally, I just normally just try to go in and be my authentic self. But nowadays, I prefer not to go into spaces where I don't know people already.
00:18:46
Speaker
I go into spaces where I know people already.
00:19:02
Speaker
knowledge about you and therefore can just kind of treat you in a more respectful way right as any of us can exactly so yeah um i feel like what i'm saying is to isolate a lot which i know that to be true about myself um but i know that that is very true for a lot of by people it's not even just the whole like masculinity femininity thing
00:19:23
Speaker
that makes me want to stay away from people. It's so many things nowadays. The list just keeps getting longer.
The Journey of Forgiveness and Writing
00:19:31
Speaker
You know, finding the strength to still put myself out there, because there's risk in everything and every relationship. And, you know, meeting people can also be fun. It doesn't always have to be this daunting thing either. But I definitely notice that I do shy away from, like, meeting new people or being in spaces with new people. And I know that a lot of bi people feel the same way.
00:19:59
Speaker
So here we have your book, The Other F Word Forgiveness. Yeah. So you wrote this in your mid 20s a few years ago. What is it about this topic of forgiveness that interested you? And like, why is it a powerful tool? Oh, man. I really wrote this for really selfish reasons. I wrote this book for myself. And I think that
00:20:21
Speaker
because of that is so truthful and it is so vulnerable and it is so real. I wrote this because I had and still struggle with forgiveness. It is really hard for me to let things go. It is really hard for me to forgive people who I love and who love me.
00:20:41
Speaker
of some of the worst years of my life, some of the things that they put me through, namely my parents. I had a really rough, horrible childhood. And when people think of parents, they think of protectors and they think of nurturers and things like that. And that is just not
00:21:00
Speaker
the experience that I had in a lot of different ways. Me writing this book really really really was to teach me how to forgive and how to let go.
00:21:12
Speaker
Well, and the book is kind of designed to be, it's like a 60 day kind of framing for it, right? That you read it over a long period of time. Like how did that format come up for you? Yeah, so that format didn't come up until like I was maybe somewhere like halfway through the book or something like that. There are chapters in there that I started writing when I was 17. And I was just kind of writing short stories and writing affirmations and writing
00:21:37
Speaker
journal entries about forgiveness and I wasn't doing it consciously at first literally like I was literally just doing it because this is what I needed this is what I needed to get to the next day or the next week or whatever and when I got like halfway through I was like wait a minute all of these things have something in common I should like turn this into a book and that's what I did
00:21:59
Speaker
You talk in the book about becoming the person you needed when you were younger. Who is that person and is there any connection to sexuality and gender and that kind of acceptance that you maybe didn't get at a younger age? Totally, yeah. So becoming the person that I needed when I was younger
00:22:18
Speaker
It's all about me becoming my healthiest version. It's all about me becoming my kindest version. It's about me making my friends and my family members feel safe when I'm around them and when they're around me.
00:22:30
Speaker
And that is a person that I needed when I was younger. I needed somebody who was the confident, bisexual, feminine uncle. You know what I mean? So it's all that. It's interesting because forgiveness is like, it's something you sort of give to somebody else, but it really comes from within and it's...
00:22:48
Speaker
an internal thing and like to be the person that can help other people and provide support to other people or parent to child like what's really important is being comfortable with yourself. So yeah a lot of people think that forgiveness is for like somebody else and it's really really honestly truly it's for you it's for you to have peace it's for you to let go of anger
00:23:11
Speaker
And it's not to necessarily even let people back into your life or to be a stand-in for reconciliation. It doesn't always have to be that you get back with this person or that you allow them back into your space.
Promoting Bi Visibility and Social Media Impact
00:23:28
Speaker
Sometimes forgiveness is about letting go of anger and realizing that you have to let go of this relationship too, you know? Yeah.
00:23:44
Speaker
So you have been very active talking about bisexuality and other topics on social media. And let's start with the hashtag that you created. Yeah. Hashtag bisexual men speak. Yeah. So you did use the full bisexual. So I want to ask about that too. I'm just realizing that now.
00:24:01
Speaker
but uh let's start with like why did you start it how did you promote it what was the beginning of that oh my goodness it's i this is so it's a little weird it's a little weird for me this is a little weird for me because it's like literally really unexpected um i don't have
00:24:18
Speaker
that many followers. And when I started this, I didn't have that many followers either. So I was really surprised when it blew up and people would use it. It is still weird to me. I don't want it to stop at all, please. But I am still like
00:24:37
Speaker
Why? What? Like, you know? So, yeah, I was, to be honest, I was at work. It was like a slow day at work and I was just on Twitter and I was talking to one of my followers. She is bisexual. We were talking about couples and couples that we basically have crushes on both parties in the couples. Yeah. So we were going down a list of celebrity couples, blah, blah, and then these two people came up.
00:25:05
Speaker
And I was like, oh yeah, I'm really attracted to both of them, but the guy actually said some really biphobic remarks. He basically said he didn't think that men could be bisexual and something along those lines.
00:25:20
Speaker
So me talking about it again with my friend who's bisexual kind of reminded me and like reopened that wound. It was like, oh yeah, like people don't think that bisexual men exist. So I don't know what made me put bisexual men speak, but I just did. I was like, yeah, like we exist. And I was kind of like, you know, I'm tired of like having to prove every five minutes that like, you know, bi men exist. And I just kind of kept tweeting and adding the thread and like people started retweeting it for some strange reason.
00:25:50
Speaker
And then eventually people started using the tag and I was like, this is amazing. Please keep doing it. But why is this happening? I think people don't like the idea that bisexual men exist should be so basic, but it is kind of a radical idea. That's why we named this podcast to buy guys. Cause that's the main point. Yeah. Yeah. That's the most overlooked point at the very least. There's plenty that we all want to be talking about, but like, that's the thing that nobody seems to be aware of.
00:26:18
Speaker
Yeah, right. Yeah. Here we are. There were a bunch of bi guys, three bi guys today just chatting, right? Yeah. Yeah. So why bisexual men speak as opposed to bi men speak? That is a good question. So, okay, I'm so glad that you bring this up. Online, I have no problem putting bisexual like in my bio or whatever. I have no problem using the word bisexual online. But in person, I don't say the sexual part. I just say bi in person.
00:26:42
Speaker
And bisexuals just used in names of slogans and LGBTs and that. So it is a standardized way of identifying it. If I put BI, I don't know if everybody would know that I meant bisexual. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe that's what... Some other weird word that I would see. Yeah. So do you have a social media mission? Do you set out to be an activist or is it sort of accidental the way it happened?
00:27:08
Speaker
This is accidental. I think this is the first time anybody has called me an activist. That feels very weird and great. I think it applies. Oh, my God. So I guess my mission is a huge one. It's for people to look at a man that they find attractive and think, oh, I wonder if he's gay, straight or bi, globally.
00:27:34
Speaker
And it to be a normal thing and it not to be a disgusting thing and just like, oh, like, yeah, like there are variances of sexualities and none of them is right. So like being heterosexual is not right or normal. It's one sexuality of many sexualities.
00:27:50
Speaker
When I say bisexual right now, I mean bi plus, so I mean bi curious, I mean queer, I mean pansexual, I mean people who don't do labels, I mean everybody who falls under the bi umbrella, hetero flexible, homo flexible, everything. I mean all of that. So I really don't want to leave anybody out. But yeah, I want people to like wonder when they are attracted to someone or whatever, it's like, oh, I wonder if this person is this, this or this.
00:28:16
Speaker
rather than like, oh, gay or straight, like, there is more to sexuality than gay and straight, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that shouldn't be the default. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody recently was talking to me and they were talking about how we're in a situation when somebody's like,
00:28:31
Speaker
Do you think they're straight or gay? They always have to be the one to say, like, or bye, or bye, or like, right? And it sounds like you're kind of amplifying that in a very direct way that caught on. It's awesome how much traction you've got it through that way. Thank you. You have got a lot of traction. A couple of your tweets, like, the bisexual men speak have gotten big, but others have, like, gone to tens of thousands of retweets randomly. Yeah, that's crazy. What's that like?
00:28:56
Speaker
It's weird. It's really weird. And usually I mute my tweets, well, depending on. Like, if it's bisexual men speak, I usually don't mute those regardless of how big those get. But if it's like another tweet that's like too much too fast, I usually just mute it and then I'll check back in on it like I was later or whatever. For bisexual men speak, the hashtag, I try to be very diligent about it and I try to like start conversations with people and
00:29:24
Speaker
The direction that I'm going with it now, because it's one year later from me starting the hashtag, is for it to really be about bi men and masculine-identified people and to bi men and masculine-identified people. I want it to be us speaking to each other instead of just speaking to the world like, hey, we exist, we exist.
00:29:45
Speaker
I want to like speak to us and talk about issues that we are facing because I want us to be healthy. When you look at our stats for depression, anxiety, suicide, when you look at
00:29:57
Speaker
things like poverty levels and all other kinds of things in terms of health. We fare terribly worse than our gay and straight counterparts on all of these levels. And I want us to be healthy. I want us to be happy. So I want to talk to us like I want us to be in conversation.
00:30:16
Speaker
Yeah, I love that. And I love the fact that it's also in an extremely public forum, right? Where other people are viewing that conversation, but they're viewing a conversation amongst us as bad guys, right? Which is fantastic. Yeah, there's definitely a lack of that discussion among bisexual men. There's not a lot of space to do that, so it's great you're creating some.
00:30:38
Speaker
Thank you. I mean, it took a very strange series of events for the three of us to even be in the room together, right? Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, we would have looked right past each other and never have known because of that inherent buyer ratio in the world. Yeah. That's so true. Yeah. Yeah. But that support and just knowing other by people and hearing their experience was probably the most valuable thing for me in accepting my identity and becoming comfortable with it. So that's really, I think, one of the most important things you can do is create community. Yeah. Yeah.
00:31:06
Speaker
What do you think is going right in the conversation about these issues on social media?
The Need for Bisexual Visibility in LGBT Discussions
00:31:12
Speaker
What do you wish people would talk about differently? I have noticed personally, with the people I follow and the people who follow me, a certain willingness to at least acknowledge like, oh,
00:31:23
Speaker
Yeah, I have these biases against bi people and against bi men. And I know that they don't come from me, they come from the programming. So all of these ideas I have about bi men being cheaters and liars and blah, blah, blah. Yes, I believe them, but I realized that that is conditioning. So I noticed that people are more aware of their conditioning. Because they're aware of their conditioning, they're more accepting to like, find an alternative and find a way to get away from being that way.
00:31:52
Speaker
Now that might not be the way the world is going right now, but that's those are the people who I follow and who follow me and the people I haven't blocked on Twitter. What I do not like. I will just say this one thing that I do not like.
00:32:12
Speaker
I do not like that I never see the word biphobia or by erasure. I do not like that people only say gay, lesbian, and transgender. I don't like that it feels like we are being left out online.
00:32:32
Speaker
Especially when there are more bi people in this world to think gay or lesbian folks, right? Can we break this down? Can we get into this, please? Can we? Oh my god. It is so invisible and yet it's the most common among the LGBT community. Can we talk more about this like specifically? So from what I've read, 10% of the population globally is only attracted to the same gender.
00:32:57
Speaker
Only has only ever always had dreams about, has had fantasies about, blah blah, crushes on the same gender. 10% has only had crushes on fantasies about, blah blah, another gender than their own.
00:33:13
Speaker
and 80% of the world globally, from what I read, falls somewhere in between, where they might have only had fantasies about one guy before, or maybe two guys, and the like. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't heard that stat, but that makes perfect sense to me. That's the spread that I imagine. I think that is accurate.
00:33:36
Speaker
Yeah, and I've heard a lot of talk about a bell curve, right? Like how there's a few people at the ends, but almost everybody falls in the bi-spectrum that we talk about, right? Where they fall on that bi-spectrum is up for debate. And it's tough to say, is that really like a bell, or are there kind of big clumps at either end, and then another big clump in the middle? So there are kind of three distinct identities. And I'm seeing a lot of conversation about that.
00:34:00
Speaker
the pushback to it, unfortunately. It's just hard to, like, you need honesty from people to get these answers. And that's not kind of honesty we can expect from people who are not, you know, in this biphobic world aren't encouraged to speak out about it, right?
00:34:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think also it's like the lack of resources and it's the lack of language. People think that they are supposed to only like one gender. And conversely, people think that they are only supposed to be heterosexual too,
Societal Norms and Relationship Expectations
00:34:30
Speaker
you know? So when you have a person who, yeah, most of the time they're a guy and most of the time they only think about women,
00:34:38
Speaker
That's who they want to date. That's who they want to marry. That's who they want to have sex with. And once in a while, or maybe only once or twice, they've had like a really hot dream or a really hot fantasy about a guy. And it's like, well, does this suddenly mean that I'm bisexual, even though I don't want to be in a relationship with a man or whatever? And so it's like these conversations, we just lack resources. We lack resources.
00:35:07
Speaker
and ways to navigate these things and ways to talk about these things. And like, that's not really a big deal. And it's not a bad thing to be with the same gender. Right. I think there's so much internalized homophobia that that prevents people from going down the path of, you know, what is that one thought or that dream mean? Because they want to shut that down. Yeah. And going back to what you were talking about, J.R., I think, you know, I've recently started thinking a lot about how
00:35:33
Speaker
I feel like it all comes down to this expectation that we're all kind of taught to create for ourselves, that we're taught to follow this relationship escalator or something. Is that what it is? The idea that we go through life in a certain way and we kind of are in a relationship and monogamous one, of course, because that's the only possibility.
00:35:53
Speaker
And then we kind of like move through the motions and then we get married. We have two and a half kids and all of that like right statistically like that's what like is supposedly the most normal what we're supposed to adhere to and I feel like as a bi person the reason why I'm able to see my bisexuality in a more open perspective where I don't know who I could marry in the future and who I could be in a relationship with in regards to gender at least
00:36:19
Speaker
is because i've broken down that expectation and i don't have the expectation that i'm going to settle down with this person and that has created a world where i don't have to have any kind of image in my head right because the second you start imagining a person you're gonna marry or you're like hoping to marry one day you're dreaming about your soul mate or whatever
00:36:39
Speaker
You picture a gender or at least we're taught to, right? And bisexuality doesn't have room in that. Right. And anything that threatens that you're going to resist it and you're not going to, you're not going to give it the real thought and consideration that it might deserve.
Acceptance of Fluid Sexuality
00:36:54
Speaker
Yeah. There's a real disconnect between that spectrum of like most people somewhere in the middle and the identities that people have, because still it's changing and it's getting better. Like now among young people, close to 50%.
00:37:09
Speaker
identify as something other than straight, right? But that's still 50% that do identify as straight. And some of them are having other thoughts or experiences. And so like, you know, we didn't want to normalize talking about those things, regardless of identity, I think, and what label you're choosing, because all those thoughts and experiences are totally normal and within a range of fluid human sexuality, I think. Yeah, totally.
00:37:37
Speaker
Well, I think that was a fascinating conversation. Thank you, JR, for being here and having it with us. Thank you. I really appreciate it, guys. And hopefully this is just the first of many conversations. That would be dope. That would be really dope. Thank you guys so much.
00:37:55
Speaker
Our music is by Ross Mincer, graphic design by Caitlin Weinman. This podcast is edited by Moxie Pung and is also produced by Moxie Pung, Matt Loomis, Rob Cohen, and me, Alex Boyd. Thanks for listening to two bye guys.