Bisexual Invisibility: The LGBT Community's Dirty Little Secret

[Behind the Aegis]

A few weeks ago, Alex Anders of the YouTube channel Bisexual Real Talk uploaded a video saying it was time for his fellow bisexuals to leave the LGBT community. He cites two studies recently published in the Journal of Bisexuality that link the lack of support for bisexuals in the community to bisexuals having worse mental health than any other LGBT group. As Anders puts it:

Every time we tell young people who are bisexual to go and search the LGBT community, we are creating certain expectations in their mind. And what do you think does more damage: when a person who knows they are going to be discriminated in a certain group and then gets discriminated in that group, or when a person is told that they will be able to find solace in a group and they lower their guard and then they're discriminated against?

Indeed, bisexual invisibility and biphobia are the LGBT community's dirty little secrets. According to the San Francisco Human Rights Commission's 2011 report Bisexual Invisibility: Impacts and Recommendations, "self-identified bisexuals make up the largest single population within the LGBT community in the United States," yet the bisexual community is one of the least represented groups within LGBT organizations:

For many years, Funders for LGBTQ Issues has tracked data on grants made by U.S. foundations to LGBT organizations. Although LGBT funding has risen in terms of dollars, it still represents a tiny fraction of the total grantmaking, with bi issues among the least supported every year. In 2008, while total foundation giving to LGBT issues increased compared to the previous year (from $77 million in 2007 to $107 million in 2008) and the percentage of dollars increased (from 0.18% to 0.24%), funding for bi organizations or programs went down; it was the lowest of all two dozen demographic groups they tracked. In fact, during all of 2008, not a single grant in the entire country explicitly addressed bisexual issues.

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