A bisexual bride asks: Is my wedding queer enough?

As a bisexual bride who’s marrying a man, I spend a lot of time feeling ambivalent about how much a bride is allowed to like weddings… and what it means to be a bride with a queer identity.

Decades of dealing with bi-erasure

I’ve fought against erasure since coming out (at age 13–now 15 years ago). I’m from a small, conservative town, where the general wisdom was that I was only “doing it” – performative sexual identity, apparently – to get men.

Within the lesbian community at my college, I was dismissed as somehow not actually into women, not committed to gay rights (I don’t even get to be in the name), not involved in the political aspect of being queer.

I also got flak from straight people for being “too queer,” too sensitive, too invested in gay rights. Which was all bullshit. Every last piece of that was identity politics, gender normative bullshit. And somehow I didn’t have a problem recognizing that and, in general, telling people off.

Being a bisexual bride marrying a man

But now that it’s about weddings I’m once again in that corner: am I being queer enough? Too queer?

Will people take away my queer card? I “earned” it, in the eyes of my alleged peers, by sleeping with women. This still seems ridiculous: I didn’t have to sleep with them to know I wanted to, any more than I have to actually go to Hawaii to know I’d like to vacation there!

Now that I have a male fiance, it’s like the years that I have spent out (years of being aggressively political, aggressively visible, coming out to the people I go to school with and work with because I know that if I’d known a single queer person in a responsible position as a teenager it would have meant so much to me) mean nothing.

And WTF to wear

When it comes to deciding what to wear, I’ve felt the urge to react in both ways. Part of me wants to dress uber-femme for my wedding because I want to and for no other reason and to hell with the haters. Part of me wants to dress uber-butch because I hate the wedding-industrial complex and to hell with the homophobes.

It’s been a huge challenge to keep it on track and keep it about the love, rather than the frustration. Because that’s the whole point behind everything: I love the person I’m committing to. I love whoever I chose to commit to like this. My love is more than a feeling–it’s a series of decisions that are made over and over again.

There are no easy answers, so all I can do is keep asking the questions.