If you’re gay in the LGBT world, you’re part of the gang. If you’re straight, you’re on the outside. But where do those in between sit?

A year ago I was planning my wedding. My fiancé and I had just celebrated our four year anniversary with an engagement party. To everyone who knew me, I was a lesbian. After all, I was going to be marrying a woman, I visibly appeared as a gay woman, and many of my friends are also gay women. But the truth is more complicated.

I’ve always been bisexual. I started experimenting with my girlfriends at sleepovers from around the age of eight. At the time I didn’t know what it meant – it just felt fun, exciting and natural. I came out as bisexual to my parents at 16 with a handwritten letter that I spent six weeks composing. After I handed my mother the letter, I ran away to my best friend’s house for three days in shame, expecting to be disowned.

I remember thinking that it would be easier for them to understand if I were just gay. For some reason, “bisexual” just sounded and felt hyper-sexual and dirty. Bisexuality is either the bridge to coming out as gay, or we’re greedy and can’t make up our minds. Bisexual women are not really into women, we just hook up in bars to impress men. Bisexual men are really just gay and haven’t come to terms with their sexuality yet.

These are the stereotypes and fallacies we are inadvertently fed and taught to believe as a society. The media has always either hypersexualised bisexuality or ignored it. While male bisexuality is routinely erased under the misconception that a man cannot be genuinely interested in men and women, female bisexuality is almost exclusively rolled out to fulfil a male fantasy.

Even though I’m aware of the discrimination, I’ve still faced this internalised biphobia since childhood. I never even told my ex future-wife that I wasn’t exclusively gay, because I was so ashamed of it. I wish I were straight. Or I wish I were gay. Most of all, I wish I could be honest with lesbian women about how I identify. The truth is, in doing so, I face a very real risk of rejection and excommunication.

There’s an undercurrent in the lesbian community is that if you’re a bisexual woman, you’re damaged goods. You’re a little bit too close to straight and therefore, not one of “us”. I wish I had a dollar for every time a lesbian has said she’d never date a bi girl. It’s ironic that a community that claims to be inclusive and supportive can often be the most judgmental of all when it comes to those who don’t subscribe to their exact sexual identity.

I didn’t get married. When you’re planning your wedding and already thinking “well, there’s always divorce…”, that’s a pretty good indication you shouldn’t be going through with. Also, if you can’t even come out to your own fiancé for fear of judgement, that’s not a great basis for a happy, long lasting marriage. I called off our wedding the week we were due to send out the invitations.

A month after we broke up, the first person I kissed was a boy. I hadn’t kissed anyone but my fiancé in five years, and I hadn’t kissed a boy since I was 19. I distinctly remember my full body tensing up and my face contorting itself into an ugly shape as I tried to make sense of it. After solidly identifying as a lesbian for five years, kissing a boy I found attractive was confusing. I had pushed down that part of me for so long that when it came out, I didn’t know how to react.

I kissed a couple more boys after that. Each time, the same reaction. My body tensed up, my face would contort and every time I’d ask myself what I was doing. I came to understand that the discomfort was a reaction to no longer understanding where I fit in the world. I had had this community of lesbian women who I identified so closely with, and dating a man felt like I was no longer a part of that. I felt adrift.

My straight friends slowly started to cotton on to the fact that I wasn’t exclusively interested in women. Their reactions were usually the same – you are so lucky! The dating world is your smorgasbord! I didn’t feel lucky, though. I felt like I was turning my back on the queer community by dating men and I felt like a fraud for dating women. I hadn’t told any of my queer friends that I was open to dating men. I gradually alienated myself from the community I had felt so closely aligned with.

In the months following the break up I went on a few dates with men and women and ended up in a sort of “situationship” with a close male friend. When we first met, I was with my fiancé. I was attracted to him and being attracted to a male was not part of the plan. I felt guilty and dirty. Once my fiancé and I broke up, he and I began to spend time together as friends. We had chemistry I hadn’t experienced with anyone else, but my self-imposed lesbianism meant I completely denied that I felt any attraction towards him. I was so deep in self-loathing biphobia, I denied the truth even to myself.  

Gradually we began to break through the wall of resistance I’d built up around dating men. I was able to relax and enjoy being with him. I was honest with him about my sexuality and the minor identity crisis I was having. He treated me with kindness, care and respect. Being with him was cathartic in that I was finally allowing myself to be cared for by a male which forced me to challenge my own biphobia.

A few weeks ago, I met a girl. Immediately I felt a strong connection and spark with her. After continuing to date for a few weeks and realising I was developing real feelings, I became terrified of her finding out that I didn’t identify solely as a lesbian. When we’d met it hadn’t felt necessary to tell her. I was so afraid that if she knew the truth, she’d back off in disgust. There is clearly still work to be done.

In gay culture, if you’re gay, you’re part of the gang. If you’re straight, you’re on the outside. But where do those in between sit? Although LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, in reality, bisexuals are not always included in this supposedly inclusive community. We are all fighting for the same cause. We all want freedom to love who we want and fuck who we want and go about our business however we want without judgement.

As a community we must do better to welcome all stripes of the rainbow. The queer community is all of us – gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual and more. To treat anyone as less deserving because they aren’t gay enough is engaging in the the exact prejudice that we have spent decades marching against. The only way we can combat biphobia is by recognising this is a problem in our community and talking about it.

Jenny Eastwood is an Auckland-based writer and content creator at eastwoodcreative.co.

Organiser Hayley Coles explains why the time is right to launch New Zealand’s first union for legal workers.

In 2018, Aotearoa’s legal profession received a wake-up call. The media broke stories of sexual harassment, bullying and other injustices throughout the profession. It was a call for change and it was long overdue. These problems have been around for a long time, but most of us did not realise to what extent when we first started university.

Most of us went to law school to try and help people. Legal work is, at its core, about helping people to do things like buying a house, resolving relationship property disputes or defending someone accused of a crime. Legal work is engaging, interesting and exciting (most of the time). It can also be really fun. But there are other aspects of working in law that can be very challenging.

Almost everyone that works in the legal profession has either experienced working exhaustingly long hours without compensation or knows people that have. The same goes for bullying and sexual harassment. These conditions have not been all of our experiences in the law, but we have all seen it happen around us. It’s just chance that sees one person in a great team and another in a toxic one. It’s a lottery. The structure of law firms and the legal profession permit these environments to exist because of the hierarchy and traditions. It means being a lawyer can be a lonely experience and many legal workers feel helpless to speak up.

The stories that surfaced last year exposed what many of us had known since starting work but that no one had done anything about. Suddenly, everyone was forced to confront how big an issue the culture of our community was. Law firms scrambled to be the first to update or implement new policies on harassment and bullying. They also told their staff they were making changes and that things would be different now. We all hoped they would be.

And then we saw the long hours continue, unaddressed. We saw our peers on the brink of burnout with many leaving the profession. We continued to see a lack of meaningful diversity in our workplaces and a largely homogenous group of lawyers at the top. We heard stories of some of the bullies trying to get on anti-bullying committees. One by one, new stories came out. Some bullies were disciplined. Some were dismissed. But some were just given a slap on the wrist and continued with their practice, sometimes even with name suppression. Policies are great, but they don’t change a culture.

We know culture doesn’t change overnight. It’s a long game to play and we know legal workplaces are still trying to evolve. But there are some easy changes that could’ve been made but haven’t. And even then, the hundreds of lawyers at the bottom of the hierarchy still have no voice and no representation.

The idea of a union is not new. Groups have come together to talk about starting one in the past, but it never ended up happening. Some juniors are scared it will affect their careers; others think it won’t make a difference. Last year, a group of us got together and thought it was time to try and change things for those members of the legal community who have been marginalised and ignored. The Aotearoa Legal Workers’ Union (ALWU for short) seemed to be the best solution.

At its core, the goal of ALWU is about addressing the power imbalance within the profession. Collectively, our voices are stronger and we can negotiate with employers. We want to support each other, advocate for those on the sidelines and hold employers to account. We want to even out the experience of working in the law because we shouldn’t have to play the lottery.

There are a number of ways ALWU will do this in the coming months:

• First, we’re going to ask for increased transparency in the legal profession. One of our current challenges is that we have little concrete data about either the pay or the conditions at different workplaces or levels. We’re launching an anonymous survey to collect information comparing pay at legal workplaces and also workers’ experiences at those workplaces.
• Second, we’ll advocate for transparent and consistently applied policies across a range of important employee issues, such as sexual harassment and overtime. We’ll also identify employers that fail to address these issues.
• We’re also in the process of organising larger law firms through a system of delegates. This will create a system where members can share issues arising across law firms with the union’s executive and a support network for juniors that goes beyond the firm itself.

What we focus on in the future will be member driven, but a likely starting place will be the report released last year by Dame Margaret Bazley. There are plenty of recommendations in there that all legal workplaces should be implementing.

If this appeals to you, then please join our union. ALWU is open to all legal workers, not just lawyers, including administrative staff and those who work in policy or advocacy roles interfacing with the law.

Membership of ALWU is free (at least until our first AGM in August), private and confidential. ALWU will not disclose the identities of any of its members without the written consent of that member. There is no legal obligation to disclose the identities of its members unless ALWU is bringing a personal grievance on your behalf or negotiating a collective agreement, neither of which will be done without your consent. A responsible employer should not ask whether you are a member of the Union, and regardless you are under no obligation to tell them. Employers cannot discriminate against an employee based on their membership of a union.

If you have any questions, come along to one of our Q&A events this week in Auckland and Wellington, or in June in some other centres. Otherwise, get in touch with us via our website.