earlfoolish:

Looking for oldish photos and material about The Ark, I stumbled across this. It’s an article in Swedish, and it’s from 2001, but it’s still very relevant.

Here’s my translation:

In RFSL’s (Riksförbundet För Sexuellt Likaberättigande = National organisation for sexual equality) journal Kom Ut (Come Out) big media study presented in January 2000, Jörgen Isaksson (openly gay at the newspaper Aftonbladet) got the question: “Would it be fun with more gays in the workplace?”. Jörgen replied “Yes, of course it would be nice. More bisexuals would be nice too”

A year later is the drag queen Krizz Dee Light interviewed in the gay magazine QX. To the question “Do you fall in love with boys or girls?”, Dee Light answers “I’m bi so I’m attracted to both.”

Both “gay media” and “straight media” handle the bisexual “deviants” in an interesting way, the disrupters of order in the mononormative culture. In the latest issue of Cosmopolitan, the openly bisexual Ola Salo is interviewed. When you know that Salo identify as bisexual, it becomes evident how the whole article is characterised by an underlying bisexuality. From this perspective Ola’s stubborn and consequent use of the gender neutral “someone” becomes a contradictory protest against the journalist’s stubborn attempts to paint Salo as a ladies’ man rather than a man with a double sided desire. The consequence is that the article seems to stick its head in the sand and Salo appears as a brutally heterosexual Casanova. A dangerous but alluring female fantasy. 

In Cosmopolitan, Salo is compared to Håkan Hellström och Magnus Uggla. Hellstrom is described as the girl’s favourite while Uggla is the boys’. Salo, however, attracts both boys and girls. Salo is, according to the magazine, the sexiest man in Sweden, but as in regards to his own desires they are more diffuse. The pop idol is categorised as fairly straight, albeit with a bit of oversexual heterosexual desires.

The Salo example expressed mononormativity. Mononormativity assumes that all humans are either straight or gay. That they either fall in love with girls or boys. The journalist interviewing Ola Salo assumes a mononotmative perspective in which the mononormative position assumes to be the only naturally existing one. Homo and heterosexuality becomes the only alternatives. Everything in between assumes to be a phase, a temporary position until someone’s “made up their mind” for one side or the other. The exciting but also absurd of the article when Salo counters by drawing attention to the fact that the monosexual position isn’t the only possibility, that it’s possible to be attracted to both sexes, to be bisexual.

The treatment of Ola Salo in “gay media” is dual. He is recognized as bisexual while we get the feeling that he is put in the category of “bisexual chic”, “the half-straight who rides on the queer chic wave”, that he’s bisexual because it’s “in” to say that you’re queer. While Salo’s bisexuality is heterofied, the earlier quoted drag artist Krizz Dee Light is in a later issue of QX “homofied”. When QX reports about Dee Light being assaulted, they report about “the gay drag artist Krizz”. Why is Krizz suddenly read as gay? Is his bisexuality not enough to feel sympathy with? Does he have to be gay, the “gay victim”, a victim together with swedish homosexuals? 

The question is what actually happens. Why does Krizz dee Light become “half homo”, almost so homo that he could just as well be called gay? And why does Ola Salo become “half hetero”, or so straight that he is barely taken seriously when he talks about homosexual desires? The mononormativity means that bisexuality must be erased. That is why Dee Light and Salo are defined as either gay or straight. Krizz Dee Light and Ola Salo give us examples of the possible bisexual position, examples neutralised and rendered invisible by the mononormativity.