Trad-wives, looksmaxxing men: A lot has changed since I wrote my article on bi non-practicing people at Brown exactly a year ago.

Conservative culture encourages one to be more conventional within the gender binary, and the pendulum has surely swung. Gender-affirming care is being banned across the country, even in liberal states like New York. Meanwhile, men like Clavicular scream of hormone science, low cortisol, and low testosterone in men, holding onto the so-called saving powers of normative beauty. Some of his followers are bashing the bones on their faces and drinking unpasteurized milk. On the Red Scare podcast, the hosts have shifted from their “dirtbag left” roots to align more with the new right, reactionary, and contrarian viewpoints: being “anti-woke.” What was once fringe is now, in my eyes, cringe.

Meanwhile, the “CBK [Carolyn Bessette Kennedy] aesthetic” of proper femininity is in—at the school where her late husband once journeyed, many girls strut through the Main Green in modest clothing, their carefully-constructed blowouts bouncing in the spring wind (not that I don’t love a good blowout).

I began last year curious about the “little black dress” of sexualities. In my previous article, a bi non-practicing person is defined as someone “who publicly identifies as bisexual but only engages in relationships with people of the opposite gender.”

I come back to it asking: What does being subversive in an increasingly authoritarian country look like? But after many interviews, I found myself unable to resolve this political thesis. I have become fascinated by the negotiations my peers are making in this climate, regardless of what political ends they serve.

We have endured another year of the Trump administration, and at a place like Brown—known for both its liberal political climate and (as much as I adore this school) its inherent elitism—I am interested in the ways people have sublimated these changes along the lines of gender presentation and sexuality.

So, this time, I'm stepping back. First-person narration does not serve me here: I am no longer investigating the “why,” but the “how.” I want to let other voices lead. I see this piece as collective dialogue, a Greek chorus, if you will, lightly stitched together, an oral history mosaic document that we can look back on.

Of course, many of these viewpoints in dialogue create contradictions; this is my intent. People may respond differently to the same threat. One thing I could not resolve: I was unable to find a single cis man willing to identify as bi non-practicing. Whether that is because they are more closeted than their female counterparts, or because the language itself is insufficient, I cannot say—maybe that silence is its own answer. While I do not believe that the far-right has made everyone intrinsically “straighter,” more slight conservative attitudes seem to be seeping into a campus that only a few years ago was much more radical. I have a hopeful feeling that the pendulum may begin to swing closer to where it once stood, in the way people dress—and the way people fuck.

A note: The identifier preceding each quote denotes the speaker’s gender identity and sexual orientation as they described, and quotes attributed to groups represent multiple different people.

[cis man, gay] “At a federal level, inaugurating a very far right government obviously comes with the government acting in ways that are repressive, authoritarian, militarized. But I've also noticed a huge reaction to it—the riots and protests across Minneapolis, ICE Out everywhere, No Kings Day—in a way I don't even think we saw after Trump’s initial inauguration. As much as maybe the easy answer is to say we’re in the midst of far right backsliding, I haven’t actually felt that to be the case. It’s become so obvious that the government is not acting in the people’s interests that a lot more people are becoming aware of it, becoming very critical.”

[cis woman, straight] “If you’re bi non-practicing, your identity is basically a social marker that gets you into a party or doesn’t, gets you into a friend group or doesn’t. And given the political state of the world right now, everyone is just so exhausted—we bombed a new country, we wake up every day to that. People just want to have fun. And if that means moving a little bit away from queerness to get into the parties, I think people are kind of willing to do that.”

[cis woman, bi non-practicing] “There used to be a large segregation along sexual lines—social groups were kind of delineated by identity in that sense. And now there doesn’t seem to be as much separation between queer-aligned people and really straight, fratty groups. They’ve come together in this weird, strange way.”

[cis woman, straight] “[anonymous’s] sister’s best friend is this gay guy from Yale. He was talking about the existence of the “trad gay”—basically a guy who acts and looks straight, even though he’s gay. And she was saying that that is what has come to Brown within the past year.”

[nonbinary transfemme] “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. The masc girls who skateboard put on sundresses and go to tea parties. The guys who were wearing their Ariana Grande T-shirts with coiffed hair and painted nails put on the muscle tee, grew their facial hair out, and tried to get masc with it. The progression has been to get more and more conventionally within your gender binary. And what that means is that bisexuality, any kind of fluidity, falls away—because that’s risky now. It’s not a point of coolness.”

[nonbinary transfemme] “The new archetype for the gay guy is no longer Kurt from Glee but muscle tee Hudson Williams dupe. How did that happen? That is conservatism at its finest. They want to tell you it’s woke, beating the stereotype—but the woke thing is to fight the conventions of the binary. The needle moving is clearly in conservatism. There is nothing being won. The box is smaller.”

[cis man, gay] “I don’t think it is necessarily gay people trying to acquiesce to straight society. I would take offense to that narrative—I think that’s kind of stripping queer people of the agency that they have to just choose where to go…The [social] parties have merged because we are now older, people have had more classes together, there is more interlocking.”

[cis woman, bi non-practicing] “You think of 2020, 2021, when the left was so left to the point where, I think, it became damaging—people were taking things so far that it was alienating a majority of people that would consider themselves liberals. The radical left was really alienating, and that would push them into the other direction. That’s the pendulum. And then obviously that affects who people are dating.”

[cis woman, bi non-practicing] “I still have options. Whereas if you’re a lesbian, you’re not gonna be like, no, I’ll just go date a boy. Bi people have more access to necessarily erase their bi identity, to internalize heteronormativity, because they already like the opposite sex. So it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. Cutting down the pool of people you’re open to is already the easier choice.”

[cis woman, straight] “In the current political climate, why would you choose to make your life any harder than you need to be? If you don’t have to go down the path of potentially having a marriage that’s invalidated—why would you necessarily do that?”

[cis woman, bi non-practicing] “I'm so protected—I’m from Los Angeles, I have supportive parents. As a white woman, it’s more of a socialized thing than a safety thing for me. But I think for a lot of people it’s changing with the political atmosphere. If your rights are being taken away, I think it is understandable that so many people are taking away their own queer identities.”

[cis woman, bi non-practicing] “I study politics, and everything was just so heavy and exhausting all the time. And being queer just felt like another thing, another hump. I got too tired. I was just like, I’m gonna tap out, I'll be straight for a year. I would have probably self-identified as a lesbian freshman year—I could not have conceived of a future being with a man. But now the world has become so tiring, and I’ve also just started to focus more on living in the moment, because everything is so uncertain politically.”

[cis woman, bi non-practicing] “Even just in terms of basic preference, I haven’t even been thinking about my sexuality as much of a choice, but I’ve just moved into more of a straight space. And I think that does coincide with the broader cultural shift that’s happening.”

[cis woman, bi non-practicing] “The political climate has made me respect men less. We’ve seen men become a lot more conservative, and because of that I don’t really respect them. So I find it a lot easier to have casual relationships with men, because I know it’s transactional. I know I don’t respect them as much now. Whereas I don’t think I could do casual with a woman. Men are easier to just...discard.”

[cis man, gay] “A lot of people come to terms with their queerness much later in life than I did. I am fully gay, and so there was really no shot of me being happy with women—I reached the dead end. If I wanted to live my life authentically and be a full person and continue to develop and grow and be happy, I needed to just come to terms with being gay. Some people are interested enough in women that they might be able to live a happy, authentic life with a female partner, so they come to terms with their queerness much later because they are able to find other avenues. I also think that men honestly take a while to emotionally mature—perhaps I was just in a special circumstance where I ended up maturing earlier, and so they are still emotionally immature, still coming to terms with how to act right, how to treat other people, how to process difficult emotions and self hatred, and get over their insecurities.”

[cis man, gay] “Before going abroad last fall, I had had multiple experiences with fully gay men. Finding someone bi was a little bit out of the field for me. And then since my study abroad, I have almost exclusively found myself in situations with purely insecure, closeted bi men. Pretty much all of them would admit to me at some point that they were bisexual, but then they end up going back—they start dating a girl, or they just get scared. I don’t even know what is up in their lives.”

[cis man, gay] “I think there’s more of a social hatred for queer men, whereas there’s a commodification or dismissal of queer women, and it is kind of infantilizing. A bi man is seen as fake—not actually interested in women, he’s actually gay. Whereas a bi woman is seen as fake bisexual—she’s mostly still straight. Conversations about men being DL or closeted have dominated discourse more, so there’s already a language for it. Maybe there’s only now a language for women. Queer men are more demonized in society, and so they are not even willing to admit that they are queer, which means we call them DL or closeted instead of bi non-practicing, because they won’t even admit they’re bi.”

[cis woman, straight] “Most people I’m meeting are both politically progressive, creative, alternative—but they have incredibly wealthy, elite families. That’s kind of the reigning demographic. In [my home country], if you’re going to be artsy, queer, alternative, then you're generally divorcing yourself from any associations of wealth. But here it’s not so covert, not so discreet.”

[cis woman, bi non-practicing] “I think if Kamala had won, I would be dating a woman right now.”

[cis woman, straight] “My mom grew up in a rural Catholic community—coming out as a lesbian meant she lost her family at eighteen. So for her, somebody claiming queerness as a way of getting cultural or social capital goes against everything she’s fought for, everything it has taken from her life. People who claim the title bisexual but have never actually been with a woman—they enjoy making out with a girl at a party, enjoy the social clout of being bisexual at a place like Brown, but would never actually commit to it long term.”

[nonbinary transfemme] “I don’t think there’s ever been real clout from being queer, but it’s now actively negative.”

[cis man, gay] “I definitely noticed that politics pervades how people talk about the character of other people, or whether or not you should hang out with them, or get with them. Being able to say they said this racist thing, or they support Trump—that is such an easy bomb to drop. Because politics has become such a totalizing aspect of someone’s character.”

[nonbinary transfemme] “It’s already so hard trying to exist, let alone date or do anything romantically when you’re trans. You’ve got one target market—bisexuals. By definition they’re supposed to include you too. With gay guys it’s just a mess for me, it basically doesn’t exist. With straight guys it’s like, sign up here to get emotionally tortured for ten million years. So bi guys are what you have…but every bi guy at this university is lying. Everyone is either just a gay guy who wants to seem more masculine and bi—and somehow you’re twenty-two at Brown and you’re still scared to say you’re gay…grow up!—or the actual bi guys are all still straight. I am over it.”

[nonbinary transfemme] “They only see you as an experiment. Something to try and figure out what they want. Even if they were gonna get gay with it for a second, it’s to be with a conventional man—because they’re terrified of actually being with someone who people look at and think, what is that gender? Nobody wants to actually have to face up to that, to live the difficulty and the truth and the vulnerability. It’s fucking hard. You have to actually be yourself around people, and nobody wants to do that anymore. They all want to study econ and become a consultant.”

[nonbinary transfemme] “It’s all to do with people realizing they’re going to start losing the privileges they’ve become accustomed to if they stay true to who they are—but also are unwilling to stand by all the queer people who can’t just go into hiding. I can’t just turn it off. I will never be able to go anywhere and not be perceived as what I am. A lot of people have the privilege to hide it, and they’re maximizing that. You could say, oh, I don’t blame them. I do. I very much do blame them. Because you’re very actively leaving people like me behind. I'm risking it every single day, and I’m still here, still alive, still getting shit done. So why the fuck are you too weak to do the same?”