For Bisexual Visibility Day, Kade Matthews from Proud 2 Play shares the importance of taking up space, not just for yourself, but for those yet to come.
By Dean Arcuri
History picks its squad the way kids do at lunchtime.
The ones who look “sporty” get snapped up first, while everyone else waits.
Names are quietly being marked off the list, while you stand there just hoping for your name to be read out.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about who gets picked for the history books and who is left standing on the sidelines.
(I am researching an upcoming book on Australia’s queer sporting past.)
That work has turned up many amazing stories of people creating and forcing their way into spaces for our community.
But when it comes to bi+ people, the record is almost silent.
I’m proud of our fight for equality alongside the whole LGBTIQA+ community.
We are, and always will be, bound together in that struggle for rights and recognition.
That said, our stories are too often flattened into tidy, one-size-fits-all versions of queer history.
If we really want to understand where we’ve come from, we have to lift the bi+ voices that have always been there, and not just as a polite footnote of history, but as the headline of it.
Growing up in the Latrobe Valley in the late 90s, I never heard those voices.
