“I also found in myself a hunger to find records of bisexual+ people and communities”
BY MEL REEVE
Mel Reeve (she/her) is a writer and lapsed archivist living in Glasgow. As an archivist, she has worked on a wide variety of projects, with organizations such as the National Library of Scotland, Glasgow Women’s Library and more. She runs the Bi History project (@BiHistory), which aims to celebrate, promote and preserve the history of the bisexual+ community. As a writer, her fiction and narrative non-fiction work has been published widely, including by 404 Ink, Monstrous Regiment Publishing, Knight Errant Press, The Skinny, Autostraddle, and more. In 2020, she won the Glasgow Women’s Library Bold Types short story prize and was nominated as one of YWCA Scotland’s “30 Under 30”. She co-runs the FOMA Press zine distro (@fomapress), and has created several popular zines, including a sold-out exploration of queer medieval history through fact and fiction. Her work often explores themes of identity, queer history and the natural world. She can be found on social media @melreeve and at home with her beloved cat.
For many of us, looking to our history is the starting point for how we understand ourselves. It gives us context; a shape and dimension to apply to our own complicated experience of existing. We can look to the paths of those who have come before to see where we might go next. It can also give community, a feeling of belonging and comfort – in sharp contrast to the alienation and loneliness that many people, especially those from marginalised communities, encounter in their daily life. What happens then, when we are denied access to our histories? What happens if we do not even know we have a community to look back on and be part of? For marginalised people, the experience of finding ourselves in the past can be even more vital, and yet so often these are the histories that are ignored, forgotten, dismissed or erased.
The phrase “bisexual history” feels comfortable to me now but there was a time when it felt alien and complicated, like a question I was trying to ask without permission, or an intrusion on something that was not mine. The words did not seem to fit neatly together; in fact, they felt somehow in conflict with each other. Coincidentally, as I was developing my understanding of myself, I was also beginning a career working in heritage as an archivist.
As part of the heritage community, archivists are responsible for collecting, managing and preserving the records that people (particularly historians and researchers) use as sources to understand and describe the past. This can be exciting; perhaps being donated a marvellous collection of letters from someone’s attic that perfectly describe the life of a long-dead relative, and in so doing reveal what it was like to live at that moment in history. It can also be highly repetitive work that requires a great deal of focus, meticulously cataloguing all those letters to ensure that if someone wants to find a letter relating to a specific topic, they will be able to do so. Those letters are records of a time and a place, and of the people who lived then; these records (whatever form they may come in) are the materials that constitute an archive: records of people, places, things, lives and societies.
It made sense, then, that as I developed my understanding of how we record and manage records of our histories, I also found in myself a hunger to find records of bisexual+ people and communities, within existing archive collections. Archives are often held by large institutions, and all too often the histories they contain are representative of the power structures of our world, prioritising the voices of privileged, white, heterosexual men. Marginalised communities have historically operated outside the mainstream, whether because of criminalization, prejudice or their own rejection of traditional structures. It is hardly surprising that these marginalised voices are often harder to find represented in traditional record forms. The nature of archiving and the structures that support it sadly often exacerbate this divide rather than working actively to challenge it. Records of LGBTQ+ and other marginalised communities are often lost or ignored because of the ephemeral nature of a community trying to protect itself from the prejudice of wider society, and the inherently exclusionary nature of many traditional archive practices.
Early in my own searching for bisexual+ history, I was repeatedly challenged by resources that declared they contained records of LGBTQIA history, but showed only explicit evidence of lesbian and gay people and their communities. I knew on some level that this did not exclude the existence of bisexual+ people entirely. I myself had lived the experience of being in a queer space and being presumed not to be a part of that community, and then in the rest of the world being presumed straight. I knew not being able to find these records didn’t mean there weren’t any bisexual+ people in those spaces, but I wanted desperately to see physical evidence of my community naming itself as such. I wanted to know if other people had been proud to be bisexual, because that felt like permission for me to find pride in who I am. What I found in the end changed how I saw myself and the work I did in heritage, and led me to create the Bi History project (@BiHistory on Instagram and X (formerly known as Twitter)).
At the beginning of the project I was sharing on social media what felt like rare and precious glimpses into a world I had only dared to hope had existed. In finding records of the bisexual+ community and its rich, wonderful, complicated history, I found permission to be my own authentic self and to explore and understand my own identity. I also began to question how we place value on archival records, and how we excuse the lack of representation found in many archive collections – something I was feeling increasingly aware of and uncomfortable with. I’ve seen repeated evidence throughout my career in heritage that many people do not even realise that bisexual+ people exist within LGBTQIA records unless they are named as such, and even then that this valuable history can still be erased or ignored. This is a disservice to the historical LGBTQIA communities and individuals themselves, and also offers a reductive, minimising view of the true reality of the richness of LGBTQIA history and what that can offer us looking back.
As I began to realise how much of the bisexual+ history I knew existed was missing or underrepresented, even from explicitly queer archive collections, the Bi History project developed into something else. It became somewhere for me to express my frustration that bisexual+ history was seen as separate from LGBTQIA history, or was just straight-up ignored. The project then became a tool for me to advocate for the inclusion of bisexual+ people in archival collections, and in our discussions of LGBTQIA history.
It Ain’t Over Til The Bisexual Speaks is out now. You can read the rest of Mel’s essay and more by purchasing a copy today.
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