Nowt as Queer as Folk: A Conversation with Rio Veradonir

Former Areo Editor-in-Chief and current Managing Editor at Quillette Iona Italia sits down with Queer Majority Editor-in-Chief Rio Veradonir. They discuss Rio’s work at QM, his bi activism, his upbringing in Seventh-day Adventist schools, modern activist culture, the concept of “queer”, the cultural shifts in LGBT politics, and more.

Iona Italia: Welcome to the conversation.

Let's begin with a little bit about your background. So I was interested to read that you grew up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and I'm always struck by how many people who are polyamorous or sex-positive or kinky or have joined a rationalist community or an effective altruist community. Not that you're necessarily part of those communities.

But there is a group of people who are, I would say, yes, broadly sex positive, many of whom seem to have grown up with religious fundamentalist backgrounds.

And tell us more about your upbringing, your religious upbringing, when you began to lose faith, and how that has influenced your approach to life.

Rio Veradonir: Sure. My parents sent me to a private Seventh-day Adventist school starting in the third grade because they weren't happy with the education I was receiving in the US public education system. They didn't send me there because they were Seventh-day Adventists.

II: Oh, I'm sorry. I misunderstood.

RV: No, you didn't misunderstand. I know which essay you read. Yeah, I didn't clarify that, but I'm saying it now. My dad is an atheist and was an atheist when I was growing up. My mom believes nominally in a God.

But after my brother and I started going to the Seventh-day Adventist school, my mom kind of converted to Seventh-day Adventism. I'm sure that the same thing happens in the UK. A lot of people spend time going to churches, mainly to build community, and my brother and I were already at that school. So we started attending the same church.

And my brother and I were brought up as Seventh-day Adventists in that respect. So I did believe in most of the teachings of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, until my teens, I would say.

II: Why do you think so many sex-positive people come from religious fundamentalists, religious backgrounds, or have had those kinds of upbringings? Or am I wrong in thinking that that's a very common theme?

RV: It's not an observation I've made.

It's kind of interesting because in the United States, it's very common for people to be brought up that way in general. So I've never really… I obviously spend time in sex positive and kinky communities, and I am in rationalist communities and humanist communities.

And there definitely are a number of people who were brought up that way. But I never thought to connect the two as if it were causal.

It might be in the case of atheist and humanist communities, because, especially [in] atheist communities, I think a lot of the people who followed the New Atheists were probably motivated by a desire to try to help others avoid the kind of indoctrination they experience themselves. And that is definitely worse in fundamentalist communities than in more liberal religious communities.

II: Yeah.

So you then went to university where you had multiple majors, something which isn't really possible here in the UK, or not normally possible, but you studied a range of different things. But among other things, you took a course in the late 2000s, “Get off my lawn, Rio!”, University in the bloody late 2000s. That's way too late.

You were first exposed to critical theory and the idea of [the] death of the author. You write and read a little bit here:

“I remember the professor saying the author's intent doesn't matter, which meant that it was considered acceptable to attribute meanings to a work even if the author had explicitly stated that they never intended such that rubbed me the wrong way, it begged the question: 

By what standard can we judge which interpretations are correct? Or is it just anything goes?”

And I want to ask you about [it], because you talk about having later come to some insights on the basis of this course. But I first wanted to sort of answer that question in a way, which is… I think that, as with all searches for knowledge, there isn't a right answer, or, well, there is a right answer, but we will never arrive at the right answer. We can only hope to get kind of closer and closer to it. And the way we get there is by eliminating error. So, although there's no one right explanation, there are many wrong explanations.

And we try to work out which explanations are more and less correct by persuading each other. And we can do that on the basis of evidence that's in the text itself, by pointing to the text itself, without needing the author.

So I'm actually quite sympathetic to the death of the author's school of thought, and the idea that there are meanings within text that the author… and I'd really like you to retrace the events that led to the founding of the amBi and Bi.org, and how that is different from [the] kind of LGBT I should just call it, alphabet people.

RV: That's perfectly fine. 

II: Just a b c d e f g h h i j k l etc. I’m just going to use the word queer because it's easier to pronounce into the microphone, but you give a really — this really vivid account of an early activist group that you witnessed. And I think it's an absolutely fantastic account.

So I'm going to read it, and then I'd like you to talk more about your early experiences of activism and frustrations with it. So this is what you write:

“In 2016, I attended an LGBT event in DC hosted by the Obama administration as an invited bi activist. I didn't know what to expect. I was hoping for something productive. What I witnessed was anything but. There was virtually no discussion of policy ideas that might make a real material difference in the lives of bi people. It was nothing but grandstanding.

Panelists were competing in the oppression Olympics, obnoxiously vying to portray themselves as both the most virtuous and the most beleaguered. Every speech began with a recitation of the speaker's intersecting oppressed identities. The more intersectionality points, the more street cred. Poor chaps who had the misfortune of being born white, male, and or heterosexual, and who weren't trans, were admonished to check their privilege, which meant that their opinions were worthless. The quality of one's ideas didn't matter, not that anything concrete was being discussed anyway.

Instead, the political strategy amounted to nothing but endless shouting about how American society was irredeemably awful and needed to be torn down. It felt like the White House invited us so we would feel listened to, even though it served no other practical purpose.

Of course, Obama was not in attendance. I'm sure he had more important things to do. But I wondered what he would make of the weird illiberal theatre I'd witnessed. I thought back on his speech, delivered after attacks on his association with the radical Reverend Jeremiah Wright:

‘We've heard my former pastor use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation. They expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country, a view that sees white racism as endemic and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.’

No, President Obama would not have approved. He is a liberal like me.

I got into LGBT activism in service of the dream of Martin Luther King's vision of exclusion as a pathway to integration and treating people the same, regardless of any immutable trait.”

I love that nightmarish description, which is just an ordinary Friday night around here. Shouting at people and being part of the Oppression Olympics.

One question, first of all, which is, you talk about the lack of discussion of policy ideas that might make a real material difference in the lives of bi people.

What policies did you have in mind?

RV: Well, same-sex marriage, which we now have, and which many people on the woke left oppose. They said that it was respectability politics and bourgeois.

But we have it now, thanks to the more liberal approach to this issue that treats people equally. Everybody should be treated equally if straight people can be married. So, should gay people be able to get married?

That's an obvious example.

Discrimination protections against bi people of the same sort that we have against any other group.

Nobody should be discriminated against because of their race or their sex or their sexual orientation — including white, cis, straight men. And it's rather ironic we're seeing an awful lot of discrimination against them coming from the far left, right now.

Outside of government policy, because the truth is in the liberal West, we've largely secured LGBT rights. And it's an enormous success story. It's something that liberals should be proud of and something that we should spread. But beyond government, within culture, one thing we were trying to address with amBi is to have a space where everybody is welcome. So straight people are welcomed.

And I remember the first Pride Festival I went to in LA with amBi. Actually, it wasn't with amBi. It was with this group, the LA Bi Task Force, and amBi just happened to be attending along with them. And they were essentially protesting the Pride parade, holding signs saying down with biphobia and that sort of thing. Not protesting against homophobia, but protesting against the concept of the Pride parade, which you see happening a lot in activist spaces.

They also get angry about the fact that corporations are allowed to participate or that police officers are allowed to march, that sort of thing. And so this was in that spirit. We were protesting Pride because gay people were biphobes, and that's bad. And it really turned me off. People were booing at us.

So the next year, Ian and I decided to do a parade that was more celebratory. So we had an entry in the parade where we had male and female go-go dancers and big balloons and a giant 50-foot-long bi flag, and really good music, and that sort of thing. And just regular amBi members carrying this huge flag. So everybody got to be part of it. And we weren't booed.

We were celebrated by all of those largely gay men, but also some lesbians, who the LA by task force had thought were our enemies.

Now, don't get me wrong. There is a problem of biphobia in the gay community.

But I think that the difference in reaction shows that you can accomplish a lot more by being part of the celebration of liberty rather than pitting yourself against other groups in a zero-sum struggle, as we said.

II: That's interesting. That also goes along with your attitude towards allies. In fact, I think that you are not keen on the word “ally.” Can you say more about why that is?

RV: Yeah, I'm not saying people can't use it or shouldn't use it. Obviously, you can be allied with other groups. But this returns to the question you asked me a bit earlier about the word queer.

So the way that we use queer at Queer Majority is to refer to people who do not conform with real or perceived norms around sex and relationships, which includes a much larger range of people than just those people who might technically be classified as LGBT.

And so in the fight to preserve liberal freedoms at home and to spread them abroad, many cis straight people are arguably all, since none of us really conform 100% to norms around sex and gender and whatnot — they're not merely our allies — they're our compatriots, in that we all have a stake in that game.

II: Yeah. I think some of the resistance that I've encountered to a kind of broadening out of the word queer, or I've encountered when I've been sharing your ideas, is because people are entirely now associating this with the Oppression Olympics.

So many people complain that the queer identity, very like the non-binary identity also, is a way for people who are otherwise part of the “oppressor group”, who are white, straight, basically cis, and are able to kind of grab a bit of that sort of oppression cachet for themselves by calling themselves non-binary or queer.

And of course, that's not the way in which you're using it because you're not at all interested in valorizing oppression or in gaining a kind of intersectional oppression points.

RV: Yes, that's right. And in fact, the way that you describe that idea, which I thought you steelmanned quite well, so it was a fair description of their concern.

And I do understand the concern. It's usually expressed in all sincerity and with good intentions.

But the way that you framed it, was you said from the oppressor group.

That's the concern, right? How dare people from the oppressor group, right? Be part of our club.

Well, my goodness. I mean, I'm bi, I don't feel oppressed by ordinary cis straight people who are around me. What a dark thought.

II: Yeah. I think it's, you know, that's the concern. So that's the criticism that I hear from the kind of woke left, not of non-binary, which generally people just accept, you know, sight unseen as correct.

But for the kind of broadening out of the word queer, I hear some criticism that that's people grabbing — it's stolen valor — it's people grabbing oppression points they don't deserve.

But from a kind of more anti-woke perspective, people are worried that it's just multiplying the number of people who are fighting over their oppressed status. It's just kind of heightening up the Oppression Olympics by allowing more people to compete in it.

That's also obviously not your aim.

RV: No, not at all. And I also sympathize with it. And let's be clear, not everybody uses queer the way we're using it. In academia, the dominant approach to queer theory is the critical one, just like the critical approach dominates anti-racist theory, etc.

Hopefully, this trend won't last. But within a liberal framework, queer is about helping people, all people, integrate into society, including everybody, so we can all integrate together into the liberal system and be equals and get past these petty squabbles.

Now, they weren't petty when it was against the law to have same sex behavior, right? That was a real, genuine concern. They weren't petty when we didn't have same-sex marriage. But we do now, and we got them by persuading a mostly straight population. We can talk a bit about this if you want,

II: Sure.

RV: But increasingly it seems that a larger percentage of the population may be bisexual than we realized before, which is an interesting question. But certainly the vast majority of the human race is attracted to the opposite sex, as you'd expect. And we accomplish these things by persuading that majority, not by vilifying them.

So that concern about the critical approach to queer issues is completely valid. The critical approach is toxic and antisocial, and we should get past it. But the solution to that is to embrace a liberal approach to queer issues, not to ignore them.

II: Yeah, it really gels with how I feel about Pride, for example. Which is, I think, Pride is very important, despite the fact that it is sometimes… hijacked by people who want to push a kind of divisive and victim-based sort of approach. I think that it's very important to celebrate differences.

So this is, for me, the real kind of inclusivity, which is that, if you can see — even if you are a straight person — if you can see that, for example, gay people are accepted, that makes it also more likely that you are going to be accepted for idiosyncrasies of your own, which are for… traits that not everybody will share, that maybe only a minority of people share, but that are in themselves neutral.

And what we're doing there is modeling a kind of freedom for everyone. We're showing that we are accepting of a wide range of approaches, and that we are basically accepting of individual human freedoms. And Pride is just kind of a symbol of that, of a broader acceptance of the freedom of consenting adults to run their own sex lives without undue interference.

RV: Absolutely. And if you've been to a large Pride Festival, you'll notice there are plenty of straight people there having a really good time. There are big parties now, A-list musicians perform, the booze is flowing, and straight people like to get buzzed and dance to good music in the park just like anybody else.

They're completely welcome, and...the spirit of it very much is that we are celebrating everybody's freedom.

I want to, again, to put this back in context where I'm not saying, and I'm sure you're not saying, Iona, that the word oppression is never appropriate. What we're saying is let's not be hyperbolic.

Women and gay people in the Middle East are oppressed today, but not in the West. So what we should be asking ourselves is, how is it that in such a short period of time, our countries have made so much progress on this issue, and how do we help others do the same? And how do we avoid a backlash? But the critical approach to women's rights, LGBT rights, anti-racism, etc., is causing a backlash.

I didn't write this line, but one of our other writers at QM, Jamie Paul, wrote a rather funny line for one of his articles for us, which was [that]: “Critical social justice is the best thing to happen for the Christian right since the Cold War. It's made them relevant again.

II: Yeah, I've seen a lot of people who began as liberal leftists like myself, just sliding over into conservatism and really championing some very traditional conservative views, even kind of turning — renouncing atheism — and turning back to Christianity and things like that. And I mean, I understand why they're doing that. I have empathy, but I also think it's just very, very mistaken and misguided.

And I think it's extremely important not to abandon, for me, the left-wing space and certainly the liberal space, not to abandon that to a kind of woke ideology, but to sort of make a stand here and fight for our values, because I don't believe in conservative values either. And I don't think that we need to be caught between this Scylla and Charybdis, you know, if they're woke on one side and the conservatives on the other.

RV: Yeah, I think of myself as kind of a centrist. I see value in center-left and center-right ideas. And I think trying to thread the needle between the two is generally the best approach to governance and democracy. I also don't necessarily have a negative attitude toward conservatism per se; I see it as somewhat subjective. It means that you're trying to conserve something. The question is, what's worth conserving, right?

There are a lot of things that people who call themselves conservative want to conserve, which we probably should move past as a society. And then there are other areas where people call themselves conservative, and really what they're advocating is regression to [a] previous, less progressive time.

But then, of course, you also have the same problem on the other side, where a lot of people who call themselves progressive are advocating ideas that in practice would be regress, the opposite of progress.

So, for me, it's more a matter of not taking people at their word when they say they're being conservative or progressive. It's more like, what do you mean specifically by that?

There is a fight in the liberal West today to conserve liberal institutions, which are under threat from both far left and far right extremism. And this is a rhyme in history that happens from time to time.

So I don't think being conservative is necessarily bad, as long as what you're conserving is a good thing.

II: Yeah, I agree. And I mean, also, I wouldn't want to live in a one-party state. I think it's very important to have good opponents, whichever side you're on. I think what we want to encourage is the most sensible and reasonable voices on the left and the most sensible and reasonable voices on the right. And that is, you know, our political system is adversarial, is confrontational, and that in itself is good because we don't want to live in an autocracy.

Yeah, I think, you know, you talk about the way in which activists, even though the problem is that activists need to convince us that things are really bad, because that's how they get exposure, they get money, they get support. They do that by kind of drawing our attention to things that are bad and making us think: “We need to solve those things, so we need to give money to those people or give support to those people”.

And there is a kind of competitive — you talk about this — a competitive one-upmanship among activists to embrace increasingly radical positions in order to try to stay relevant. So the more equality we have in society, the more rights [that] LGBT people obtain, the more kind of radical the activist demands have to become to make them seem as if they are just as important as they used to be when we didn't have marriage equality, etc.

RV: Yeah. In part, that's just human nature. It's not just a problem in the LGBT community. When you devote your life to achieving a cause, what do you do once you've done it? The healthy thing would be to sit back and celebrate.

I threw a party when same-sex marriage passed the Supreme Court here. But a lot of people said, “Oh, wow, we need to pivot. We need to pivot.” And, in fact, before it even happened, they were already looking for ways to pivot.

II: Why?

RV: The cynical answer, which there is some truth to, is because they wanted to continue to bring in donations for their various nonprofits and so forth. Our foundation has a trust that was left to us by a psychiatrist named Fritz Klein. So thankfully, we don't have that incentive structure where we have to constantly go to regular people and say, “Give us money.” Because then you go to regular people who don't have a lot of money. They aren't wealthy. They can't set up a trust, right?

II: Mm-hmm.

RV: And you have to convince them that what you're gonna do with that money is going

to do more good in the world than they could do in their own lives, or in the lives of their friends and family. So it really does create an incentive structure where you have to focus on a kind of sky-is-falling rhetoric.

It works extraordinarily well, and it's a beautiful thing when communities come together to make donations like that and improve society. But when it gets captured by kind of a false narrative of oppression or an exaggerated narrative of oppression, it really can become rather toxic. So I feel very grateful that our foundation is able to go about these approaches in a healthier way. Because of the fact that we aren't dependent upon donations and so forth.

II: Yeah, that is wonderful. I like the ethos that you describe at your organization, amBi, where it's not primarily about complaining about [the] ill treatment of bisexual people. It's more about, as you put it, simply fostering an environment where bisexuality is completely normal, where it's no big deal, where people can just be people. Can you talk a bit more about how you do that?

RV: Yeah. So at amBi, the philosophy is that anybody is welcome to come, but simply because of the fact that it's called amBi, which is short for ambisexual, which is an old-fashioned term for bisexual, but it also stands for a meeting of bi individuals. And we have a t-shirt that says, “Kiss me, I amBi.”

II: Yeah.

RV: Generally, the idea is that you're in a space where you can reasonably assume that most of the people you meet are probably bisexual. And in regular society, that's not the case. We're not getting together to process our oppression and work through it, and so forth. That can be healthy and healing and healing. And people of my age can still share many horror stories about mistreatment at the hands of homophobic people in their lives. So that's still a thing that people need to do sometimes.

But this is more like a space where people don't have to think about it in a way. Because of the fact that it's assumed as normal, we spend actually rather little time talking about bisexuality or anything related to bisexuality. We just hang out with each other as friends. And there's a kind of ineffable healing that happens in a space like that, because you're able to just let go of whatever trauma you may or may not have, and just be yourself.

II: I really like the fact that the space is also inclusive. So there seems to often be an assumption that the only way to have those kinds of spaces that feel comfortable is to exclude people who are not part of that group. So you can feel comfortable as, say, a black person, if you're in an all black group and you know there won't be any white people there.

And I can see the worth in segregated groups sometimes. I mean, I think this is a question of freedom of association. And I don't really have a problem with people choosing to socialize, to decide who they are socializing with. And sometimes, of course, it has [a] really clear kind of practical value.

So, for example, we have a local group that is for Ukrainians only. And I think you wouldn't be thrown out if you arrived as a non-Ukrainian, but everyone is speaking in Ukrainian. And they are talking about their experiences, and they're talking about things that are happening back home. It makes perfect sense.

But I particularly like your inclusive approach, which is, you know, if you're not bisexual, you can go join at your own risk and risk having a lot of fun around a ton of bisexual people.

RV: Yes. And a funny story. When my wife and I first joined the Meetup in LA, so this was before it grew into a big international club. When we first joined, my wife identified as straight, and she knew I was bi. We were polyamorous. We've been polyamorous our whole relationship.

But because of the fact that people like my wife are included in the club — not only because I'm married to her, but because we don't exclude straight people — she spent time casually hanging out with a lot of people who are bi. And I alluded earlier to the fact that we're starting to realize more people are bisexual than we thought. That's partially because of this thing called the Kinsey scale.

Alfred Kinsey, a sex researcher, kind of plotted on a line from zero to six, from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. And people who are mostly straight — or heteroflexible is a cute term that gets thrown around, it's kind of funny — still qualify as bi.

And my wife spending time in that circle made her comfortable acknowledging that about herself. And she thought back on the crushes she had on girls at Bryn Mawr, the all-girls school that she went to in college. And she thought, “Huh, maybe that really was a crush. Maybe that wasn't just a little college curiosity,” or whatever.

And since then, she's opened up to that. And she was actually the director of Bi.org for a few years. She's explored that side of herself, her gay side, so to speak. But, you know, she's comfortable saying she's primarily straight. I suspect that might be — and there is some data to back up this assumption — by far the largest share of the “LGBT community” is people who are mostly straight. So, excluding “straight people” would be excluding most of the members of our own group.

II: That's interesting. Yeah, I certainly know a couple of people who've had one or two very slight kind of homosexual experiences, like a crush or, you know, a little bit of a snog or something, or even have had some kind of sexual experience — usually just touching or something like that — but who definitely don't consider themselves bisexual on the principle that one swallow doesn't make a summer.

So it's interesting where people draw the line. And of course, it just shows that terminology is, as you said, people have very different ideas in mind when they use certain terms. So even deciding, even what people mean and think of when they think of someone being bisexual, that varies hugely.

RV: Yeah. And to be clear, when I'm talking about bisexuality, I'm referring to sexual orientation, so it's an attraction pattern, which has been measured in the lab, and it's real and exists. But it is on a spectrum. So it's kind of like somebody might be mostly into redheads, but every now and then a brunette turns their head, right? It's the same sort of experience.

Whether or not somebody chooses to act on it — let alone identify with it — is separate from the attraction. And if somebody gets to the point where they're engaging sexually with another person, unless they are under duress, there was some attraction there. Now, I'm not saying that all of those people should technically be classified as bisexual, but I am saying this is about more than just people wanting to seem trendy. It's acknowledging the fact that these kinds of experiences are more common than we thought and that there's no shame in them.

So, simply being open to what your body naturally tells you can be a very liberating thing.

II: Yeah, I'm sure. There's something I wanted to ask you. Yes, I guess there's a couple of things. First of all, I want to say that I really like the way that you resist a sort of political pigeonholing. So you say that there, I'm going to just read here:

 “LGBT rights can be supported or opposed by any individual across the political spectrum. However, the association of LGBT rights with the so-called political left, whatever that means to each person, is such an ingrained societal assumption that readers tend to assume any essay supportive of LGBT rights must emanate from the left. Similarly, any essay even remotely critical of the dominant LGBT dogma is often assumed to be motivated by right-wing ideology.”

And I think that's a very good point, that this is about basic liberal values and basic human rights, and therefore it shouldn't be associated with one or other partisan side of the political spectrum.

RV: Yeah, I obviously completely agree with that. Being inclusive also informs our approach to Queer Majority. Not only do we have lots of readers who are straight, and not only do we publish lots of articles on topics that are of interest to straight people, like BDSM, polyamory, [and] stay-at-home dads. We have a piece coming out by a middle-aged woman called something, I think the working title is “What I wish I had known about sex when I was in my twenties”, that sort of thing.

Because mainstream LGBT journalism becomes this echo chamber where you're just writing by and for one group of people, and that can be healing and positive, and there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're trying to broaden the conversation to be more inclusive and more liberal to get away from the us versus them thinking, that means having a publication where straight people are welcome. We have lots of straight writers. So yeah, you're right, it's not a matter of left versus right, and it's not a matter of gay versus straight either. 

II: Yeah, yeah. Could you tell us a bit about your founder? Well, not your founder, but the psychologist who left money to the Bi Foundation.

RV: He also founded it, yeah. His name was Fritz Klein, and he was a psychiatrist who was kind of a shrink to the stars, made a good living, left… a trust to the foundation. And he also started one of the first bi-specific organizations in the world. He just did a lot of great work. He wrote books about bisexuality at a time when that was still a pretty rare thing to do. He invented a concept called the Klein Grid, which was an expansion of the Kinsey scale.

It's a bit in the weeds to talk about on a podcast, but if people want to look it up, the Klein Grid, it's spelled K-L-E-I-N. It's a very important contribution to our understanding of the study of sexuality.

II: Could you maybe talk about it a little bit? Because I think people will be interested.

RV: Sure. Basically, he expanded the same zero-to-six scale that was applied to other things, other than just sexual orientation. It was also applied to things like, “Do you prefer the company of people of the same sex or the opposite sex in a platonic context?” We all know straight men who prefer to hang out with their buddies rather than girls, right?

Or do you feel more comfortable in the “gay culture” or “straight culture”? There are lots of homosexual people who don't really fit into “gay culture.” And then he also mapped all of these things across time in terms of how people felt about themselves in the past, how they feel about themselves now, and how they ideally would like to think of themselves, and started to contribute to our understanding of sexual fluidity, the fact that the way people experience their sexuality can change over the course of their lives.

Later researchers like Lisa Diamond have further corroborated this. It's especially common in women that they will never have a lesbian thought in their lives. And then suddenly in their 40s or whatever, they realize, “Boy, I think I want a girlfriend.” So I think that's important, too, because you want to get away from the kind of, I guess, it's like a red herring, this idea of “born this way.”

On the one hand, yes, it is not something people choose. They don't choose their sexual orientations. And it's some combination of nature and nurture, just like most of our psychological traits, but we don't choose them. But on the other hand, does it really matter?

The quality for whether or not to consider something good for society isn't whether or not you can choose it. It's whether or not it's positive, whether or not it hurts people, that sort of thing. So a better understanding of fluidity has helped to, I guess, make LGBT issues more liberal because we're going back to that, centering it on the concept of individual rights and liberty, and telling the government not to dictate our personal lives and whatnot, rather than this, “Oh, we can't help it. We're this poor beleaguered minority” that sort of thing. 

II: Yeah, I've always thought that the born-this-way rhetoric was a bit of a red herring. For one thing, it's possible that they will discover that it's not genetic. I think it's unlikely, but I think it's possible that they might discover that even what the biologists rather dryly called obligate homosexuality, exclusive homosexuality, might not be genetic; it might be environmental. I mean, we really don't know. And I think it's an interesting question from a biological standpoint.

You know, it's an interesting puzzle, but it doesn't have any moral valence. If it were the case that you could just click your fingers and choose your sexuality, it should also be fine to choose whichever sexuality you want. And I'm sure everyone would choose to be bisexual, though it's surely the most convenient. 

RV: I think so.

II: Yeah, the most options. I think a lot of biphobia is just envy. That's my theory. But I think we shouldn't be basing our ethics anyway on something that isn't even settled science. I mean, we really don't know. It's still a kind of mystery to evolutionary biologists. What causes exclusive homosexuality in men to take the simplest kind of form of the question, because clearly that is an evolutionary dead end.

Or in the past, it was.

Nowadays, of course, you could donate your sperm and things like that. So it needn't be any more. But in the ancestral past, if you only had sex with men, then you weren't going to leave any offspring. And that's a problem. So it's kind of an interesting puzzle, and Richard Dawkins has a nice video on it. But none of this is a question of ethics. The ethics is just, does it harm people? No.

So why not be allowed to do it as a consenting adult in a liberal society? So that's… That's my belief.

RV: Yeah. And as you say, we really don't know. I would say the fact that it's not a choice is probably true. If nurture plays a role in addition to nature, it doesn't follow from that, that it's a choice.

II: Yeah.

RV: Of course. But there is actually some evidence for what your suspicion about exclusive homosexuality being partially cultural, because people talk a lot about homosexuality in animals. But when you look at it, when you look at the data, what they're really talking about in over 1500 species that we've observed is homosexual behavior from bisexual animals.

The only two species where we have observed lifelong exclusive homosexuality are humans and domestic rams, which are both highly influenced by human culture, obviously.

Now, the fact that something is... 

II: I think parrots also.

RV: Oh, is that so? Okay, I didn't know.

II: Yeah. But it's because parrots, in many parrot species — it's impossible to tell the male from the female, at least from appearance and song and everything else that we can — we humans have been able to observe — you can tell male from female obviously by doing DNA tests or by waiting to see if one of them lays an egg. But so it's in the case of parrots, probably some listener will correct me if I'm wrong on this, but it may be that they don't even know, so there do seem to be quite a lot of lifelong homosexual matings in parrot species. But even lifelong homosexual mating doesn't necessarily imply exclusive homosexuality, so it may have to do with circumstances, [it] may have to do with [a] lack of opposite sex partners. It may be a coincidence.

You know, there could be a lot of other things motivating that behavior. But yes, mostly in animals, we're talking about homosexual behaviors, not a kind of exclusive identity. So it's still a puzzle, I think. I personally still find it an interesting puzzle, but it's not politically or morally relevant. 

RV: Oh, I completely agree. Yeah. And given the fact that bisexuality is clearly much more common than homosexuality at a minimum, that right there is really your answer to how homosexual behavior might have been allowed. That's how that could evolve.

Because as long as you're still attracted to the opposite sex, you're still very likely to procreate. That's what matters. It doesn't preclude homosexual attraction or behavior.

II: Yeah, I've read Diamond's book and I found it fascinating. And I've also, I don't want to get too into the weeds here, but I've always been struck by the fact that men will often tell a story that runs something like this, “I've always been, I didn't know I was gay. And then I realized I was gay.”

Or, you know, “I've always been gay, but I just didn't know it. I was closeted. I didn't even realize it myself. I was repressed”, etc. Whereas when women tell a similar story of a similar trajectory, they tell it as, “I used to be straight and now I'm a lesbian.” Or even just, “I used to be married or have a boyfriend, been married to a man, and now I'm with a girlfriend.”

And I find it fascinating that difference in the way in which not all men and women, but in general, men and women seem to perceive that same development, in effect, from having an opposite to having a same-sex partner.

RV: Yeah, and likely there is a partially biological explanation for that that has to do with some differences between men and women biologically. It could also be partially cultural because men and women are acculturated differently. So that is an interesting question.

II: So getting back, getting back to your work, Rio. Could you tell us how you came to found Queer Majority? How and why? And also, we haven't really talked about Bi.org, which is the other organization that you're involved in. Yeah, please tell us a bit about both those projects.

RV: Yeah. Bi.org of the three that we're discussing, is the oldest one that the Bi Foundation has been doing. My wife took over as the director for a while. But before that, when I first came on as the Assistant Director at the Bi Foundation, I was sort of the de facto editor at Bi.org as well. And during that time, particularly on social media, Bi.org has a very large following on social media. I think we have like 1.3 million likes on Facebook, something like that. Something that struck me was that our positive messaging, celebrating bisexuality, celebrating bi people who are out, and that was not partisan.

Some people would say, you know, everything's political, but we weren't really political. We were apolitical and nonpartisan in our approach to it. And it really struck me how a lot of people on social media appreciated that. We got a lot of comments saying, “Wow, this is the only LGBT page or account or organization I've seen that doesn't make it all political all the time and say,

you know, you're bi, therefore you must vote for the Democrats” or whatever, right? And I think that it provided a very important service just by giving people an apolitical space to be pro-LGBT. And then when my wife took over, she expanded the publication to cover pop culture and literature and things like that, which I thought was a really great development because it kept it interesting.

I mean, you can only publish so many essays about coming out as bi before people get bored of reading them. So now we do reviews of TV shows and novels and things like that.

I think that's terrific.

II: That's fun.

RV: Yeah, it is. It is quite fun. Queer Majority… I was involved in founding because we recognized a need to have [a] sort of deeper, more philosophical conversations about the nature of LGBT rights and how they relate to broader subjects like liberalism. So really, we settled on a tagline — different like you — which I think relates nicely to something you said earlier, Iona, about how we're all kind of different in a way.

And that's something that's the nature of being a human being. And we're all individuals. So we're celebrating that. And we basically describe our goal with QM [as] reclaiming queer discourse for liberalism. Because I really believe that LGBT rights and more broadly queer rights are a liberal value that have been co-opted by enemies of liberalism, cynically in some cases, but sincerely in others. And they're just doing the regular work of helping bi people integrate their bisexuality into their own lives and to help bi people integrate into society.

We kept running into all of these roadblocks, like that odd spectacle I experienced in DC. So Queer Majority was created to address that issue, but also because we had noticed the only people who really read Bi.org are bi people, or people who have bi friends or family. We weren't reaching the general public with that.

So with QM, we wanted to create a publication that everybody would want to read.

II: It's quite a provocative name, actually, Queer Majority. I think that if you are kind of a conservative, you might see it as a frightening vision of sort of… a bunch of sexual perverts taking over the world.

RV: This is the world liberals want: a taco truck on every corner.

II: Exactly. And of course, what you mean is that everybody is, it's kind of like St. Patrick's Day. You know, everyone is a little bit Irish on St. Patrick's Day, which I think I've always thought is an absolutely wonderfully, inclusive slogan and idea. And it's a bit like that. Everyone is a little bit queer.

RV: Yeah, exactly. So the way we're using queer, it does not mean it's not a synonym for LGBT. It applies to straight people as well. There are many ways that a person could be queer. They could be queer because they're a stay-at-home dad, and that goes against norms, or because they're… pejoratively speaking, an old maid, a woman who has chosen not to get married. There must be something wrong with her. She's going to be judged by society. That's a bit queer.

You could be into BDSM. You could be polyamorous. Most polyamorous people are not LGBT. And in fact, there's actually more legal discrimination against polyamorous people than against LGBT people now. Same-sex marriage is legal, but polyamorous marriage is not. LGBT people don't have a monopoly on the idea of queerness. And I think it's time that we return to the correct original meaning of that term and reclaim it from the woke.

II: Yeah, I agree.

RV: I'm curious, Iona, we haven't really discussed this yet in our previous conversation. So I'm curious what you think about this. I'm still figuring it out myself. Under how much of a threat do you think liberalism is under and why in the West? Because I have a very strong intuition that it is. But I'm curious what you think about that.

II: I really have no idea.

You know, whenever I have tried to project, make future projections, I've always been wrong. For example, I thought 2020 was going to be an amazing year of lots of international travel and fun. And so I just think that prediction is very, very difficult because there are so many factors involved, and there are so many known unknowns and unknown unknowns that are going to affect what happens. I think that there may be a resurgence of liberalism, due to the collapse of Russia because my guess — which of course again might be completely wrong — is that the Russian Federation is going to implode. And I think that that will be ultimately a good thing.

I, you know, I tend to be rather pessimistic about my own life, but I'm quite optimistic about future developments because I think that looking at the very long term, if you look at things on a long enough timescale, then you see a movement from illiberalism towards liberalism on almost all counts.

There are local setbacks and there are short-term and medium-term setbacks, but the general thrust is towards greater liberalism, and I do believe that that will continue. But of course, we can't take it for granted. We have to keep fighting for it all the way.

RV: Yeah, that sums up my own feelings pretty well. I think that there is a backlash against liberalism in the West, largely driven by globalization. I think that we are transitioning from an industrial economy into an information economy, and it's a consequence of that.

There's a resurgence of illiberal populism on the far left and far right, and ideologies like communism and fascism that we thought we had long ago defeated. And I think that the West, too, is still so powerful that if we are going to implode, not that we're in any danger of doing that now, but if that were to happen, it would come from inside.

I think that's why enemies of the free world like Russia spend so much time and money trying to amplify populism and discontent and to reduce faith in liberal institutions. So you're right. We simply can't take them for granted.

We don't know...to what extent they're in danger, but I would rather not be flippant about it because they might be in more danger than we think.

II: Well, that's always the case. It's always wise to be vigilant. I think I'm so concerned about what is happening in China and, in particular, in India. That to me seems like the major danger. But of course, I'm not really able to directly influence what's happening in those countries, occasionally by publishing articles and things, trying to support the liberals who are over there. But I feel the best we can do is provide a kind of bastion of liberalism here in the West and keep that whole philosophy strong. Provide a kind of beacon. So it might not work, but we'll give it our best shot.

RV: Yeah, and I think it's worth pointing out that the same people who are trying to undermine liberalism at home in the West also tend to oppose its spread abroad. They tend to oppose attempts to help people achieve liberal progress in the rest of the world, as colonialism.

I think that's misguided. Obviously, actual colonialism is very bad, but to characterize mere attempts to help spread liberal values and human rights as colonialism seems very counterproductive to me.

II: Yeah. To me, colonialism is about draining a country's resources, going in there and extracting whatever value you can get and taking it back to your home country, basically. So I actually kind of think the term settler colonialism is somewhat paradoxical and nonsensical, but let's not get into that whole thorny field. Field of worms, I was going to say, which I guess makes sense, but it's a very odd metaphor. That thorny field full of worms aerating the soil.

But I think that exporting good ideas that is not only a positive thing, it's a duty; in fact, that liberalism isn't a Western thing. It's the birthright of humanity.

RV: Yeah.

II: And so I want to see it flourishing in India. As much as I do anywhere else. More, actually, because I have more attachment to that country. But yeah.

RV: Yeah. And we can't really know how many people in less liberal parts of the world want their society to liberalize, because in many cases, they're so oppressed that they aren't able to speak freely about that.

II: Yeah.

RV: Yeah, we published a cover story a few issues ago at QM by British ex-Muslim activist Jimmy Bangash about Islamic homophobia, both in the UK and in the Middle East. And about how the left, through the pernicious misuse of the term Islamophobia, has tried to silence very necessary liberal criticism of Islam.

II: Yeah.

RV: Okay, well, that's so great, Iona.

II: Thank you so much for joining us, Rio.

RV: Thank you for having me, Iona. This has been a treat.

II: It's been my pleasure. Have a wonderful week, everyone.