Visibility Matters is a monthly column by AfterEllen.com Founder Sarah Warn about larger trends affecting lesbian/bi women in entertainment and the media.
The story I’m about to tell you is a complicated entanglement of half-truths, homophobia, and capitalism. It’s also about the larger pattern of straight women exploiting bisexuality out of carelessness or greed.
But in its simplest form, this is a story about someone making a mistake and blaming someone else for it, or trying to have their cake and eat it, too.
In either scenario, AfterEllen.com and the LGBT community are paying the price.
The story starts all the way back in 2003, when I read and wrote a positive review of NY Times best-selling novelist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s The Dirty Girls Social Club, which included a lesbian Latina character among its main characters. Five years later, when a sequel to the book was released last summer, I assigned one of my freelance writers, Teresa Ortega, to request an interview with Valdes-Rodriguez about the LGBT characters in her books. She agreed, and the interview was conducted over email on September 9, 2008.
To our surprise, Valdes-Rodriguez volunteered in the answer to our very first question (about why she included the lesbian character in her Dirty Girls books) that she herself was bisexual:
As a bisexual woman (who, as it happens, is faithfully married to a man and therefore living a “straight” life) I feel it is important to include homosexual or bisexual characters in my work. I am living proof that such things are not “choices,” but innate.We were so surprised by this revelation that Teresa sent a follow-up email on September 11, 2008 to make sure she was understanding Alisa correctly:When I was a newspaper reporter, I once did a story on “coming out” in traditional Latino societies, and I was shocked by some of the stories I heard. Horror stories. A man being thrown through a plate-glass window by his own father; a woman beaten by her relatives.
Luckily, I never faced that in my own family ÔÇò well, my mom did tell me she had hoped to have “normal” kids, but she was the non-Latino parent. I should say I never faced it with my dad, who, when I told him what I was, hugged me and said, “the greatest secret in humanity is that inside every person is a gay person.”
Teresa: Thank you for the answers you sent me for the AfterEllen.com interview. I have a few more questions to ask you as background information for my intro. First, I must ask you to pardon my ignorance about your being out as a bisexual. I did not realize this or I would have phrased some of my questions a bit differently. I did read numerous articles about you and none of them mentioned that you were bisexual, so I was wondering if you could tell me whether you have discussed your bisexuality in the media before, and if so, when and where? Alisa: No one has ever asked about it. I have posted about it several times on my blog over the years, but as for other press – you will be breaking “news”. That said, on the Kinsey Scale, I would say I’m somewhere between a 1 and a 2.In preparing the introduction to the interview, Teresa and I briefly discussed whether she should mention Valdes-Rodriguez’s controversial departure from The L.A. Times in 2000, but decided not to because it had no specific bearing on the interview, and we didn’t think it was fair to introduce potentially prejudicial information into the interview when it wasn’t directly relevant to the topic at hand. (And as a general rule, I don’t believe in sensationalizing articles and interviews on AfterEllen.com just to get more readers.)
So on Sept. 25, 2008, we published her responses to our interview questions exactly as they were written, with just a short introduction. Valdes-Rodriguez’s revelation that she was bisexual was indeed “news,” as she predicted, and the interview was picked up by several other online news outlets because she “came out” as bisexual in it.
Fast-forward six months, and it turns out that Valdes-Rodriguez stated on her own website shortly after we published the interview that she was not bisexual, and in December, made multiple statements on Wikipedia, and in emails from her official website to Wikipedia editor David Shankbone, claiming that we misinterpreted and/or made up the quotes about her being bisexual.
In response to Shankbone’s question on Wikipedia as to whether Valdes-Rodriguez was claiming the quotes about her bisexuality in our interview were “made up,” she responded, “Yes. This is Alisa. I’m not bisexual. Stop posting this garbage unless you wish to see me in court.”
Further attempts by Shankbone to clarify the obvious discrepancies on this issue and others resulted in David receiving increasingly inflammatory denials from Valdes-Rodriguez, which he chronicled this week on his blog.
She never made any attempt to contact Teresa or me to retract or update her comments.
Learning just this weekend of Valdes-Rodriguez’s claims on her website and on Wikipedia that we fabricated answers to her questions, I contacted her immediately asking for clarification, pointing out that while misinterpretations do sometimes happen in phone or in-person interviews, there was no room for misinterpretation here since we copied her answers directly from her emails verbatim, and asking why she did not contact us after the interview was published to correct the information.
In our subsequent email exchange, she did not deny making these statements on her website or Wikipedia, and continued to refuse to take responsibility for her statements to us, saying she thought she was bisexual at one time, but not anymore:
I am sorry you and Teresa interpreted my emails as me saying I am bisexual now, because I’m not and did not intend my words to be interpreted that way. I did not amend the misstatement or request clarification for several reasons. One, I figured After Ellen had cherry-picked my words to make me seem more palatable to your readership – ie ignoring my Kinsey Scale statement, or my statement that I was a straight woman married for twelve years to a man, in favor of taking the bisexual statement out of context. Two, I did not want to seem like someone who was offended by being called gay. But when someone started changing my wikipedia page as a result, saying I was gay, and I started getting email from readers asking if it was true, I had to address it.This answer does not make any sense, since it would be easy for her to verify the fact that we did not, in fact, cherry-pick her words, since she had copies of the emails she sent us. And her Wikipedia page was changed to say she was bisexual, not gay (a distinction she fails to make in her email to me), which would make sense according to Wikipedia’s guidelines because she very clearly identified as a bisexual woman in our interview.
Also, the whole point of the Kinsey scale is that sexuality and bisexuality in particular is part of a continuum, and stating that you’re between one and two on the Kinsey scale isn’t proof that you’re not bisexual, especially when you’ve already clearly identified yourself to be bisexual.
But she went one step further and insinuated that we were discriminating against her for being straight.
“I feel like I have to apologize for being straight, or something,” she wrote in the same email to me. “I feel like the message you’ve sent is that your editorial stance on me is favorable if I’m bisexual, not so much so if straight. It feels unfair.”
I think most readers would agree that AfterEllen.com’s editorial stance is very inclusive of gay-friendly straight-women (see: Tina Fey). If we had a problem with straight women, why would we have approached her for an interview in the first place, since we believed she was straight at the time?
We do have a problem, however, with straight women pretending to be bisexual to sell products to the queer community.
Even if that wasn’t her intent, it had that effect – comments left on AfterEllen.com and elsewhere on the web indicate many women paid more attention to and purchased her books because she identified as bisexual. With AfterEllen.com averaging around 800,000 unique users (readers) a month now, the kind of promotion we’ve given her over the last six months probably translated to a small but not insignificant bump in sales. We’ve frequently featured her interview in the “Editor’s Picks” section on the homepage, in part because she is – or was – one of the few openly bisexual Latina women in entertainment.
Certainly many of our readers would have bought her books regardless of her sexual orientation, but it can’t help but influence how some people view her and her work – a point Shankbone (who doesn’t know Valdes-Rodriguez and has no stake in the outcome either way) makes in his blog post about it, and a point Valdes-Rodriguez clearly understands herself if she’s willing to go to such lengths to deny she’s bisexual. By publishing these denials on her website and on Wikipedia, what she appears to be doing – aside from defaming us – is, in effect, telling the LGBT community she’s bisexual, and telling the rest of her audience (many of whom are straight teenagers, since she’s currently marketing a young adult novel she wrote) that she’s heterosexual, which strikes me as the worst sort-of opportunism.
Unfortunately, it’s the kind of opportunism AfterEllen.com readers are all too familiar with.
We have written extensively over the years about the increasing trend of straight women in entertainment and pop culture to pretend to be bisexual in order to sell products – whether that’s music, TV shows or books – but never actually date women, and then deny they’re bisexual when it’s beneficial to do so.
Nelly Furtado told Genre magazine in 2006 that she was bisexual, than hastily took it back two months later in an interview with a mainstream publication, telling them, “I guess I was humouring the journalist a little and I was reading a book about Chinese medicine, and we went off on a tangent.”
Furtado at least gets credit for setting the record straight almost immediately, and for not denying what she said. Megan Mullally, on the other hand, told The Advocate in 2003 she was bisexual (“I consider myself bisexual, and my philosophy is, everyone innately is”), then waited until 2006 – after Will & Grace was off the air – to take it back, telling our brother site AfterElton.com that she never said she was bisexual, despite the clarity of her comments to The Advocate.
These are just a few examples; there are many, many more. I wrote my first article about this trend back in 2003, when AfterEllen.com was only a year old, asking, “is this recent flood of bisexual disclosures a reflection of the changing times, or just another attention-getting trend that allows many of these women to score cool points with the younger, more open-minded generation that has increasing power at the box office?”
Meanwhile, in 2009, everywhere we turn we have Katy Perry’s song “I Kissed a Girl” promoting bisexuality as drunken experimentation, and PETA using women making out on a street corner to promote animal rights. Every bisexual character on TV (with the exception of Callie on Grey’s Anatomy) dates women only briefly, if at all, and most bisexual women in movies are murderers or highly promiscuous.
Is it any wonder no one takes bisexuality seriously?
My point is, even if legal considerations and our own journalistic integrity didn’t prevent us from falsely identifying someone as bisexual, our larger goal of improving lesbian and bisexual visibility matters would. We actually don’t want any more straight women claiming to be bisexual. It doesn’t help bisexual visibility, it hurts it.
It’s like the story of the boy who cries wolf – the more straight women falsely crying “bisexual!” the more difficult it is for actual bisexual women to get anyone to take them seriously.
Valdes-Rodriguez can play with the truth in her novels, but doing so in real life leads to anything but a fairytale ending for queer women.
Continue on to read my full email exchange with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez – which I am providing so you can see her answers in context, and to prevent accusations that we “misinterpreted” her – or click here to go to the last page and leave a comment and tell us whether Valdes-Rodriguez’s coming-out influenced your decision to read her books, and whether her subsequent denial of these claims has changed your opinion of her and her work.
The following is the full text of my email exchange with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez.
Our email address have been omitted, for privacy reasons, but everything else is presented exactly as written, in descending chronological order.
From: AfterEllen.com Editor Sent: Sat 2/14/2009 3:05 PM To: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez Subject: request for clarification from AfterEllen.com
Hi Alisa – I’m the editor in chief for AfterEllen.com. I assigned my writer, Teresa Ortega, to interview you for the site back in the fall b/c I really enjoyed your “Dirty Girls” books, and was looking forward to the sequel.
I’m writing now because one of our readers has recently let me know that you have stated on Wikipedia and your website that you did not tell us you are bisexual in the interview, and that we somehow misinterpreted your words. Can you clarify that for me?
Please respond ASAP so we can clear this up.
Sarah Warn Editor in Chief AfterEllen.com
From: Alisa Valdes Sent: Sat 2/14/2009 3:44 PM To:AfterEllen.com Editor Subject: Re: request for clarification from AfterEllen.com
Hello Sarah. Let me guess – your “reader” is David Shankbone, who is obsessed with me?
Anyway, I regret leading your writer to believe I currently identify as bisexual. I don’t. At other times in my life, I thought I might have been bisexual, namely in college. I told your reporter that if I were to grade myself on the Kinsey scale, I would be overwhelming straight, with homosexual curiosity. I don’t think we’re all any one thing entirely.And I am a staunch supporter of human rights, and work hard to include gay and lesbian characters in my work as part of my commitment to equality and justice. I think I could have worded my answer to your reporter better. To have my identity on Wikipedia now showing up as “bisexual” is incorrect and misleading, considering that I have never had a relationship with a woman, and that it has been more than 20 years since I thought I ever might. I am straight.
Thanks for asking for clarification. Beware the Shankbone; he’s creepy as hell.
Alisa
From:AfterEllen.com Editor Sent: Sun 2/15/2009 2:18 AM To: Alisa Valdes Subject: RE: request for clarification from AfterEllen.com
Hi Alisa, thanks for getting back to me so quickly. But there are still a few things I’m confused about.
I understand that people’s sexual orientation, or understanding of it, can and often does change over time, and of course you are the ultimate authority on your own sexual orientation. But I’ve seen the original emails you sent Teresa in September responding to her interview questions, and your response isn’t misleading or open for misinterpretation – you’re very clearly identifying yourself as bisexual now, not in the past (your very first response starts off, “As a bisexual woman…”).
I appreciate that everyone mis-speaks occasionally, and regrets saying/writing certain things, etc (I’ve certainly regretted some things I’ve said before). But if you wanted to amend these statements to clarify that you no longer identify as bisexual, why didn’t you contact Teresa or me after we published the interview in September?
By choosing instead to write on your website and on Wikipedia that we (intentionally or unintentionally) misquoted or misinterpreted your answers, you have implied quite publicly that we’re liars or sloppy journalists, both of which are defamatory and inaccurate (since we pasted your answers directly from your emails to us). This is especially disheartening since we have gone out of our way to promote you and your books on our website over the last 6 months (so much so that “Dirty Girls on Top” even tied for our Visibility Award this year for Best Novel with LGBT characters). Why didn’t you just admit on your site/Wikipedia that you made those statements and now want to amend them, instead of unfairly hurting our credibility?
Sarah
From: Alisa Valdes Sent: Sun 2/15/2009 9:51 AM To: AfterEllen Editor Subject: Re: request for clarification from AfterEllen.com
Are you saying you would not have promoted my books if you believed I were straight?
Alisa
From: Alisa Valdes Sent: Sun 2/15/2009 11:12 AM To:AfterEllen.com Editor Subject: Re: request for clarification from AfterEllen.com
I am sorry you and Teresa interpreted my emails as me saying I am bisexual now, because I’m not and did not intend my words to be interpreted that way. I did not amend the misstatement or request clarification for several reasons. One, I figured After Ellen had cherry-picked my words to make me seem more palatable to your readership – ie ignoring my Kinsey Scale statement, or my statement that I was a straight woman married for twelve years to a man, in favor of taking the bisexual statement out of context. Two, I did not want to seem like someone who was offended by being called gay. But when someone started changing my wikipedia page as a result, saying I was gay, and I started getting email from readers asking if it was true, I had to address it.
Here is what you need to know about me: I am sort of a reverse Larry Craig. I WISH I were gay. I have long thought (probably stupidly) that life would have been easier for me if I were. (I wrote of this in my most recent book, my experience showing up as Lauren’s with Elizabeth.) I tried, in my late teens and very early twenties, to fall in love with women; it did not work for me. It’s that simple. So while there is some longing to be a lesbian in my life, I am sorry to say I’m just not a lesbian, or bisexual – though I tried. In the end, my genetics respond to men.
I hate having to talk about this. I feel like I’m insulting you or something and that’s not my intention at all. I feel like I have to apologize for being straight, or something. I feel like the message you’ve sent is that your editorial stance on me is favorable if I’m bisexual, not so much so if straight. It feels unfair. Maybe this is what it’s like to be a gay person in the straight world. I don’t know. We don’t choose to be what we are, but we can certainly make choices to be fair and just toward those who are different, which is what I’ve tried to do in my work.
All best,
Alisa
From: AfterEllen.com Editor Sent: Sun 2/15/2009 4:51 PM To: Alisa Valdes Subject: RE: request for clarification from AfterEllen.com
Hi Alisa – thanks for the explanation. But there was no interpretation involved – we literally copied and pasted the words you wrote into a Word document and published the interview. Your comments about the Kinsey scale and being married to a man are both in the interview we published, exactly as you wrote them, in the paragraph you began with “As a bisexual woman…”. Since you would also have copies of the emails you sent us, you could have easily checked those emails to compare what you actually wrote to what we published before assuming (and telling other people) we cherry-picked your words.
Re: your comment that, “I feel like the message you’ve sent is that your editorial stance on me is favorable if I’m bisexual, not so much so if straight,” I’m disappointed that you’re choosing again to impugn our credibility instead of just admitting you did not accurately represent yourself in the interview.
I believed you were straight when I positively reviewed your book “Dirty Girls Social Club” back in 2003. I believed you were straight when I asked Teresa to pursue an interview with you in 2008. We were interested in talking to you because your books included LGBT characters, not because we thought you were bi.
We have always interviewed/promoted the work of straight women (or women who are not openly gay/bi) as long as they are gay-, and/or write, play, or direct queer characters in their movies, TV shows or books. On the homepage just today we have an interview with straight actress Eliza Dushku, and straight TV creator Kari Lizer.
We had no idea you were bisexual and were in fact surprised when you volunteered this information (you’ll notice none of the questions in the initial email are worded as if you’re bi – we don’t even ask about your sexual orientation, because we assumed you were straight, since most people are, and because you had never talked about being bisexual in previous interviews, etc.) Our surprise at this revelation is clear from Teresa’s follow-up email to you after you responded to her interview questions, saying, “First, I must ask you to pardon my ignorance about your being out as a bisexual. I did not realize this or I would have phrased some of my questions a bit differently.” When she then asked you why you had not discussed your bisexuality before, you responded, “no one had never asked” and told us we would be “breaking ‘news'” by reporting on this information.
In other words: it was very clear from our communication with you at the time that we didn’t know you were bisexual prior to the interview, and that not only were you were fine with us identifying you as bisexual in the article, but you knew it would be news, and you had multiple opportunities to review and amend your statements before we published them.
The reason your declaration of bisexuality matters is because when you volunteered that you were bisexual, you became inspiring to queer women (especially queer Latina women, since there are so few openly gay or bisexual Latina women) in a different way than you were as a straight woman who includes queer characters in her book. The latter is definitely valued (which is why we asked for the interview in the first place), but with so few openly gay/bi women to identify with, queer women are obviously going to pay special attention to those who are. A comment on your interview by one of our readers illustrates this – she wrote, “Now I’m really glad I found this site and joined, or else I might have never known about these books or this author. Being a ‘bi latina’ myself I’d love to read something I could identify strongly with…”
The article itself got picked up by several other news outlets online because you had “come out” as bisexual in it, which introduced new readers to you and your books; I have seen more than one comment elsewhere on the web from people saying they discovered your work because of our interview, which they may not have even happened up if not for other news outlets picking it up because of the “news” of your coming out as bisexual in our interview.
By subsequently taking it back on your site and on Wikipedia, you appear to be just one more in a long line of straight women exploiting bisexuality to sell a products (music, movies, or in your case, books) to the LGBT community. In the process, you have cheapened bisexuality and made it look like something “bad” that you want to avoid being associated with. When you posted a question in the FAQ on your website saying, “I saw a profile of I saw a profile of you on Wikipedia that said you graduated from Butt Crack University, that you’re gay, that you are a communist and that you suffer from bipolar disorder. There was more awful stuff, but my mom will be mad if I write t here. Is any of it true?” and then you answered it by denouncing Wikipedia as the devil but not correcting the fact that the question lumped being gay in with “awful stuff” like being a community and going to Butt Crack University, you further the idea that being gay or bisexual is a bad thing.
I know your books have lots of positive LGBT characters in them, and I don’t doubt that you have gone out of your way in your books to be inclusive, but can you see how you’re sending mixed messages here?
You write below, “But when someone started changing my wikipedia page as a result, saying I was gay, and I started getting email from readers asking if it was true, I had to address it.” That says to me that you were OK with being considered bisexual by LGBT people, but not by the rest of the world. That’s far more offensive to gay people than simply correcting your statements immediately after they were published.
I did not then and do not now care if you’re straight – there are many straight women who have done wonderful things for the LGBT community – but I do care if you pretend to be bisexual only when it’s convenient, or use bisexuality to sell your product to our community. Because aside from just being unethical and misleading – especially to the young Latina woman who might be inspired by your decision to come out – it’s actions like this that contribute to Americans continuing to view declarations of bisexuality with skepticism and disbelief.
I also care that you disingenuously used AfterEllen.com and the LGBT community in general to sell books – by letting our readers think you’re bisexual, but making sure the readers of your young adult or mainstream novels know you’re not – and that you have impugned our credibility because of mistakes you made and don’t want to admit to publicly. In the seven years AfterEllen.com has been in existence, we have interviewed hundreds of women, and never been accused of misrepresenting anyone’s words. When there have been mistakes made, we always correct them immediately – something which you need to do.
I know that you’ve deleted the original blog post on your site denouncing our interview as false, but your false claims that we made up your statements about your bisexuality are still on Wikipedia. You need to fix that.
If you would like to send me a statement to add to your interview on AfterEllen.com acknowledging that you mis-spoke and do not currently identify as bisexual, I would be happy to add that immediately. Then Wikipedia will no longer identify you as bisexual, and our readers will not be misled by your responses into believing you identify as bisexual, either.
I would appreciate you sending me the statement as soon as possible, so our readers do not continue to believe you are something you’re not, and so that you are not continuing to defame AfterEllen.com’s credibility on Wikipedia.
Thanks,
Sarah
From: AfterEllen.com Editor Sent: Sun 2/15/2009 7:59 PM To: Alisa Valdes Subject: RE: request for clarification from AfterEllen.com
Hi again, Alisa – it’s important that I set the record straight immediately given your public claims that we fabricated your answers, so I’m going to do so on AfterEllen.com tonight. If you want to provide any further explanation, or give me the amendment I requested acknowledging that you did in fact make those statements about your bisexuality in September, please send them to me by 7pm PST/10pm EST.
Thanks,
Sarah
Update No. 1 (Tuesday, 2/17): I received no response by the publication deadline, or by 3am PST/6am EST Monday (when I went to bed). A few hours later, Valdes-Rodriguez responded to this article with her own blog post entitled “Under Attack By Lesbians”, in which she acknowledged that “I am bisexual,” and said she tried to take it back because she is “afraid of homophobic people who would crucify me for it,” specifically the far-right fringe of the Cuban exile community, who she says have made attempts on her life. The lengthy post alternately apologizes to and attacks the LGBT community, and me, asking us to “try to imagine what it is like to have dangerous stalkers.”
Update No. 2 (Thursday, 2/19): Valdes-Rodriguez has now deleted this blog post.
