How an Unlikely Publicity Stunt at the 1984 DNC Paved the Way for Bi Visibility

After coming out for the second time (first as a lesbian, then as bisexual) in the early ’80s, Lani Ka’ahumanu got together with the few out bi people in the San Francisco gay and lesbian community and started BiPOL, the first advocacy organization of its kind in the United States.

The problem was, no one wanted to join—at least not publicly.

“We’d go out there speaking for the bisexual community and we’d come into our meetings going, ‘Oh my god, where are they?’ We were all confessionals, all of us, for people who were too afraid to come out as bisexual,” Ka’ahumanu, now 76 years old, says over the phone from her home in Sonoma County. “I had more lesbians come up to me, or call me on the phone and say, ‘You don’t know me, but someone gave me your number. I’ve been relating to a man for six months and I’m really scared to come out or else I’d lose my community’—which is what happened to me.”

Indeed, Ka’ahumanu understood their trepidation. In the 1970s, lesbians were fighting for visibility within the nascent gay rights movement, and identifying as one was often considered a political orientation—not just a sexual one. Early lesbian organizations encouraged bisexual women to pick a side, and many chose to hide the fact that they loved men as well as women in order to be accepted in this new community.

In response to the dominant culture’s homophobia, gay rights activists in the 1970s adopted a born-this-way, binary view of sexuality as a means of gaining legal protections that hinged on defining sexual attraction as a biological, immutable characteristic. But that political ideology didn’t match many people’s lived experience of fluid sexual desire. After she left her husband and moved to San Francisco in the ’70s, Ka’ahumanu bought into the stereotype that bisexuality was just pitstop to coming out as gay or lesbian. Then, after years of dating women, things changed when she fell in love with a bisexual man, Bill Mack, who was traveling through a Mendocino County clothing-optional resort where Ka’ahumanu worked as a chef. In 1983, she and Mack started BiPOL along with Autumn Courtney, Arlene Krantz, David Loreau, Alan Rockway and Maggi Rubenstein.

Despite the low attendance, to everyone’s surprise, BiPOL ended up having one of its most successful fundraisers to date. That same day, gay and lesbian Democrats organized a march from the Castro to the Moscone Center to promote their visibility in the DNC. And they explicitly told BiPOL organizers that bisexuals need not join them. But it was an uncharacteristically hot summer day in San Francisco, Ka’ahumanu recalls, and everyone was thirsty when they arrived at Moscone. Thankfully, the bisexuals were selling ice cold beverages outside.

“We had the last laugh on that one,” Ka’ahumanu says.

In the days leading up to the DNC, Ka’ahumanu and her fellow BiPOL activists donned campaign T-shirts and set out with clipboards to scour San Francisco for Democratic Party delegates willing to sign her candidacy form, many of whom were tipsy at lavish parties, themed by state, in the ballrooms of the Hilton and other upscale hotels. 

“Puerto Rico had rum drinks and giant prawns and big ice sculptures—no holds barred on party[ing],” she says. “Every time we walked into a ballroom, it was like, ‘Holy mackerel, this is nuts.’”

The morning of the convention, the BiPOL team was pleased to have gathered well over the 200 required signatures, and Rockway went to DNC headquarters to submit them. After a formal count, however, Democratic Party officials claimed that Ka’ahumanu didn’t qualify; almost a third of the signatures were from alternates, not the delegates themselves, they said. As Ka’ahumanu recalls, the incensed BiPOL team stormed the DNC office, which was empty because party officials were already headed to the convention. But a binder with a list of delegates’ names revealed that some of the signatures that had been discounted were indeed from actual delegates.

Security arrived. Ka’ahumanu and Rockway demanded to speak to the head of the DNC, to no avail. “We knew it was over at that point,” she says. “But when we got together, we were amazed at what we had actually accomplished from this little idea about getting visibility and using political theater.”

Their accomplishment even snared the brass ring of media coverage at the time: a mention by prominent San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, despite Caen misspelling Ka’ahumanu’s name and taking subtle jabs at her sexuality and weight. “The Oral Majority tried to get a woman bisexual candidate nominated for Vice Pres. and collected 253 names on the necessary form (you only need 200) but the Demo Nat’l Committee quickly knocked off 99 signers as ‘unofficial,’ meaning alternates. The wouldn’t-be nominee: Loni Kaahunanu, a bisexual built for two,” Caen wrote.

Sure, not everybody got it, but Ka’ahumanu looks back at the summer of 1984 as a pivotal one for bisexual visibility. In the years that followed, she would continue her fight. In 1987, she helped create the Bay Area Bisexual Network, which took off as a social and support group for the bi community, attracting dozens of members. In 1990, she organized the first National Bisexual Conference. In 1991, she and co-editor Loraine Hutchins published the influential bisexual feminist anthology Bi Any Other Name, and in 1993, she lobbied for bisexuals to be included in the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation—where she was the only out bisexual speaker.

Ka’ahumanu and BiPOL’s work undoubtedly paved the way for increased acceptance of bisexuality and other fluid sexual identities, such as pansexual and queer. She and her allies were ahead of her time in other ways, as well: studies of Generation Z suggest the youngest generation embraces a spectrum, rather than rigid binary, of sexual orientations and gender identities alike.

Ka’ahumanu says she’s heartened by these generational shifts, and the increasing number of public figures who identify as bi. But she also knows the work is not over.

“Why do bisexuals have higher depression rates, higher drug rates? The invisibility is still a factor,” she says. “The fact that we can still be told make a choice—I still hear that from people. There’s a way in which bisexuals are still dismissed, whether it’s right in your face or it’s [treated as] not as important.”