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Today is the 30th anniversary of the Day that Newsweek Discovered Bisexuality. To mark the occasion, I’m going to tell you all a little story. 1/

This is the epic tale of how @ekseebacher.bsky.social and I became formally known to the United States Congress as depraved pagan scoundrels. It begins with a wedding. 2/

Our wedding. Our story begins on a bright spring morning in 1995. Our wedding day. This was a picture taken that morning. Don’t we look adorable? Don’t we look wholesome? 3/

(Dear reader: they were not wholesome.) 4/

A few weeks after our wedding, we were back home in Chicago, where we lived at the time, working for the University of Chicago. 5/

In April, at a meeting of UCBU — the University of Chicago Bisexual Union, of which Ellen was a founding member — we learned that Newsweek was planning a cover story on “Bisexuality”. A local freelancer was interested in attending one of our meetings to hear our stories. 6/

Would we be comfortable with that? Would we *ever*. 7/

The next meeting of UCBU was the best attended one we’d had in *months*. Everyone had something they wanted to bring up. It was pretty great and raucous. 8/

At that meeting, I talked a little bit about having just gotten married, and what that meant to me. That I was nervous about falling into a traditional, patriarchal relationship mode, one that might not be good for us. 9/

After the meeting, our visitor came up to me and said, in great surprise, “This was really interesting, because I didn’t expect to find anyone here who was *married*!” Oh, the poor man. I wanted to hug him. Just imagine what he must have been thinking. 10/

So he and I and Ellen arranged to have lunch the following week, and we met at the Medici Restaurant on Harper and talked for an hour or so: about our relationship, about our personal bisexual identities, what being bi means for our marriage. Stuff like that. 11/

Some weeks after that, we got a phone call from an editor at Newsweek. They were sending out a photographer. They wanted to put our picture in the magazine. 12/

Some time after that, we got another phone call from Newsweek. They had some vague questions about how comfortable we were with being prominently placed in the magazine. “Good Lord,” Ellen said. “Are they planning to put us on the cover?” 14/

In the end, Newsweek did not put us on the cover. 15/

They put us in the table of contents. 16/