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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/

The photographer Newsweek sent was a delightfully twee man with a very earnest young assistant. We all spent a couple of hours around the university archways and arcades, finding dramatic backdrops to work with. 13/

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

They put us in the table of contents. 16/

And a sidebar. 17/

Is your wife full Canadian or just Midwestern?