I would eventually figure it out and come back. “That way, when you come back, you won’t have damaged your reputation and you won’t have trouble finding a match.” To my mother, leaving Orthodoxy was a phase, even at age 25. She found it ironic that the cousin said he was “not as religious as your daughter.” I asked her why she doesn’t just tell our cousin that I’m no longer religious, and if she’s not telling her or anyone else, then what does she tell the matchmakers who must still be calling? “I tell them you’re seeing somebody,” she said. In June, while I was on my first non-Orthodox trip abroad at a summer program in Exeter, U.K., my mother told me that a cousin who’d hosted me for Shabbos a few times in Washington Heights, when I was exploring Modern Orthodoxy, had suggested a potential match. I came out to my mother in April, around Passover, when I could no longer avoid it. I moved out of my parents’ home in Boro Park, Brooklyn in January 2014. The responses to my coming out as queer – both this coming-out as bisexual and my later coming-out as nonbinary – were similar to responses I got from family and community when I came out as ex-Orthodox. I don’t currently use the term bisexual for myself because my sexual and romantic orientations need more complex descriptors, but bisexuality still forms an important part of who I am. When I felt safe enough to come out to more people, one lesbian friend said to me, “You’ll figure it out eventually,” as if coming out as bisexual was either just a step to figuring out that I was fully lesbian or testing the waters only to discover I was fully heterosexual. I grappled with the messages that I got from all kinds of media which I can now recognize as bi-erasure. I came out at first to two bisexual friends who, incidentally, are married to each other. I am asexual/demisexual and panromantic, but my first queer coming-out was as bisexual. While Miriam is a real person and this isn’t a scripted show, the framing of the season – beginning with Bat and Ben’s statement that Miriam will end up with a man and ending with that scenario apparently playing out – reinforces the idea that Miriam’s bisexuality was never real, that she was just “experimenting,” just “going through a phase.” While we see Miriam dating two girls over the course of the show, each of whom appears in just one episode, her boyfriend Nico appears in three episodes and the relationship appears to be going strong by the end of the season. Speaking to her husband Ben, Bat says, “Miriam is in that time in her life where she is, like, trying everything out, but I definitely think it’s, like, an experimental stage… It’s like a shock value factor, I think she’ll still end up with a guy.” Ben agrees, “Yeah, I don’t see her settling down with a woman.” By the end of the season, Bat and Ben are proven right. While Robert’s sexuality is never questioned and never a major plot point – his reluctance to date has nothing to do with homophobia – the show reinforces negative stereotypes about bisexuality through its treatment of Miriam. Its queer themes aren’t as prominent as its religious and feminist themes, with only two openly queer lead characters: Robert Brotherton, the gay COO of Elite World Group, and Miriam - Julia Haart’s bisexual daughter. The Netflix reality show My Unorthodox Life misrepresents Orthodox communities, ex-Orthodox individuals, and feminism. In the case of bisexuality, people often have their identities mischaracterized as an insatiable desire for multiple sexual partners, and in the case of ex-Orthodoxy - an insatiable desire for material pleasure over spiritual. Within the queer community, bisexual people often face erasure from their fellow queers or queer allies who assume that the bisexual person will eventually “figure out” whether they’re really gay or straight. Both groups also share the condescending doubt they face, often expressed as “it’s just a phase.” As an ex-Orthodox queer person myself, I’ve faced this kind of erasure in multiple parts of my life. LGBTQIA+ and ex-Orthodox groups both talk about “coming out.” Those of us who belong to both groups often have to specify which one we mean: “I came out as ex-Orthodox” or “I came out as lesbian,” etc.
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