Source: Love Is Blind / Netflix
I noticed early this morning that #BisexualMenExist was trending on Twitter, and I sent it to a friend, finding the timing very interesting considering we had just had a long discussion about Carlton Morton from Netflix’s Love Is Blind series. I didn’t see who began the trending topic or an explanation at the time though, so I went about my day.
Hours later, #BisexualMenExist was still trending with thousands upon thousands of men sharing their stories and photos. That same friend ended up sending me a link to a story on the Advocate, where Vaneet Mehta, who says he is a writer and blogger, explained that he got the hashtag going, as it turns out, because of an “uptick” in what was deemed biphobia because of Love Is Blind.
“I saw several successive comments after that really upset me,” Mehta told the publication. “My hope was to pull the conversation back! The biphobia towards men had been a mess and I wanted [sic] spread some positivity instead. I did the same thing before, using the same hashtag. So I decided to bring it back and start a positive conversation, and maybe cheer myself up in the process”
Morton, in case you don’t plan on watching and didn’t know, is engaged to be married to a young woman named Diamond Jack on the series. He makes a connection with her without the two seeing each other, but only by communicating in isolated pods. As the show works, that connection is made in a span of literally under 10 days, and he hopes to marry her just a few weeks later. The whole thing happens in 28 days.
The only issue is that Morton waits to tell her he’s bisexual because he’s concerned she will take issue with it. When he finally confides in her after proposing, she, a day later, lets him know how she really feels about it. She takes this delayed information as him not being honest but doesn’t shut down them being able to work. Nevertheless, things don’t go well to say the least.
So when I found out the hashtag, or at least this iteration of it, was born out of a disappointment in the public response to that particular episode of Love Is Blind, I could get it in a way. I’m sure people took their disapproval of Morton’s way of going about things too far. Twitter is known for that unfortunately. It’s also important that people have a different perspective of bisexuality, where there isn’t an assumption that because you’ve dated and or loved someone of the same sex in the past, you will be so easily swayed to cheat on a partner of the opposite sex. That often prompts people, usually women, to decide they won’t date a bisexual man from jump because at one point he was with a man and could be with one in the future. Though preference is preference, it is time for our way of thinking to shift.
However, I also couldn’t really get with it. The hashtag as a whole is important, but Morton is not the person who needs to be the poster child for the creation of it.
He didn’t owe an explanation to the whole world about his sexuality, but he sure owed one to the woman he was weeks away from marrying, especially if it was enough of a concern for him to end up frustrated and in tears about more than once. Sure, its 2020 and people date whomever they choose, but if you are proud, as he claimed he was, you can be forthcoming so that the person you want to be a part of your life will not be blindsided and have a choice in knowing the person they decide to move forward with has been fully honest. You don’t emotionally pull them in to where you want, then tell them you have a history of being with women and men, then lash out at them when they feel betrayed. And for the record, Jack never said she couldn’t be with him, that’s why she returned to his side to have a conversation. He chose to explode, insult her and call her a b—h when she called him out for withholding that information. He ignored all that to keep saying that he could have been one of those dudes to keep such information to himself but he was an upstanding one because he didn’t.
