Gabrielle Noel

Photo by Gabrielle Noel

Gabrielle Noel has made it her mission to make people “be more aware of the B’s and the T’s in this umbrella community,” she says. The bisexual writer, speaker, and digital creative is the founder of the recently launched clothing brand Bi Girls Club, which was made with bisexual, queer, and pansexual women/femmes in mind. Ten percent of sales every month go to Bi Net USA to offset the fact that, largely due to the invisibility of bisexual folks and monosexism, bisexual people receive the least funding/resources in the LGBTQ community. “Obviously the bigotry we are united in experiencing comes from heterosexual people,” Noel says, “but there are other social systems—like transmisogyny and monosexism—that members of the LGBTQ+ community participate in. When we ignore or deny their impacts, or even when we ignore our role in them, we harm the people we claim to be bonded with,” she says. “It’s also important to center Black and Brown folks in queer activism because we are so often sidelined. We talk about how Stonewall was a riot, but it was a response to police violence against black trans women and drag queens. That should be at the forefront of our understanding of Pride.” You can find Noel’s writing on sex/sexuality, dating, cannabis, and identity in Swipe Life, Playboy, the Independent, Slate, the Huffington Post, Elle, and other platforms. —DT