So, that post was a spur-of-the-moment research hyperfixation, prompted by the meme being linked to me last night, but I got to thinking today: I bet there’s more?
Returning to the pages of The Body Politic, I found several more mentions in the Internet Archive’s collection, which ends in 1987 - when it stopped being printed, in favour of the same publisher’s tabloid newspaper format, the now-defunct print version of Xtra.
![A letter to the editor titled "Vigorous cuddling" endorses the Bambisexual Liberation Front's December 1979/January 1980 letter to the editor and "oppos[ing] the tyranny of genital primacy" generally, and is signed as the "Cuddlers' Caucus" of the BLF.](https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/cf3271d7-d4d8-47b2-b669-aae27344a252/vigorouscuddling.png "A letter to the editor titled \"Vigorous cuddling\" endorses the Bambisexual Liberation Front's December 1979/January 1980 letter to the editor and \"oppos[ing] the tyranny of genital primacy\" generally, and is signed as the \"Cuddlers' Caucus\" of the BLF.")
And then, since I was on the Internet Archive already, what else is there to say about Bambisexuals? The Bay Area Reporter's June 1982 issue flat-out rips off the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence article from TBP's March 1982 issue, only... without the joke of the "coupon" (and was the Bay Area even aware of Fran's?):
Michael Chabon's 2008 novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, uses "Bambisexual" as a malapropism from a character searching for the word "bisexual":
2006's But So Did Her Brother, which appears to be a lengthy shitpost by a gay English prof at the University of Wisconsin, in the format of a 338-page zine, says... this:
2006's Gay-2-Zee: A Dictionary of Sex, Subtext and the Sublime makes the subtext text, but gendered:
2006's Self-Organizing Men: Conscious Masculinities in Time and Space, a transmasc manifesto:
And finally, good god, 2010's The Big Black Book of Very Dirty Words:
So... what else can we learn here from these historical sources?
Well, first, I am now very confident that Bambisexual was, when originally coined, probably in the late 70s, overwhelmingly used as a term of derision for gay men seen as too vanilla, soft or cowardly to have 'real' sex. A few people tried to reclaim it, but I don't think it was very successful, given that by 1983 Richard Summerbell is mocking them via a mouthpiece OC (so to speak) with the very fancy-lad name of "Wilbur Wimplegon," and by 1984, TBP is wondering whatever happened to the Bambisexual Liberation Front.
The secondary sources are fascinating too, because they suggest a parallel history of the terminology that didn't draw on The Alyson Almanac or tumblr at any point. I can't imagine that anyone who wanted to say something positive about Bambisexuals would call Michael Jackson one out of nowhere, say, and I suspect it's only because the 2006 and 2010 slang glossary books were published in 2006 and 2010, and targeted at gay men specifically (long after Bambi has stopped being periodically re-released in theatres or pumped up as going back into the Disney Vault!!) that those writers felt it necessary to be explicit about the inspiration.
Anyway, what this exercise has reminded me, more than anything, is that there's a treasure trove of queer history just... sitting there, on the Internet Archive, and I think I'm going to do some more deep dives like this.
