Remembering the groundbreaking bisexual activist and author Loraine Hutchins

Loraine Hutchins, an esteemed bisexual activist and author, has died. Her death was announced this week on social media and confirmed by friends, who are now recalling how much she contributed to bisexual visibility and acceptance through her writings and activism.

“Loraine Hutchins was one of my bicons [bi icons] — I’m considered a bi-plus OG, but Loraine was there even before me,” says writer, editor, and activist Robyn Ochs. “She’s someone who most definitely thought outside the box — she was creative and persistent and had such a huge impact on the bi-plus movement of the ’80s and ‘90s.”

Related: What Does It Mean to Be Bisexual?

Hutchins and Lani Ka’ahumanu edited the 1991 anthology Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. It was one of the first three bi anthologies in world, says Ochs, who has an essay in the book. It was named one of Lambda Book Report’s Top 100 Queer Books of the 20th Century and has been reprinted three times.

“That book really helped me with my coming-out,” adds Mimi Hoang, a Los Angeles-based psychologist, life coach, advocate, and founder of three bi-plus organizations. It was feminist, multicultural, and helper her feel she wasn’t alone, Hoang says: “It really created a safe space for people who didn’t fit in the binary.”

“Without her, we really wouldn’t have the movement that we had,” she says. “I had always considered her to be one of the grandmothers of the bisexual movement.” Hutchins, Ka’ahumanu, and Ochs are “giants” of the movement, Hoang says.

“That book still has an impact,” says Ochs, who met Hutchins at the National Bisexual Conference in San Francisco in 1990.

Hutchins went on to coedit Sexuality, Religion and the Sacred: Bisexual, Pansexual and Polysexual Perspectives with H. Sharif Williams. It was published in 2011. Her doctoral dissertation, Erotic Rites: A Cultural Analysis of Contemporary United States Sacred Sexuality Traditions and Trends, was published in 2011. More recently, she contributed articles to Bi Women Quarterly, a publication Ochs edits.

Hutchins was a “gypsy-adjunct” professor at various colleges, as she wrote on her website, including Montgomery College in Maryland, where she was vice president of the union for adjunct professors, Local 500 of the Service Employees International Union. She also taught courses online.

As a teenager in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in the 1960s, “I learned that social justice and equality are all that really matter and that erotic justice, economic justice, and environmental justice are all connected,” Hutchins wrote on her site. “But I could not speak this insight aloud for many years.”

She helped create BiNet USA, the national bisexual network, and she served on its board of directors in its first years in the ’90s. She cofounded an educational, support, and direct action group in Washington called the Alliance of Multi-Cultural Bisexuals, or AMBi.

Related: How to Make Bisexual Invisible No More

Hoang, who has founded three bi-plus organizations since the ’90s, met Hutchins at the White House bisexual issues roundtable in 2013, during Barack Obama’s presidency. Then they kept in touch through Facebook. “She was friends to many — she was such a smart, funny, intelligent person,” Hoang says.

In 2022, one of Hoang’s groups, the Los Angeles Bi+ Task Force, hosted a Zoom discussion in its series of “Bi-alogues” with bi elders, including Hutchins, ABilly S. Jones-Hennin, Ka’ahumanu, and Ochs, moderated by board member Mike Szymanski.

“We had that really lovely panel, hearing everybody talk about the early days, when there was no bisexual representation at all,” Hoang says. “I just feel so grateful that my org was able to put on that event.” Jones-Hennin died last year, and now Hutchins is gone too, she notes.

In 2015, with a 25^th anniversary edition of Bi Any Other Name being released, Hutchins and Ka’ahumanu contributed an article toThe Advocate. “In some ways things have changed tremendously for the better for bisexuals since Bi Any Other Name brought over 70 different voices sharing their bi stories in essays, poems, cartoons, and photos with the public,” they wrote. “And in some ways, nothing much has changed at all, except that we now have credible research results that puts numbers to what we knew existed — the shocking and depressing statistics that document the exact ways bisexual people are disproportionately stigmatized, discounted, and hurt. Still, the children of today grow up in a different world than the one we elders entered. It is no longer as stigmatizing or as alienating and isolating to be bi, at least in some areas of the country sometimes.”

In their introduction to the anniversary edition, they noted, “What’s most important is respecting each person’s self-identity and being recognized and understood for who we are. Eventually perhaps the word bisexual will go the way of homosexual and fall from favor. Meanwhile we live and work with all the words we have. In the end, identity doesn’t matter to a heart in love.”

The best way to honor Hutchins’s memory, her friends say, is to keep fighting for bi rights, acceptance, and visibility and to remember her contributions. “She made the B in LGBT what it is,” Hoang says.