Bailey Merlin | she/her
The Bisexual Resource Center honors the life and legacy of Dr. Loraine Hutchins: a foundational figure in bi+ organizing whose work helped make our community possible long before many of us had language, safety, and/or visibility.
Some people shape movements through institutions. Others do it through presence, persistence, and a refusal to back down. Loraine did all three. For decades, she insisted that bisexual people were not a problem to be solved or not a footnote to someone else’s story. She insisted that bi+ lives were real, political, worthy of care, and worthy of being remembered.
For many of us at the BRC, Loraine’s influence is not abstract or distant history. It lives in the assumptions we refuse to make, the questions we continue to ask, and the space we try to hold for complexity. It lives in our understanding that bi+ organizing has always been intersectional, contested, and necessary.
For me personally, Loraine is someone I never met and yet know through her work. She never knew my name. We never sat in the same room. And still, my writing, my organizing, and my sense of responsibility to this community are deeply shaped by what she made possible.
There is a particular kind of gratitude that comes with inheriting a movement rather than founding one. It is the gratitude of knowing that the ground you stand on was fought for by people who were told they were asking for too much. People who were dismissed as inconvenient. People who were pressured to compromise their language, their politics, or their bodies in order to be tolerated.
Loraine did not accept tolerance as the goal.
She understood that bi+ people were being asked to disappear in multiple directions at once. She saw how heterosexual culture relied on binaries to protect itself from complexity, and how gay and lesbian movements could also reproduce those same binaries when bi+ people challenged them. She named the exhaustion of being asked to justify one’s existence over and over again. She named the harm of being oversexualized, erased, or blamed. And she kept showing up anyway.
Her organizing mattered not just because it existed, but because of how it was done. Loraine did not advocate for a narrow or respectable version of bi+ identity. She did not flatten the community into something more convenient. She made room for contradiction, for political disagreement, for desire that didn’t behave, for lives that didn’t follow prescribed paths. She resisted the urge to make bisexuality+ legible only on other people’s terms.
That resistance is a gift we are still unwrapping.
At the BRC, we often talk about visibility, but Loraine’s work reminds us that visibility without accuracy is not liberation. Being seen incorrectly can be just another form of erasure. What she fought fo was the right to be seen in full: intellectually, politically, sexually, spiritually, and socially.
She also understood that bi+ organizing does not happen in isolation. It happens in relationship to feminism, racial justice, disability justice, labor organizing, public health, faith communities, and cultural work. She rejected the idea that bi+ people needed to isolate themselves to be legitimate. Instead, she insisted that bi+ people have always been everywhere: bridging, connecting, complicating, and expanding what justice looks like.
That framework is deeply aligned with how the BRC understands its mission today. We do not exist simply to assert that bi+ people are real. We exist to build community, reduce harm, challenge systems that rely on erasure, and make life more livable for people whose identities do not fit neatly into dominant narratives.
Loraine’s legacy also includes honesty about the cost of this work. She did not pretend that organizing was glamorous or endlessly rewarding. She spoke openly about fatigue, frustration, and the pain of fighting the same battles across generations. And yet, she also held on to hope, particularly in younger people, in students, in those who were coming into language and community with fewer apologies than previous generations were allowed.
That hope matters now.
Many bi+ people today are still encountering the same myths, the same suspicions, the same demands to explain themselves. The landscape has changed, but the underlying pressures remain. Loraine’s life reminds us that progress is not linear, that gains can be fragile, and that memory is a form of resistance.
This is why archives matter. This is why telling the story matters. This is why naming our elders matters.
Even those of us who never met Loraine are part of her legacy. We are evidence that her work traveled further than she could see. Every time we insist on nuance. Every time we refuse to simplify bi+ lives for the comfort of others. Every time we build a space where people are not asked to shrink, we are continuing the work she helped begin.
The Bisexual Resource Center is grateful for Loraine Hutchins not only for what she did, but for what she made possible. We carry her influence forward in our programming, our advocacy, our care for community, and our refusal to accept erasure as inevitable.
May we honor her by continuing to tell the truth.
May we honor her by holding complexity with courage.
May we honor her by making room.
Thank you, Loraine. Your work lives on.