Why Does Vogue Think Bisexuality Is a Phase?

Bisexual advocates are calling foul on Vogue after a profile of model turned actress Cara Delevingne insinuated Delevinge’s sexuality might be a “phase.”

In fact, more than 18,600 people have signed a petition launched by a bisexual woman, asking Vogue's editor in chief, Anna Wintour, for an apology and to recognize that "being LGBT isn't a 'phase!'"

In the cover story for the July issue, Delevinge told Vogue writer Rob Haskell she started to question her sexuality as a young girl.

“It took me a long time to accept the idea, until I first fell in love with a girl at 20 and recognized that I had to accept it,” Delevingne told Vogue. “But I have erotic dreams only about men. I had one two nights ago where I went up to a guy in the back of a VW minivan, with a bunch of his friends around him, and pretty much jumped him.”

Delevingne has long been open about her fluid sexuality. The model has been linked to female and male love interests, and is currently dating singer Annie Clark, who performs under the name St. Vincent.

“If I ever found a guy I could fall in love with, I’d want to marry him and have his children," Delevingne told Haskell. "And that scares me to death because I think I’m a whole bunch of crazy, and I always worry that a guy will walk away once he really, truly knows me.”

That's when Haskell offers Delevingne a solution to her hesitance in revealing her "crazy" to a male partner: “Trust a man.”

"When I suggest to Cara that to trust a man, she might have to revise an old and stubborn idea of hers — that women are perennially troubled and therefore only women will accept her — her smile says she concedes the point,” Haskell wrote. "Her parents seem to think girls are just a phase for Cara, and they may be correct," added the writer.

Advocates say Vogue missed the mark when reporting on Delevingne’s sexuality. Calling bisexuality a phase is a harmful trope that erases the bisexual community.

“The only way to combat this kind of misinformation is by calling out media outlets which repeat these stereotypes uncritically,” Julie Rodriguez, the bisexual woman who started the petition demanding an apology from Vogue, tells The Advocate. “I do think that Vogue's misstep in this article came from a place of ignorance, not hate — so my hope is that the petition helps educate the editors and writers of the publication, so they can do a better job of reporting on bisexual celebrities in the future.”

When contacted by The Advocate, LGBT media watchdog GLAAD declined to comment on-the-record about Vogue's "misstep."