Loraine Hutchins, the bisexual and feminist author behind the groundbreaking 1991 anthology Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, passed away, according to friends cited by Advocate.

Hutchins helped create the nationwide coalition that would later turn into BiNet USA and co-founded a local educational, support, and direct-action group in Washington D.C. called The Alliance of Multi-Cultural Bisexuals (AMBi), she wrote on her personal website.

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She and Lani Ka’ahumanu co-edited the 1991 anthology Bi Any Other Name, a collection of nonfiction essays, fiction stories, poetry, and art created by over 70 bisexual people. The book helped unite isolated bisexuals and educate the larger LGBTQ+ community, which was especially important in a pre-Internet era with very little bisexual representation in popular media and mainstream politics.

Lambda Book Report called Bi Any Other Name one of the Top 100 Queer Books of the 20th century, with three reprintings and over 40,000 copies in circulation at its height, Ka’ahumanu said.

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Hutchins, who grew up in Washington D.C. during the 1960s, said she gradually “learned that social justice and equality are all that really matter and that erotic justice, economic justice, and environmental justice are all connected,” she wrote on her personal website.

During Bi Awareness Week 2015, the book got a 25th anniversary edition re-release. The book’s new opening noted that bisexuals and sexually fluid people call themselves by many names (or live without any desire for labels at all). Still, it added, it’s most important to respect, respect, and understand individuals’ identities.

“In the end, identity doesn’t matter to a heart in love,” the new edition’s intro added.

In a 2015 op-ed that she co-wrote with Ka’ahumanu, Hutchins noted that unpaid bisexual volunteer activists have been the ones to continually create hundreds of community events and commemorations during Celebrate Bisexuality Week (in mid-September) each year. These same activists have pushed established LGBTQ+ organizations and even the U.S. federal government to increasingly recognize bi people.

“As youth we had no idea what the first early organizing efforts for U.S. gay rights in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s would portend,” Hutchins wrote with Ka’ahumanu. “We certainly didn’t know how dizzying the language changes, how culture-wide the debates, would become.”

“How could we have imagined when we were teenagers that, in the new century, thousands of triumphantly out LGBTQ people would walk boldly through the front doors of the White House as invited guests at Stonewall Pride receptions and governmental meetings?” the authors added.

Hutchins participated in the White House’s 2013 roundtable on bisexual under then-President Barack Obama. She also participated alongside other bi elders in a series of 2022 “Bi-alogues” hosted by the Los Angeles Bi+ Task Force.

In addition to co-editing the 2012 book Sexuality Religion and the Sacred: Bisexual Pansexual and Polysexual, she worked as a traveling adjunct professor at multiple universities and also helped organize a union for adjunct professors at Montgomery College in Maryland.

“Having reinvented myself many times in my 60-plus years, I now speak aloud what I could not as a teenager: that none of us are free until/unless all of us are free, sex and spirit are one, and our most sexually alive moments—if we would just realize it—are also our most spiritually potent ones,” Hutchins wrote before her death.

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