IKEA Pride Collection’s Bisexual Couch Receives Mixed Feelings
IKEA’s pride loveseat collection debuted at the end of Pride Month and received the most buzz for its bisexual inspired couch.
To celebrate Pride Month, the furniture company IKEA announced 10 loveseats in their pride collection. Each couch represents an LGBTQ+ identity, inspired by the various pride flags, including the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender flags. The bisexual inspired couch evoked the most online buzz. Brian Lanigan, the bisexual poet and the inspiration behind the bisexual loveseat, has attempted to respond to the buzz.
An IKEA loveseat collection inspired and designed by members of the LGBTQ+ community was revealed earlier this week to celebrate Pride Month.
On the campaign page, it says the IKEA loveseats are meant to celebrate the identities of 2SLGBTQ+ individuals and share stories of love. They chose to use the 2SLGBTQ+ acronym to include 2-Spirit indigenous individuals who carry both masculine and feminine spirits.
The collection was met with mixed feelings and online buzz from queer individuals. Although the company has not announced plans to sell the loveseats, some queer individuals worry it’s still an attempt to use Pride Month as a marketing strategy.
A queer employee at IKEA, who prefers to be anonymous and will use the pseudonym Jasmine Rothfield, does not think the collection is unique to the company. She believes it was released during pride to market to queer people: “Honestly, as an IKEA employee, I know this is not something unique to IKEA and it’s probably going to happen anywhere I work.”
Out of all the couches, the bisexual couch has gained the most attention. It was inspired by the story of Brian Lanigan, a bisexual spoken word poet, and was designed by queer artist Charlotte Carbone. Its design has layered handprints in the colors of the bisexual flag — pink, blue, and purple — and in the middle it has the words: “When you change OR to AND, nobody believes you.”
This line was taken from one of Lanigan’s spoken word poems he performed over 10 years ago on bisexual erasure. The full quote is, “You’re welcome to love boys or girls, but when you change OR to AND, nobody believes you.” This is the only couch with a quote printed on it and this has evoked much of its online reaction.
The loveseat went viral on Twitter, where one user wrote: “Somehow the words are my least favorite part. They’re weird and make you think about biphobia, whereas the other couches are just pretty.”
Jessica Carlson, a bisexual-identifying therapist, also expressed confliction toward the bisexual couch because she believes it was trying to make a bigger statement than the others, which only represented the identity attached to them. Carlson said she believes the statement it was trying to make is important, but didn’t understand why the other couches did not make statements like that as well.
Anthony Ayala, a member of the Bear Closet Decal leadership team at UC Berkeley, a class that focuses on creating welcoming spaces for LGBTQ+ students, commented on the partial quote:
“If you’re going to market a ‘bisexual couch’ to mainstream consumers, you probably shouldn’t pull an excerpt from a poem without further context.”
Ayala also expressed concern that IKEA released this collection to engage in performative activism for the LGBTQ+ community, and did not make him feel “good or visible” as a gay man.
Users on Twitter have also taken to making memes out of the bisexual couch, while others had more positive responses.
Although Brian Lanigan, the inspiration behind the bisexual couch, had no say in the actual design, he loves the couch. During the interview, he said the purpose of IKEA’s campaign was to highlight the stories of specific queer members, and thought it connected to his story well.
In response to the memes online, he said he is “glad to have played a part in sparking discourse on the negative responses bisexual folks often receive.”
“If there’s something I want people to know, it’s that while it was part of a campaign from a larger company, the actual loveseat was the design and collaboration of two queer artists with a common goal of flipping something negative — my experience with bi-erasure — into something beautiful.”