A Bisexual Love Story?

Also a quick and semi-related anecdote about Dan Harmon.

Some time last year, I was sent a galley copy of Akwaeke Emezi’s novel, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty, which is a thing that happens when you’re a writer and people think you might be able to do book reviews (I very rarely do book reviews, it is not my beat). I meant to read it, I really did, but for some reason — possibly because I remembered struggling to get into Freshwater, one of Emezi’s earlier works, though that may have been more about where I was at the moment than about the work itself — I just… didn’t read it. It sat on my coffee table, and I looked at it, and I thought about how I should read it, but I didn’t.

A few months ago, my friend Kendra told me that she had just read a book that she thought I would love. It was a bisexual love story, she declared, and a very good one. It will probably not shock you to learn that the book she was talking about was, in fact, the very same book that had been sitting on my coffee table for a while. I resolved to read it, and moved it to my nightstand to encourage this effort.

I still didn’t read it.

Then, earlier this month, my friend Morgan also told me that she had just read a book that she knew I would love; a sexy bisexual love story. And when she mentioned the name I was like, “Oh, I’ll put it on my library list” until something clicked and I realized she was recommending the very book currently sitting on my nightstand, the book I had kept promising myself I would read and then not reading.

I finally started reading it. I’m only halfway into it, but everyone was correct: I love it.

Because I knew going in that this was a Bisexual Book™️, I entered it with my eyes peeled for Signs of Bisexuality™️. How was it going to be flagged, you know? How was it going to be Represented™️? And while I am, as I noted, only halfway through the book, I can say that the answer is “subtly at first, and then at one point really heavy handedly, and that’s fine.” Initially it comes out in subtle comments — the protagonist’s best friend is always dating women but seems to also be sexually attracted to men based on how she talks about them, and the protagonist is only dating men but alludes to some sapphic experiences — and then at one point the protagonist is having a conversation with a man that she announces is “the most bisexual conversation ever” and it’s like, okay, there we have it, we are putting the subtext in text.

I found that “most bisexual conversation ever” line to be a little irritating, a little forced, except it’s probably true to life because we do stuff like that, don’t we. We have to name our bisexuality, and other folks’ bisexuality, because otherwise it all feels too ephemeral, like it’s going to go unnoticed if it’s not forcefully called out.

And it’s weird, right? Back in the end of 2011, when I was processing some shit after the end of a four year relationship, I went back to my old LiveJournal entries and started making them into comics. I’m not sure what initially inspired this — mostly that I was having fun with Comic Life at the time and it seemed like a thing to do — but it eventually resulted in an over 200 page collection of comics about sex and dating when I was 22, 23, 24. (You should buy it, it’s very good.) Sometimes when I read through it — which I do from time to time, like I said, it’s pretty good — I find myself worrying that it is somehow insufficiently bisexual, that I am not doing a good job of Bisexual Representation™️ because, save for a very subtle reference to a threesome (blink and you will absolutely miss it, and maybe you’ll miss it even if you don’t blink), there’s really no sapphism in the collection. It’s about my chaste obsession with one boy, and sexual obsession with others, and save for the way my bisexuality and my sluttiness have always felt intertwined, it’s hard for me to say that this book counts as Bisexual Representation™️.

Except it is, though. Because it’s a documentation of a young bisexual woman navigating romance in the mid-aughts. That is what it is. And though these things don’t appear on the page — the comic itself is, uh, not an authoritative documentation of my life at the time, just snapshots of a handful of moments — while all of this was going on I was in a roller derby league with an ex-girlfriend of mine, and I was a contestant in the Miss LEZ Pageant (unanimously selected as Miss Congeniality?!) and I developed a crush on a fellow contestant and one time visited her at the upscale cocktail bar where she worked, mooning over her as she fed me drink after drink (nothing else happened, though, not really). And I didn’t include these moments because they weren’t part of the narrative, because it would feel forced to include them, to scream, “Hello did you know I am bisexual?????” when the story is about a specific journey with a collection of men. It didn’t serve the story to shoehorn these experiences in, so I didn’t. But they were experiences I was having all the same.

The thing I’m circling around — which I talked about last week, too — is that when I really think about it, Bisexual Representation™️ feels like such an unfair burden. It requires us to fit our stories, our experiences, into a very limited and predetermined frame of Acceptable Bisexuality™️, one that makes sure that everyone knows that the conversation we are having is a Bisexual Conversation™️. Within the frame of the traditional love story, it’s even more fraught: you’re supposed to end up with just one person at the end, and that “correct” person is supposed to negate every other relationship you’ve had along the way. If your “true love” is one gender, what does that say about all the other loves of other genders you’ve explored? Does that make them less real? Does that make you less bisexual?

The threat of bisexuality is that it upends so many of the assumptions of heteronormative love and romance and family structure, far more so than merely being gay or lesbian does. You can be Pete Buttigieg and be gay and have a nice little happily ever after that largely hits all the beats that a straight fairy tale does. But if you do this while bi, there is always something left hanging, always the open question of whether you are still bi at the end of the tale, because bisexuality is in direct contradiction with the overarching structure of the story you’re supposedly living. What does it mean to say “love is love” if you cannot fit your own love story into the box that hetero culture provides?

And again, I’m not against Bisexual Representation™️ or bisexual love stories. I’m enjoying You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty quite a bit, and it’s nice when bi artists get to authentically represent their bi experiences in stories and books and on TV. That’s all nice. But it’s kind of a trap, you know? Because Bisexual Representation™️ pushes us into a corner where you are only bi if you are “openly” so, where my stories of being a young bi woman “don’t count” because they aren’t sufficiently, explicitly bisexual. It pushes us into a corner where you’re only bisexual if you’re shouting it in loud, declarative statements — rather than allowing us to be in a place where everyone could be bisexual, but simply not directly affirming that fact.

[Slight tangent but this weekend I put on some episodes of Community while I was cooking and one of the ones that came on was the season three ep “Advanced Gay,” which reminded me how I’d gotten into a Twitter scuffle with Dan Harmon after that ep originally aired because I thought the ep was, uh, low-key homophobic, and before he penned this relatively thoughtful Tumblr statement his initial response to me saying that all the gay characters were cringey stereotypes was to say something like, “Well, how do you know the panini making astronaut wasn’t gay too?” and I mean, touché, Harmon. Touché.]

Anyway. The fundamental problem with “representation” is that it always relies on generalization. You cannot accurately represent all eight billion people on this planet; if you assume that 4% of the world is bi (why not, right?), then that’s three hundred and twenty million bi people currently walking the globe. How are you going to encapsulate all those bisexual lives, those bisexual stories with nuance and honesty? I mean, you’re not. And that’s not a problem, per se, it’s just a reality.

The problem is when we confuse representation with rights, when we act like being in a book making Explicitly Bisexual Comments™️ is as good as it gets, when we act like Very Special Episodes™️ of television are the best we can hope for. I, personally, believe that we deserve something a lot bigger. And I believe if we lived in a culture that truly accepted bisexuality, that truly saw it as real, then the Bisexual Representation™️ of it all would just more naturally flow. Not least because we’d be aware that 22-year-old girl mooning over two wildly inappropriate men might also be recovering from the time a girl she was in love with broke her heart; because we’d understand that bisexuality lives as much in the hidden crevices of the self as it does in the visible forefront. Because we’d understand that everyone could be bi, that the revelation of one partner’s gender is not a definitive declaration of all possible partners’ genders.

At the very least, that would take some of the burden off of individual bisexual artists. Which, I think, would be nice.

[Who knows, maybe the panini making astronaut was bi.]

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