Bisexual erasure, harmful stereotypes, and the bookish road to my bi awakening

Does the day you realise you're queer count as second birthday? Because it certainly feels like one

Oops, like Britney, I may have done it again. I’ve made another impulse purchase, and now that the Amazon package is in my hands, I am absolutely stoked to unwrap the latest addition to my growing hoard. I tear open the standard-issue packaging, and there it is - Follow Your Arrow, one of my most anticipated YA books of the year.

What’s so special about this one you ask? Isn’t it just another kissing book? Well, in some ways, yes. But in others, it’s so much more, purely based on the fact that the protagonist is a bisexual woman. A mere couple of years ago, any queer representation was hard to find in the mainstream, and bi characters particularly so, which makes having multiple books to peruse beyond exciting.

Bisexual erasure has been a problem for a while, so it’s not entirely shocking that over the years mainstream literature has been riddled with the same issues as other media. Of course, this problem is not limited to just bisexuals - it’s been universal to all parts of the LGBTQ+ community, and only recently have we seen strides towards more queer representation in popular books.

The bookish awakening of a baby bi

Growing up in the 00s, especially in a conservative Eastern European country like Bulgaria, I had very few (meaning none) role models in the way of sexual identity. In fact, it wasn’t until my teenage years, when I was lucky enough that sexuality was a casual thing in my friend group, that I even encountered openly gay and lesbian people for the first time. It was later still that these sexualities started cropping up in mainstream media as anything other than the butt of a joke.

But bisexuality wasn’t really a part of my sexual vocabulary, largely due to the lack of representation for this group. Which meant that for the most part I saw myself as an ally and a straight girl who sometimes kissed other girls at parties.

It wasn’t until I started university and discovered The Mortal Instruments series that the warlock Magnus Bane snagged my interest with his sexual identity. Originally introduced as the love interest for a male character, he later reveals that he’s attracted to both men and women.

‘He’s got the right idea,’ I thought, daydreaming about the sort of life he had, romancing ladies and gentlemen throughout history. It was incredibly easy to picture myself in his shoes, I’ve got to admit.

Finding yourself between the pages

I’m certainly not the only one to discover new aspects of their sexual identity in their twenties. In an article for YA Pride Adrienne Tooley, author of Sweet and Bitter Magic, admits that the lack of queer women in the books she read was a big part of the reason why she didn’t start questioning her sexuality until she was 23.

“Books have always been some of my truest friends, and I was always privileged enough to see myself—a white, cis woman—represented in so many characters,” Adrienne writes for YA Pride, “But there were pieces missing, too. Pieces I am lucky enough to find in the sapphic books that are now being published.”

Now that publishers are taking more risks with books featuring queer women, Adrienne shares that she finds joy in writing stories about the queer experience; both for the sake of her teenage self and all the teenagers desperate to see themselves portrayed on the page.

The author is not alone; in her own words, she is part of a community that says, “here we are, in these pages, on these covers, in this world.”

Having a community of queer writers pushing LGBTQ+ stories out into the mainstream is a boon which the youth of today have been blessed with; and which, much like Adrienne, I would have loved in my teenage years.

Luckily, I was not one to turn my nose up at YA literature simply because I was no longer part of the prescribed age group, which is how I ended up on a reading path that helped me cement my identity as a bisexual.

What does a bisexual look like?

After Magnus Bane, as bisexual characters started cropping up on my reading list, my feelings of kinship only grew. Nina and Jesper from the Six of Crows series, for instance, both embodied the type of bisexual energy that I recognised in myself. But it was somewhere over the course of the Throne of Glass and A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J Maas that my fledgling recognition became full-on identification.

Even though the author is now often criticised by the book community for the lack of diversity in her stories, it was characters like Aedion, Helion and Mor who helped me realise that bisexuals came in all forms, so there wasn’t really a wrong way to be one. What’s more, the fact that their sexuality wasn’t turned into a major deal, made me think that perhaps mine wouldn’t be either.

Similar themes have been popping up in my contemporary romance reading as well. In the past couple of years alone, I’ve managed to get my hands on more romance novels featuring bisexual women than the entirety of my earlier reading history combined.

Alexandria Bellefleur, the author of one such book - Written in the Stars, recently shared with me that using the word bisexual on the page and clearly introducing it early on was very important for her. “I wanted to write a romance that involved a bisexual main character who is very confident in who she is getting her happily ever after without her sexuality ever being a point of conflict or contention or stress,” the author explains.

She also declared with absolute confidence that her mission was to increase visibility for bisexuals and buck the stereotypes that have circulated popular media for years. “I wanted [bisexual] readers to know that they are queer enough,” Alexandria proclaimed, “regardless of their dating history, the gender of their partners, and regardless of whatever they’ve been told to the contrary.”

The message that sexuality is not defined by your past sexual experiences really struck a chord with me, solidifying my confidence in my identity as a bisexual. Thanks to these lessons delivered by characters and authors I adore, I no longer fear that my bi card will be revoked for my lack of experience with women.

It’s certainly an important theme to include in modern literature, especially considering bisexuals are often told we’re not “queer enough” if we haven’t dated both men and women. Alas, bi positivity is a small, and very recent development; for the most part, we remain as invisible in mainstream books as we do in society.

Bi erasure: the plague that turns us into mythical creatures

Even though queer depictions are booming, some parts of the LGBTQ+ community still fall through the cracks. While lesbian and gay characters are enjoying more visibility nowadays, the industry still shies away from exploring bisexuality.

In her round-up of books about fighting biphobia Danika Ellis talks candidly about the fact that bisexuality is often downplayed, both in real life and in popular media.

“If a woman is in a relationship with a man, she’s written off as basically straight,” she says. “If she’s with a woman, she’s pretty much a lesbian.”

Talia Hibbert, author of Take a Hint, Dani Brown, is no stranger to the problem either. During our chat, they tell me that in their experience, many stories which feature bisexuality treat it as an aberration of either straightness or gayness instead of its own valid thing. In short, these narratives often condemn bi women as “bad lesbians” instead accepting them. According to Danika, the problem comes from the fact that people don’t respect bisexuality as a distinct and meaningful sexual identity. This is not limited to outsider viewpoints either. Laura Sackton remarks that bisexual identities and queer people in long-term mixed-gender relationships are too often ignored within the LGBTQ+ community. This tendency towards erasing the existence of bisexuals altogether is not just disheartening, but also detrimental to those of us within the community. As Alexandria points out during our interview, relationships don’t have orientations, people do. “Labelling a book solely based on the presumptive genders and orientations of the characters quite often ignores the nuances of identity, erasing bisexual, asexual, and non-binary individuals,” she cautions.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t … date women

Considering this trend towards erasing bisexuals, regardless of the type of relationship they’re in, I was very surprised to discover not one but two bisexual protagonists in YA fantasy novels within the last year: Cayo from Scavenge the Stars and Nathaniel from Sorcery of Thorns. (Also, let’s take a second to appreciate the fact that they are bi men - a part of the queer community which is even more underrepresented than their female counterparts.) Both characters are introduced as attracted to other men before we learn they also like women and their stories develop towards a mixed-gender relationship. And, perhaps most importantly, their bisexuality doesn’t make these relationships any less meaningful.

This might seem minor, but let me tell you, when you’re bi and dating someone from the opposite gender, you can feel like a fraud about your sexuality. I can’t count the number of times my boyfriend has pointed out that if I were dating a woman, I would feel just as guilty for letting my community down. Yet it wasn’t until I started finding books which validated the experiences of bisexuals in mixed-gender relationships that I started going easier on myself.

This is not just an internalised issue either. If I had a dime for every time someone told me I’d leave my partner for the first woman I met that I fancied, I’d be able to buy even more queer books. And I’m not the only one - my bisexual friends and I often laugh about these absurd things people say to us.

Jokes aside, affirming stories about the existence of bi women dating men have allowed me, and I’m sure many others in the community, to let that guilt go.

The bad bi stereotypes

Talia is also a big advocate of the fact that bisexuality isn’t defined by the relationship you’re in, which is why they lean towards more casual bi representation in their books. But things don’t always have to be perfect for queer characters, they concede.

The author points out that stories about the harsh realities bisexual people go through are just as important, not only because they expose stereotypical and harmful tropes as something that shouldn't happen, but also because they show readers that they’re not alone.

And boy, are there plenty of these tropes. What Talia touches upon here is part of a wider set of LGBTQ+ representation issues in the literary world, especially when it comes to depictions of bisexuals.

Alexandria, for instance, points out that while her recent reads have portrayed bisexual characters with care and nuance, that’s not always the case. “I’m not saying writers shouldn’t write a sexually promiscuous bisexual character, but they should interrogate their motivation,” she says. “If they’re portraying a character that way because they’re bisexual, that’s harmful.”

Ah, the promiscuous bisexual trope. See also: “cheating bisexuals”, as these two are often bunched together.

Going back to Sarah J Mass and the bi representation in her books, I’d be remiss not to mention that even though her series were instrumental to my bisexual “awakening”, the fact that one of her (few) bisexual characters was very deliberately portrayed as a promiscuous man famously prone to flirting with everyone, while another canonically had a reputation as a whore, really grated on me.

Now, I’m not saying without such depictions people would never assume us bi folk are after anything that moves but perpetuating such narratives without any meaningful discussion within the world of the story certainly doesn’t help.

Fortunately, authors like Adrienne, Alexandria and Talia, along with many other queer writers, are working hard to reshape the image of bisexuals in mainstream media and give passionate bi readers like myself some much needed positive representation.

LGBTQ+ inclusion in mainstream literature has gone a long way since my teenage years, but we’re far from the end of the road. Bisexual representation, for instance, is still a long way from catching up to gay and lesbian depictions, both in numbers and nuance.

The good news is, more queer authors are out there telling these stories and actually getting published; so it looks like we’d be getting more bisexual characters across all genres, and I’m absolutely stoked to follow along on their journeys.