bi books
literature's bisexuality problem
Good morning boys and girls and everyone else who feels like neither of those. Readers who’ve been exploring Sequel Country with me in recent months will know that I’ve written several columns about topics that I’m especially invested in, including part 33 on LGBT+ history, part 35 on psychogeography and part 38 on magic realism. I’ve been keen to explore these areas in detail because they’re some of the things I’m driven to write about in my own novels and sequels. The one major interest of mine that I haven’t written about explicitly is bisexuality. This is something I’ve been personally known for ever since I was the editor of the soc.bi FAQ: soc.bi was the Usenet group for bisexuals in the 1990s, and its FAQ was distributed worldwide with my name on it. As I wrote way back in part 2 what is a novel, I’m driven to write novels about bisexuality because I have things to say which simply aren’t out there in English-language novels at all.
I have never read a commercially published novel set in the modern world (since 1967, say) with a bisexual male protagonist who has same-sex relationships and doesn’t have to die or be redeemed.
Obviously I care about this because I am a bisexual man (who has healthy same-sex relationships) and I’ve never read a novel with a character like me in it! Indeed, bisexual characters are vanishingly rare in English literature, even though there are lots and lots of us in real life. What is going on?
Firstly, since straight people often complain about about LGBTIQ+ terminology being confusing, let me just define what I’m talking about. Homosexual means only attracted to same-gender people (lesbian and gay), heterosexual means only attracted to other-gender people (straight) and bisexual means both of those two, same and other gender. But in reality, most bisexuals (and I have known many) actually use the word to mean “attracted to multiple genders” or “attracted to people mainly for reasons that aren’t to do with gender presentation”. In recent common usage, the word pansexual has been used for much the same thing – technically “pan” means all, but in practice, most pansexuals do not claim to have met people of all possible genders, and just use the term to mean multiple genders or regardless of gender; in other words, exactly the same thing that most bisexuals call “bisexual”. Personally I’m happy to be called bisexual or pansexual, but we’ve been using the word bisexual for a lot longer in LGBT communities, so I tend to stick with that.
So why are we (bi men) so strikingly absent from literature? It might be partly because it’s only relatively recently that we’ve been legal. In the UK, consensual homosexual sex in private was decriminalised in 1967, but literature depicting those completely legal acts was still considered illegal under obscenity laws for decades afterwards. In the 1980s, police and customs officers were still raiding bookshops like Gay’s The Word in London and seizing LGBT+ literature on the grounds of obscenity. And in that era more than any other, bisexuals faced hostility from both sides: some straights saw us as the conduit transmitting AIDS from evil homosexuals to innocent heterosexuals, and some gay people saw us as weakening the argument that homosexuality should be allowed simply because some people are born that way.
After many years of searching, I’ve found very little male bisexuality in mainstream English literature (and even less use of the word bisexual itself), even though Freud described it over a century ago.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), bisexuality is depicted as a cause of moral and actual “ruin”.
The title character of Orlando (1928) has sexual relationships with men and women, but only by changing gender half-way through; Orlando only has heterosexual relationships, in relation to their current body.
Giovanni’s Room (1956) has a bisexual male protagonist but he doesn’t have healthy relationships with men or women: he’s biphobic and self-loathing.
In the first nine Tales of the City novels (1978 onwards, which I wrote about in part 32; since then I’ve heard that a tenth is on the way), the only bisexual male character is Beauchamp Day, but he doesn’t have relationships with men, only casual sex, and is depicted as scheming and selfish.
The four Duffy crime novels (1980-87) have a confidently bisexual male protagonist but he too doesn’t have relationships with men, and his bisexuality makes his relationship with his girlfriend dysfunctional.
The narrator of The Buddha of Suburbia (1993) is more cheerfully bisexual but doesn’t have relationships with men.
One of the main characters of The Ghost Road (1995, but set in WW1) is bisexual but he too only has a romantic relationship with a woman.
The focal character of From Blue To Black (2000) is a bisexual man, but is psychologically unstable.
One of the versions of the protagonist of 4 3 2 1 (2017, but set in the 1960s) is a bisexual man but doesn’t have same-sex relationships.
In Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2019, but set in the 1990s), the joyfully queer protagonist is bisexual but doesn’t have a relationship with a man.
What’s striking about this list is firstly that bisexuality in literature is only about sex – bisexual male characters either don’t have relationships with men, or do but have psychological problems with it – and that secondly, the 1990s was somehow the decade of bisexuality. I don’t think this can just be my personal perspective (I came out publicly in 1990 and spent the 90s being as bisexual as I could). Somehow, the world came to accept in the 1990s that bisexuality is a thing, and has then inexplicably pushed it back into the closet as something not to be explored in novels.
I can’t explain this possible cultural phenomenon, but as a writer I can understand some of the difficulties of writing bisexuality. The most obvious problem comes from the mantra “show not tell”. Because most bisexuals (like most people) are serially monogamous, if the writer shows them in a relationship, readers are likely to read the character as gay or straight, depending on the gender of their partner. Only if they have multiple relationships during the same novel (as in my debut novel Parallel Lines) can bisexuality be shown, so the story tends to be about the relationships. And then the writer has to decide how to avoid the many tropes of bisexuality, such as being greedy, oversexed, irresistably attractive, questioning/undecided/on the fence, commitment-phobic, gay but in denial, or the favourite: irretrievably psychologically damaged.
The alternative is to tell the bisexuality, through describing the character’s thoughts. This limits the writer’s choices to just two modes, the bisexual character being the first-person narrator, or the omniscient narrator who can describe the bi character’s thoughts.
Sexuality is also difficult to convey through symbols. Lots of aspects of life are touched by race and class, and so can be represented by a wide range of traits or markers or focalising objects, but sex is unique in only being about sex (except when it’s about power) so it’s harder to symbolise through speech or objects of significance.
And finally, the dominant heteronormativity of society and literature is a problem because it makes any writing about alternative sexualities stand out sharply, meaning that work is needed to avoid it feeling over-emphasised or coming across as evangelism (indeed, many straight readers on GoodReads evidently feel even the slightest variation from heterosexuality automatically constitutes pro-LGBT+ evangelism). This problem is widely enough recognised that enthusiasts for the fantasy genre have a word, queernorm, to describe novels where queer relationships are considered normal and unremarkable. But this concept seems alien to novels set in the modern world.
But if writing bisexuality is difficult, so what? Since when have writers shied away from tackling difficult subjects? I don’t get it, but I do know that I want to write about it. I have a lifetime’s experience of being bisexual to inform the stories I write, and I wish there were contemporary novels with healthily bisexual characters, so I’m driven to write some of them. I’ll be venturing further into that territory, the shifting sands of what makes a writer, next week so please join me.