For Bi’s Sake

So, how can you recognize a bisexual? There is a presumption in Western cultures that all people are heterosexual, expanded somewhat in this century to the presumption that all people are either heterosexual or become homosexual. Bisexuality, for the most part, remains invisible—invisible, that is, except as a point of conflict or transition. In other words, an action or event must occur to make bisexuality visible to the viewer. Thus, with rare exceptions, the only bisexuals who are seen as bisexual are those who are known to be in relationships with more than one partner (of more than one sex), and bisexuals who are leaving a partner of one sex for a partner of a diff erent sex. Bisexuals whose lives are celibate, monogamous, and/or without conflict or triangulation are rarely read as bisexual by the outside viewer, but rather are seen by others as either straight or gay. Hence, there is an inevitable association of bisexuality with non-monogamy, conflict and transition.

— “Finding Bisexuality in Fiction” by Robyn Ochs

But is this a problem solely in literature? Definitely not. But, most tropes that fall under the Questioned Bisexual end up coming from a point that originated in literature as seen by the vast majority of what we consider “classic” literature as having underlying queer themes. You can deny it all you want, but Virginia Woolf is everyone’s queer mom, and you know it in your heart.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century literature gave rise to many different tropes – the vampiric man-eating woman, the childlike and naive full grown woman who is only a play thing for men, the woman who must die for loving her best friend and having an extramarital affair with a younger man when she also gambles and wears pants…

And still, there are others in the year two thousand and seventeen that don’t believe bisexuals exist and believe it a transitional period between heterosexuality and fully realized homosexuality. Yes, I am talking about someone specifically here, but I’m not going to name names because I’m a better person than that. We all know there are plenty of people who feel this way.

 

“The Depraved Bisexual” even has its own TV Tropes page, which outlines how many portrayals of bisexuals are innately evil creatures – “supremely manipulative[, ] recognizing the effectiveness of sex as a control mechanism, … reasoning that successful seductions gain new thralls.” And then there’s the trope of “Anything That Moves,” which implies that these characters will go out of their way to seduce and get dirty with almost anyone and anything. Then there’s the problem of making an exception… It seems that pretty much every significant trope makes the life of the bisexual an extreme, whether it’s extremely dangerous and greedy to extremely ambiguous to the point of not existing at all.

That’s not to say that there aren’t any works with negative portrayals. In fact, now children’s books like Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase are addressing bisexuality and contrasting heteronormativity. Barnes & Noble has a page on their teen blog called 15 YAs Celebrating Bisexuality, and Goodreads has over 150 works that address bisexuality in some way. All that to say, no, there isn’t an absolute of anything, but the good doesn’t always outweigh the bad.

So what do we do with that? How do we avoid it?

There’s a big difference between writing a character who is bisexual and writing a Bisexual Character™.

A character who is bisexual is a character whose sexuality accommodates attraction to two or more genders, and it usually manifests itself in the same way that general sexuality does. I, for one, love really stupid jokes and using my sexuality as the basis for puns.

A Bisexual Character™ is one who is… the epitome of everything that I mentioned above about the bad things associated with bisexuals. There’s also the ridiculous promiscuous, disloyal bisexual. There’s the angry, jealous bisexual. Then, there’s something that Ochs addresses, and that’s the issue of non-monogamy in bisexual portrayals.

There are plenty of non-monogamous individuals who also identify as bisexual, myself included, and that should very well be recognized without lumping them into a “harmful” type cast. There are ways of portraying a jealous person who is bisexual. There are ways of portraying a monogamous person who is bisexual. There are ways of portraying a non-monogamous person who is bisexual. There are ways of portraying a promiscuous person who is bisexual. But we must be careful in how we do the portraying to make an effort to make it as harmless as possible.

Our aims as writers should be to write characters who are ____-sexual, not harmful stereotypes of actual people, which I know is absolutely simplistic, but that’s still such a tall order.