Peace Signs✌️, Finger Guns 👉👉 & Bad Puns // or a discussion on Bisexuality

For anyone who was unclear on this: I am bisexual. I am NOT straight. I am NOT gay. I am bisexual, I AM attracted to people who are male, female and even people who are non-binary. I am NOT confused. This is NOT a phase. I am NOT greedy. I AM no less bisexual, if I am dating someone who is male than I am dating someone who is female. I AM extremely passionate about peace signs, finger guns and bad puns. And I won’t be erased!

WARNING: THIS IS A PERSONAL PIECE THAT WILL DISCUSS BIPHOBIA AND ERASURE.

This is a post that I have been meaning to write for ages, at least a year, and while I know that it’s important to not just talk about queer content and issues during Pride month, however, between life and other things, I haven’t gotten around to writing this until now, and Pride seems like a good time to actually post it, even if my life is on fire at the moment.

☆☆☆

I would like to take a moment to acknowledge that I’ve been extremely privileged to grow up in a household that was always very accepting, and by the fact that I am a cisgender white woman, who is agnostic and who is extremely straight passing. I have two godfathers whom I am very close to, and queerness was normalized to me for as long as I can recall, which is something that I am so grateful, it was never weird, and like that’s awesome. I am not afraid to be out rather publicly. And I am very straight passing, I have never openly been the target of homophobia or biphobia explicitly. However, I definitely experienced erasure and misunderstanding around my sexuality, which is no less frustrating.

I never actually considered myself queer, or bisexual for the longest time. Growing up I crushed constantly on guys And honestly the reason was kind of sad—I didn’t think I was queer enough to be bisexual—I didn’t realize that I could “qualify,” which is kind of fucked up and is one of the problems that I have with how we define, recognize and celebrate bisexuality.

I first began to wonder if I might be bisexual, when my friend/ex-girlfriend let’s call her Karla messaged me out of the blue, and came out to me as bisexual, thanking me for helping her realize that she was so, because I guess I was the first girl crush she’d ever had, and then she asked me out, and I said yes. After I said yes, I began to think am I bisexual? I mean I really liked Karla, but I’d always thought of it as a friend, and then I realized that within our deep friendship were some feelings…butterflies, things that felt like a crush. And the more I thought about it, in the past and even now, I occasionally have similar feelings for girls that I am insanely close too, but i’d never called it a crush because I thought it was purely because we were really good friends, and partially because this had always happened in the context of online friendships, with people I’d never met in real life, which makes them no less friends, but I didn’t think that could count as crushing, because my “real” crushes were always on men.

This has only happened a few times, and maybe once within someone other than Karla whom I’ve known in real life, so like I can understand why I wasn’t sure, but it makes me super sad that I didn’t feel queer enough because I mainly/just like guys, that i didn’t realize that bisexuality in a spectrum and can include people who only date/mostly like/crush/prefer one gender and thats still as bisexual as someone who oscillate between genders or prefers someone the same gender.

I came out publicly (at least on social media) in September of 2018, shortly after coming the conclusion in late August/early September of that same year. I first came out to my parents, in a very casual way, my parents were supportive. My relationship was Karla lasted about four months, and was long distant, since that fateful week of camp back in 2017, I had no seen her in person, and to this day I still haven’t, but over those four months, it was really wonderful. It felt really nice to be able to say my girlfriend. But whenever I would mention the phrase girlfriend, everyone would assume that I was a lesbian. And there is nothing wrong with being a lesbian, but I am not a lesbian and I absolutely hated that people assumed that because I was dating a girl. No one had ever assumed I was anything less than straight when I’d date men previously. I don’t think anyone was intending on erasing my sexuality, it’s more a cultural thing, in the straight and the LGBTQIA+ communities. But holy fuck, I hated it so much, and I didn’t want to constantly correct people.

Karla and I broke up rather unexpectedly in December of 2018, and I was pretty heartbroken, because in the course of those few months, I’d gone from liking her to actually falling in love with her, and it was a beautiful feeling, as far as heartbreak goes, it didn’t last too long, but I will forever be grateful to Karla for being there during the start of my bisexual journey. Once I wasn’t dating a girl, it felt like to everyone I went back to being straight, and since then I’ve never been questioned for being anything else, and honestly it makes me feeling invisible.

Credit to the artist.

Bisexuality comes with a lot stereotypes, which aren’t true: that bisexuals are greedy, that this is a phase, that bisexuals are promiscuous and incapable of choose one partner or one sex to like. I don’t identify with any of those. However there are many times that in other ways I am THAT bisexual. I love bad puns. I constantly throw up peace signs and finger guns and I love that. This is something that has definitely grown since I went to University and really started owning up to my bisexuality and it’s great and I love it so much.

And really it’s not the stereotypes, or the little bisexual things that are so me that bother me, it’s how I didn’t feel I was queer enough to be queer, because there in the perception that to be bisexual and queer that I must constantly be crushing/dating on people whom are of the same gender as me. For the longest time, this made me think I was straight and no one corrected me otherwise. It took me the longest time, even once i was out as bi to realize this or to have a discussion about it with someone. That’s problematic. I didn’t realize I could have a lean. I didn’t realize that I could still be bisexual and only date men, or only/mostly have crushes/date men. I only came to terms with being bisexual because I was dating someone of the same gender. I felt like an imposter, even in a place and community where I (and other bisexuals) should feel safe and accepted because of the narratives and stereotypes and expectations that are most often circulated about bisexuality.

I know it’s pretty typical for bisexuals to feel like they are too straight for the queer community and too gay for the straight community, but it fucking sucks. I just want to belong, and be able to feel like I am enough. Just because I am dating a man, I shouldn’t feel like I am not bisexual. I am bisexual regardless of who I am dating, who I date or who I crush on, and I shouldn’t feel less than or not queer enough. And it’s not just straight people who erase and afraid of the bisexual identity…it’s the LGBTQIA+ community too, and like while my personal experiences are that my fellow LGBTQIA+ people are more accepting of my identity, I still don’t feel visible in my sexuality and my queerness.

As this is a book blog, I think I should talk about books and bisexuality a little too. I’ve barely read any books that are exclusively bisexual, but I recently made a list of books that I want to read, and I was amazed at the sheer amount of books that were bisexual, but even within that, so much of the time these books were hidden behind the banner of queerness. Mostly I found them because they feature female x female/male x male relationships and the characters happened to be bisexual. I’d love to see more books that feature bisexual characters dating and in relationships with people of the opposite sex but that still recognize the fact that they are no less bisexual or queer for it.

Within bisexual books, especially of the ones I have read, it’s not often that characters use the lable—which is some contexts such as fantasy and historical based pieces—may not be realistic which is fine. Mehmed the II in And I Darken by Kiersten White is just as bi to me as if he used the lable. And then there are others like Rachel Lynn Solomon’s Our Year of Maybe that have made me feel so represented as a bisexual teen. And then books that we’re more generally queer like The Body Myth, The Gilded Wolves and Six of Crows. When you think of bisexual books, one of the more popular ones that comes to mind is one that everyone and their mother loves and has read by now, and that is The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid.

For me, I have very mixed feelings on The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I don’t hate the book, but I don’t like the book either. And personally the more praise I see for the book, it honestly makes me like the book less and less. The writing was good, the bisexual representation was excellent, Evelyn was a very realistic protagonist the thing I hate is the love interest of Celia. I HATED Celia because she’s super super biphobic and tries to erase Evelyn’s identity, even though she loves her and she never seems to fucking learn. The book does hit back at the biphobia and calls it out, but still I HATED IT and I hated to see Evelyn in a relationship with someone who did not respect or accept her identity completely, and it just rubbed me the wrong fucking way.

How I feel about Celia. Dont @ me or my fork with your biphobic bullshit.

In this house, we do not like Celia and her biphobic bullshit. I was recently talking to a fellow blogger/bookstagrammer about this fact and they mentioned that they feel the same way, no matter if it’s challenged with it comes to transphobia and it got me thinking about how that’s a really reasonable and normal reaction, and that its perfectly reasonable to not like a book because of that reason—that it doesn’t make you a bad person or have bad taste—and that it’s valid to feel hurt and angry and not like things that target you and your personal identity, no matter how much it’s challenged. I don’t like Celia and that tainted my experience and my feelings and my liking on The Seven Husband of Evelyn Hugo.

I am also a writer, who writes a mix of historical fiction, fantasy and contemporary, in my most recent book, Of Dreams and Destruction, which is co-written with my best friend, one of the main characters—my favourite character— and the love interest is a fabulous bisexual Prince named Mavi. Mavi was bisexual from very early on in the process which began in December of 2016, which was before I realized I was bisexual. Maxi starts out the book in a sort of complicated friendship/relationship with his best friend Orhan. Mavi thinks he’s gay (even though this is fantasy, so that term is not explicitly used until he meets the main character Cansu, leading him to discover that he is indeed bisexual to the extreme. However, because of the nature of his relationship with Cansu, the relationship is straight passing, and I’ve had this deep fear that readers won’t consider the book to be queer, or queer enough because the main couple is male-female instead of him ending up with someone of the same gender. And the fact that I have this fear and that’s based on my experience is problematic. Mavi is still bisexual, and my book is still queer even if Mavi and Cansu are end game. NORMALIZE OPPPOSITE GENDER BISEXUAL RELATIONSHIPS! WE EXIST, AND WE ARE NO LESS QUEER.

And honestly, it’s way more likely for a bisexual person to end up in a relationship with someone who the opposite gender because of probability—showcase it you cowards—it will not make it less queer. As a YA writer, I am determined to write bisexual books that showcase the reality and my experiences in order to better represent what it’s like to bisexual, because no matter how my bisexuality or anyones bisexuality works out, they are still bisexual and valid.

Bisexuality is beautiful, and valid, and I really hope that the rest of LGBTQIA+ community (just as we bisexuals have done for other members) can recognize and support invisible sexualities (bisexual, pansexual, demisexual and asexuals among others) just as much as they support people who are visibly queer! So to all my fellow bisexuals, I am sending you a tsunami of love, bad puns, peace signs and finger guns. ✌️ ❤️

☆☆☆

THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOVE AND SUPPORT, THIS BLOG AND THIS COMMUNITY MEAN THE WORLD TO ME! AND ALWAYS, I AM HERE, QUEER AND READY TO CHAT IN THE COMMENTS!

Petyr Baeish Books  © 2020 by Tova Portmann-Bown