September 19-23 this year is Bisexual Visibility Week (BiWeek). Every year, us invisible bisexuals take off our cloaks, pause bank heists, and step into the spotlight for a weeklong celebration of what it means to be bisexual.
However, the shadows lurk outside the spotlight, waiting for any one of us to slip a toe into the glare and dare to defend who we are on our own.
Slut, whore, confused, lying, greedy, out for attention, performing, really gay, really straight, pick a side. And my personal favorite: “I’ll never date a bisexual because they’ll eventually cheat on me.”
It’s almost old hat at this point and many of us can laugh it off. “Oh that insult again? Please.” Especially if the insults come from other adults. I can ignore them or turn them into a teaching opportunity if I’m feeling up to it.
But when those insults roll in under the guise of “protecting children,” I can’t ignore that hurt. I can’t brush off that pain.
A trade review recently claimed a book should be for mature readers only because of “many references to bisexuality” and bad language.
We live in such heteronormative and puritanical society that anything outside of cis and straight is seen as other and sexually explicit and deserving of content warnings. If there’s anything other than straight, the book suddenly has sexual themes, even if there’s no sex anywhere in the story on page or off.
News flash, there are bisexual children out there. There are young teens who adopt the label. To throw bisexuality into the same category as gore, violence, rape, language, etc is deeply troubling, highly problematic, and pretty damn insulting.
Sexual orientation is not defined by who we do or do not have in our bed. It never will be. I’m no less bi as a married woman than one of my single bi friends is. A bisexual person in a dating relationship or married is still bisexual if they claim it.
When you tell children that mentions of bisexuality in a YA book require a content warning, you tell them they are something Other. That their orientation is something to be ashamed of, to warn others about, that they’re not good. That they’re wrong and unacceptable.
In the publishing world, queer books are still severely underrepresented. Books with queer characters where queerness has nothing to do with plot are also hard to find. It’s getting better but we still have a very long way to go to reach anything even resembling parity.
Queer books depend on trade reviews because librarians use trade reviews to stock their catalogues. They only have so much budget and libraries are sometimes the only way a queer teen can get their hands on a book for them.
When a review labels bisexuality as mature, a librarian has no way of knowing (unless they’ve read it) if the review is biphobic or if the book contains explicit content such as an on-page sex scene. And many librarians only have time to decide based on the reviews themselves so this is an incredibly important distinction.
These types of reviews, in addition to being insulting and harmful to actual queer teens, hurt queer books because they could be passed over. Queer books, by and large, don’t get the big advances or the huge marketing budgets so they depend on word-of-mouth, hand-selling, and libraries. Being in a library could quite literally make an author’s career.
But the simple fact of the matter is this, bisexuality doesn’t equal mature content. You can be bisexual and haven’t ever had sex. You can be bisexual and married. You can be bisexual and have had many partners. None of those make anyone more or less bi than the other, and none of them are deserving of a mature content warning.
To insist otherwise is to erase us, invalidate us, and heap more harm and pain upon us as we continue to fight against these stereotypes again and again.
To the teens out there who may have been harmed by this review, you are valid. You are worthy. There is nothing wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with your orientation. You aren’t confused or greedy or unfaithful.
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