Writer Haley Jakobson didn’t just publish her debut novel in June. She published a “Big Bisexual Book.” It’s a slogan her team created for “Old Enough,” but it’s more than just marketing.
Bisexual individuals make up more than half of the LGBTQ community but are often less visible than other LGBTQ identities because of the unique biases they face. And while books with LGBTQ characters have grown in recent years, bisexual characters remain missing from the trend. When they are represented, they’re often filled out with stereotypes: overly promiscuous, greedy, untrustworthy. Bi readers – and writers – are looking to change that.
For Jakobson, that’s writing an explicitly bi character who encompasses the same “expansive worldview” the bi community has. In “Old Enough,” protagonist Sav is a college sophomore finding queer community after she’s come out as bi, grappling with trauma, changing friendships, crushes, identity and growing up.
“I always talk about bisexuality as a very expansive identity,” Jakobson says. “So yes, it does have to do in part with who I’m attracted to and who I might be interested in intimately, but really for me, it’s a worldview. It’s how I walk through the world, it’s the lens through which I see things in an expansive way, in a way that defies the binary, in a way that is fluid.”
The kicker here is the word bisexual. It’s on the book’s dust jacket, and all over the first chapter and the pages that follow. This is what bi readers say they’re hungry for the most – a book that proudly and vehemently says it’s a “big bisexual book.”
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The importance of the representation that is already out there cannot be understated, readers say.
Nina Haines, a reader and founder of the sprawling online book club Sapph-Lit, recalls marveling at “Old Enough” on the front table of McNally Jackson, a popular chain of independent bookstores in New York City.
“Queer women have been rendered invisible throughout history and bi women continue to be rendered invisible in the queer community,” Haines says. “It’s so gay, but it’s so universal.”
Bren Frederick had never heard the word “bisexual” before reading “Far From You” by Tess Sharpe, a book with a bisexual character that helped Frederick realize she was bi. This prompted her to start the Bi Pan Library, a collection of over 800 books with bi and pansexual representation that Frederick has been scavenging since 2015.
“I had no word for what I was feeling,” Frederick says. “I was just immediately so hungry for more of this, and I started looking for more books because it’s a really safe way to explore … identity.”
But finding these books was its own beast – many publishers and authors refrain from using the word bisexual because they fear limiting their audience, Frederick says. There are often two ways bi characters show up in books: self-identifying or the more common vague hint at bisexuality. The implied bisexual character may have relationships with partners of more than one gender, but their bisexuality may be explained away by a phase or promiscuity.
Many people choose not to ascribe a label to their attraction to multiple genders, but while there’s such little representation overall, some readers say the “implied bisexual” character doesn’t help visibility and the canon of bisexual literature.
“Sometimes you won’t find out until after the fact that the character is bi like naming it explicitly would detract from the book in some way or feel too on the nose or cringe,” Jakobson says. “It’s an identity, not who you’re in bed with at night.”
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Jakobson’s “Old Enough” is not a coming out story – that’s important. That plot has its place in queer literature, but Jakobson says we’re ready to move on.
“We don’t need to teach people that being gay is hard sometimes,” Jakobson says. “I think we show people within and outside of our community how normal it is to have joy and also remind people that we come out to experience more joy, not less.”
As a student at Duke University, recent graduate Lindsay Dial wrote a paper on bi heroines in romance novels. She found that not only is the genre dominated by straight protagonists, but that even queer romance novels are specifically gay and lesbian, not bisexual. When there is bisexual representation, it’s largely bisexual men in male/male romance couplings or filled with stereotypes where bisexuality is a cue to distrust the character.
“Good” representation means something different to everyone, though many readers contend a well-written bi character is one where bisexuality is integral to their personhood, whether or not it’s plot-relevant.
“Sometimes I just want to read a book where the fact that the character is queer is not part of the conflict,” Dial says.
Books she thinks accomplish this include “Take a Hint, Dani Brown” by Talia Hibbert, “The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics” by Olivia Waite and “Restless Truth” by Freya Marske.
Frederick offers up “The Subtweet” by Vivek Shraya and “Once Ghosted, Twice Shy” by Alyssa Cole – books in which bisexuality isn’t a plot device but a trait that makes the characters who they are.
“It’s nice seeing a bi female character finding queer love and not being questioned about her identity, not having her relationships with men, in addition to women, being held against her,” Frederick says.
Frederick also brings up the few children’s book titles, an area she wants to see increase so bi parents can see themselves represented.
Haines’ favorites include “One Last Stop” and “Red, White & Royal Blue” by Casey McQuiston, “Sirens & Muses” by Antonia Angress, “The Priory of the Orange Tree” and “A Day of Fallen Night” by Samantha Shannon, “Yerba Buena” by Nina LaCour.
“The bi experience is so unique and it’s so different from coming out journeys because of the erasure and because of the assumptions,” Haines says. “To see a book that is physical and you can pick up, put down, flip through the pages and see this bisexual representation on paper, that is so cool.”
Jakobson believes the way forward is abundance – because bisexuality as an identity is so expansive, just one representation of the bi experience isn’t enough. And that one representation is what she says she’s accomplished with “Old Enough.”
“Bisexuality is not a monolith,” Jakobson says. “I’m so happy (readers) feel seen, but I need to read a thousand other representations of bisexuality because I’m not gay in the same way you’re gay.”
Here’s how these writers and readers see representation increasing – by reading more, writing more, uplifting bi writers, sharing bi stories that get little attention and prioritizing publishing books for bi readers, who Frederick believes are an “underestimated market.”
On our way there, we need to be loud about bisexuality, Jakobson says. If we are, maybe we can get to a place where readers of any identity can enjoy bi characters across genres and where bi readers can see themselves in a thousand other ways.
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