The Bi Teens Are Out There. They’re Just Hiding.

I read this great, thought-provoking post by Kody Keplinger (author of The DUFF which is FREAKING AWESOME btw) about bisexual characters in YA. And, like thought-provoking posts tend to do, it got me to, well, thinking.

When I was in high school, back in the 90s ― pre-Dawson’s Creek, pre-Buffy, and vastly pre-Glee, when everything my friends and I knew about gayness came from our own, um, gayness ― I recall bisexuality as being the default assumption about anyone who expressed same-sex interest. There was no expectation that just because a girl was interested in another girl one week, she wouldn’t be interested in a boy the following week. But I don’t recall using the word “bi” very much. Maybe that was a generational thing; we didn’t have many examples of people calling themselves bi (we’d never heard the acronym “LGBTQ” either), so it didn’t occur to us.

Today, the vocabulary of the LGBTQ movement has entered the mainstream, and so labels are much more the thing. Kids come out earlier, too, both to themselves and to others. And in some cases, certainly, there is a rush to claim a label of their very own.

But the thing that hasn’t changed from my own teen years to today is the fact that high school is a time of sexual uncertainty for a lot of people. There is much deliberation and much exploration, and, especially for a lot of teens who identify as being on the LGBTQ spectrum, there is much fluidity. On Monday you’re totally in love with that redheaded girl in Geometry; on Tuesday she blows you off so you hate her; on Wednesday you hook up with her ex-boyfriend just to spite her; on Thursday you think hey, maybe you and the redhead’s ex-boyfriend could actually have, you know, a thing; on Friday you and the ex are picking out your prom clothes; then on Saturday you catch the ex exchanging sexy Facebook messages with your ex, and on Sunday you’ve totally moved on and are crushing hard on your field hockey coach. During all that time, are you worrying about your sexual identity? Maybe, but more likely you’re too busy exchanging melodramatic text messages with your best friend analyzing it all.

All of which, in my mind, ties back to the presence of bisexual characters in YA novels like so:

I think a huge chunk of the protagonists in LGBTQ YA novels, especially the girl protagonists, are bi. But they don’t get credit for it. Because the books themselves aren’t branded as bi in the books’ back cover copy, in reviews, in Publisher’s Marketplace blurbs, etc.

Because novels are about problems. And usually, the problem when you’re a teenager isn’t that you’re attracted to people of both genders. Attraction to people of the opposite sex is the norm; it’s expected. The problem is that you’re attracted to someone of the same sex. So that’s what books tend to focus on.

So a book gets branded as a “lesbian” book because it’s about a girl having a relationship with another girl. Sometimes one or both of those girls explicitly refers to themselves as a lesbian, but just as often, maybe more often, the protagonist just spends the book obsessing over the feelings she’s having about this one particular girl. (Btw, I’m talking about girl books here because that’s what I write myself and that’s most of what I read as well; on the boy end of the spectrum, I think this happens much less often.)

It’s very normal, in LGBTQ YA that focus on girls, for one of the main characters to start the book with a boyfriend, and from whom she then grows apart after she meets a girl she likes more. But that doesn’t always mean this girl is never going to have another boyfriend for the rest of her life. She could very well go back to dating exclusively boys once this romance with the girl ends. But we readers won’t hear about that, because the book usually ends way before that happens. (Unless it doesn’t. Think Kissing Jessica Stein ― which isn’t a YA novel, but which might as well be one. Are the characters in that movie bisexual? Maybe. Does it matter? Not really.)

So in my view, a lot of the YA books that could theoretically be classified as “bi” actually wind up classified as “gay” due to the particular window of the character’s lives we’re seeing, and, just as importantly, due to our obsessions with categorizing things. We like to put books into boxes, just as people like to put themselves and others into boxes. (This isn’t limited to LGBTQ books at all, btw; think of the constant issues with urban fantasy versus paranormal romance versus supernatural versus straight-up fantasy ― and on and on.)

It’s true that a lot of high school kids who identify as being on the LGBTQ spectrum would choose describe themselves as bi, if they had to pick a label. And the explicit selection of the “bi” label doesn’t happen that often in YA fiction; at least, not in novels that focus on girl/girl relationships. In fact, the awesome Empress of the World by Sara Ryan is the only example that comes to mind in which that happens ― and in that book, it happens because the protagonist gets frustrated with all her friends assuming that because she’s dating a girl, that makes her gay.

But as same-sex relationships become more accepted, labels are becoming less and less relevant. More important, especially to teenagers, is who you’re attracted to at any given moment. High school kids have college and/or young adulthood in front of them, and they know they’ll get to spend that time sleeping with people of various genders and narrowing down the scope of to whom they’re attracted. Teens don’t need to spend their valuable time giving themselves headaches over what label describes them. They’d rather give themselves headaches about why the girl (or boy) they like won’t text them back.

Not to bring everything back to Glee, but there’s been a lot of debate since the big Brittany/Santana scene a few weeks ago about whether the girls are gay or bi. I think that’s missing the point. What matters to Santana isn’t whether she’s also attracted to boys. What matters is that she’s in love with this girl right now. By the time Santana is in her 30s, she’ll have the details all figured out, but at this point in her life, she has no reason to care.

Not to mention that the “bisexual” label can be a difficult one to pledge yourself to at any age. It’s much easier to just pick “straight” or “gay” ― everyone knows what those mean. Even among the LGBTQ-identified, there’s much debate about the word “bi.” Are you bi if you kind of like one gender but have only ever had relationships with the other? Do you have to be equally, 50-50 attracted to both genders to qualify as bi? What if you reject the binary system of gender to begin with? What if you only like one gender now but you used to like the other ― what does that make you? (I cannot tell you how many arguments I’ve gotten into with Buffy fans about whether Willow was the Judas of the bi community.)

None of which is to say that I don’t wish there were more books in which teen characters explored their sexual identities in more depth. I do, oh lordy, I do. The very first LGBTQ YA book I ever read was The Bermudez Triangle by Maureen Johnson, which has probably my favorite bisexual YA character of all time ― except that I’m pretty sure she never actually identifies herself as such. Because she’s still figuring it all out. And she’s still figuring it all out when the book ends. Because that’s what teens do.

Sigh. That’s why I love to write to write about teenagers. Because all that self-exploration is so fascinating.

So anyway. That’s me. What do you wish you saw more of in LGBTQ YA?