Ankle-deep in the river.

Three brand-new YA Novels at the intersection of Bisexuality and Disability!

Does your partner blame it on your bisexuality? It could be partner abuse.

Does your partner:

Abusers may say:

Click HERE for pdf document to download

I made these to put up around my school for my school’s GSA. They are quotes from some little known bisexuals about their bisexuality.

Lets stop bisexual erasure and remember, bisexuality is real!

Bisexual erasure is a huge thing, even in the LG community. Let’s raise the awareness!

Recently, I was looking for a copy of the Jan-March 2014 issue of The Journal of Bisexuality. I couldn’t access it online through my local university because of a database embargo (basically, the publisher won’t release it electronically until 18 months after publication) , so I decided to...

my type of girl is “girl” and my type of boy is “stand 20 feet away and fill out a form about your political views, give me references, tell me where you want to be in five years, please buy moisturizer and do something different with your hair and we’ll consider your application and get back to you in 20 business days”

The difference between bisexuality and pansexuality: a powerpoint guide. 

(updated) 

Congratulations to the Top 10 of the 2014 Rainbow List!   The Rainbow Project is a joint committee between the GLBT-RT and SRRT Round Tables of the American Library Association.   Each year they promote the best LGBT YA Fiction.  Be sure to click the link for their 20 other nominees as well.  

We’re especially excited to see Pantomime, The Summer Prince, and Love in the Time of Global Warming on the list since all feature strong bisexual characters :D

In case you missed it, I posted a 2013 Year in Review of Lesbian/Bi Books on AE last week. Make sure to check out the comments where a few people have mentioned books I forgot!

In more pertinent-to-book-club news, there are also discussion posts up on Goodreads for this month’s choices, including one for the first portion of Bodies of Water. (I’ll post discussions for the rest of it once I’m actually able to start the book myself!)

When people say bisexual men will eventually be gay,

and when people say that bisexual women will eventually be straight,

what people are actually saying is that choosing men over women is inevitable.

This is patriarchy.

37 Books By, For, or About Bisexual or Otherwise Non-Monosexual People

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More Resources:

This is great list, including some titles I wasn’t aware had bi content until now!   A a good blend of nonfiction and fiction.   We’ve reviewed several of these titles as well :

Boyfriends with Girlfriends The Horizontal Poet A Map of Home Look Both Ways

and more!

coming round again with even more bisexual book links! And you all ARE following Bisexual Books aren’t you?

Licedames asked: Hello! Have you read “Bisexuality, Binarism And Why Everyone Has It Wrong ” by Kinsey Hope? The article states among other things that bisexuality erases other forms of polysexuality and that it is binarist because people ultimately associate it with being attracted to men and women. I just wonder what you think about the post because I really don’t want to be cissexist or erasing. And there are more points there…I’m confused :-(

Answer: I read it a long time ago. She’s not the first nor the last person to make that argument, and I don’t really care to rebut her essay point-by-point, so here’s what I’ve said about this other times it’s arisen:

What “people” (who specifically in this case?) associate bisexuality with is not necessarily the fault of bisexuals. Bisexuality is also popularly associated with infidelity, poor moral character, disease, and deceit, but that doesn’t make it okay to declare that bisexuality is therefore directly linked to any of those things just because people think they are. It’s heterosexism and biphobia that create these stereotypes.

I’m not going to claim that bisexuals are never binarist, because that would be as ridiculous as saying bisexuals are never racist or sexist. But, like racism and sexism, binarism is deeply ingrained into our culture and is something literally everyone is guilty of at some point or another, even those “enlightened” types who reject bisexuality in favor of other terms because of its supposed binarist nature. Bisexuality gets vilified because people describe it as an attraction to “both genders,” but “straight” and “gay” are built on a binary system of gender too; these identities are pretty much always framed as an attraction to, or lack thereof, an “opposite” gender. “Both” and “opposite” indicate a binary, yet it is only bisexuals who are singled out as Most Binarist Ever.

I think this argument is appealing because it’s anti-bisexual but uses social justice language to make it less obvious so it goes down easier. It panders both to the anti-bisexual sentiments drilled into all of us as well as the desire for well meaning people like yourself to want to avoid being cissexist. It touches on old stereotypes of bisexuals as politically apathetic as well as unreliable and selfish (much like how we are seen as unreliable and selfish regarding relationships), more concerned with ourselves and our own pleasure than with the well-being of others. These arguments always carry an implication that if we really cared about the welfare of transgender people, we would stop identifying as bisexual.

Of course, this erases all of the people out there who are transgender (binary and nonbinary) who identify as bisexual and the fact that transgender people have been involved in the bisexual community since the beginning. Shiri Eisnerpoints out that this argument doesn’t even originate from the transgender community, but apparently from two non-bisexual cisgender academics. It’s got more to do with creating a rift between the bisexual and transgender communities so that they waste their energy destroying each other than working toward greater visibility and power, and has virtually nothing to do with advancing the causes of transgender people.

It also results in a really lazy attitude towards transgender activism on the part of cisgender people. I’ve seen too many here who think they are good allies just because they are open to the idea of sex with a trans person and call themselves pansexual and not bisexual, as if that’s all activism entails. If being willing to have sex with someone is activism, then every straight man would be a feminist, and that of course isn’t the case.

Bisexuality isn’t binarist or erasing in its definition so long as you avoid language that implies men and women are the only options. So you can describe bisexuality as, for instance, the attraction to more than one gender and you’re fine because it says nothing definitive about how many genders exist or how many bisexuals in general are attracted to (because this number varies between individuals).

Please don’t feel like identifying as bisexual is a bad thing. There are a lot of cultural forces at work that want you to feel that way and this is only one cleverly disguised example through which those forces try to do that.

Bisexualmind, marry me*! <3

* Notwithstanding ideological opposition to marriage

This was posted in my dorm. It makes me really happy :)