Following the Putting the “B” in LGBT Summit was Bi Lines II, an evening of readings and performances by bi writers, musicians, and one playwrite. It was a pretty well-put-together evening, it was neat to see Edmund White read, and I’ve decided I like bi songwriter Rorie Kelly and would like to check out more of her work. But the highlight of the evening was the excerpt from Erika Kate McDonald’s one-woman show, Fluid. In fact, Erika Kate herself was one of the highlights of the Summit. She’s great company, and I was delighted to learn she lives in Brooklyn.

I first saw Fluid over a year and a half ago on a date with Girlfriend, Esq. In fact, when I started this blog I was disappointed that it had been so long that I didn’t feel I remembered it well enough to write about it. So it was great to get to see a bit of it again — my favorite part, no less! Play-by-play after the cut, with pictures. I apologize for the quality of the pictures; I took them on my phone on the spur of the moment.

She starts off by musing about all of the people who ask if being bisexuals means one’s attractions are 50/50. Who does this question serve? Who is the answer for? Is it for her? She doubts it, and so do I. Still, she decides to figure it out. And then she totally captured my heart by doing math. Behold:

I notice now that she starts off with the givens that people are either male or female, and that pairings are m/f, f/f, or f/m.  I don’t remember having a problem with the way that was said, though, so possibly she got a bit more nuanced with it. I honestly don’t remember.

The next page, which I missed taking a picture of because it went by so quickly and I hadn’t yet decided to get them all, simply said “HOW GAY AM I?” And then we were off and running figuring it out. First we look at the past…

I don’t even remember what all of that stood for. Other than URMRF, which was unconsummated reasonably monogamous romantic friendships. Still, looking at it I always crack up, and hearing her go through explaining it is even better.

Like in the Klein Grid, current behavior and thoughts about the future are both important here.

I love the realization that community matters to this.  I truly believe that the people one spends time with and their values affect one’s behavior — I know spending so much of my time in women&trans spaces and radical lefty queer communities has made a difference in my dating life.  And “Genetic Factors: Data not available” makes me giggle.

Are you ready? Drumroll, please…

And then she went out into the world armed with that self-knowledge, and…promptly fell in love with a boy.

Yeah. I love it. See it if you get a chance.  Or anything else she does; rumor has it she’s working on a new piece.

I sat down to write this tonight and spent two hours following links in RaceFail09 instead. Oops. But I’m glad I did it, even if it did come directly out of my sleepytime. There’s still a lot of good stuff happening out there, and the best thing I read tonight is Cat Valente’s piece on the power and importance of stories. (Yes, I am seriously author-crushing on Cat Valente right now. And what? I just wish I hadn’t lost my brand new copy of Palimpsest on that otherwise extremely awesome trip to Hartford.) There are also lots more things open in tabs. I will look at them tomorrow. Yes I will.

And speaking of RaceFail09, one of the things it brought to my attention is this LJ challenge to read 50 books by people of color in a year. There’s no way I’m going to read 50 in a year. My adolescent self would be appalled to hear me say it, but with all of the time I spend using my Eee PC on the train and being glued to the computer most of the time that I’m home and awake, there’s no way I’m going to read 50 books total in a year. But reading reviews of books by authors of color led to thinking “Hey, that sounds like something I’d enjoy!” and adding things to my library list, and I am being more conscious about where my attention goes and reading more stuff by people of color. And it is good.

Last week I read Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads (this part cross-posted to 50books_POC). I’ve been meaning to read Nalo Hopkinson for ages, particularly but not only because every time SF/F authors of color come up in conversation, her name is one of the first mentioned. I borrowed Brown Girl In The Ring from a friend last year and loved it. And even knowing I liked Hopkinson’s writing, The Salt Roads blew me away. It follows three woman, who have in common that they are sometimes hosts for the goddess Ezili. Mer is a plantation slave in Haiti in the time leading up to the revolution, a healer and the doctor for her plantation and several around it. Jeanne is a dancer and performer in Paris a century or more later, and Charles Baudelaire’s mistress. And Thais is a slave and a prostitute in fourth-century Alexandria. All three are well-drawn and sympathetic, especially Mer. And speaking of Mer and the Haitian revolution — I know that the history they teach in school consciously privileges some stories over others, but it still always amazes me that almost everything I know about the Haitian revolution I’ve learned from reading fiction. The only successful slave revolt in history (I want to say the only revolutionary war that’s succeeded without outside help, but I’m not as sure of that one), and nary a mention of it in history classes. And this was living in Miami, which has a significant Haitian population. Shame on us. Of course, now that I’ve noticed, it’s on me to do some learning that’s not from fiction. Anyway. The book talks frankly and beautifully about racism and slavery, interracial relationships, revolution, and the strength of women. It’s a riveting read.

I loved The Salt Roads not only for its vivid, seductive language and clear look at how slavery and racism have affected people and woman at different points in history, but for its queerness. The book doesn’t talk about queerness and homophobia the way it does about race and racism, but they’re undeniably present, in all three storylines. And not just queerness, but bisexuality. Or rather, loving both men and women, since our own concepts of sexuality and sexual identity can’t be mapped onto the past that way. Mer’s lover Tipingee, a fellow slave, is also married to a man she deeply loves. Her feelings for both are portrayed as real and lasting; at one point she thinks of herself and Mer as “wives to each other…even when they had had husbands.” On the next page, we read that the other slaves’ respect for Mer means that

if she and Tipingee wanted to play madivinez with each other like some young girls did while they were waiting for marriage, well, plenty of the Ginen felt life was to brief to fret about that. So long as Tipingee was doing her duty by her husband, most people swallowed their bile and left them be. Tipingee esteemed her Patrice for that, how he had never tried to take the joy of Mer from her. Another man would have beat her. Patrice had gotten to know that her love was bigger for having so many to love

The love between the two women is matter-of-fact and beautiful, and neither of them seems to fret about it or what it says about them as people.

There is no indication that Thais is anything but straight, though I of all people am not making any assumptions based on that. (I do, sometimes. At least now I usually notice it.) Either way, in her storyline we have both her best friend and fellow slave/prostitute Judah, who “lik[es] to go with men,” and her favorite client Antoniou, a Greek sailor who “like[s] boys and women.”

And Jeanne, while seeming to want Baudelaire for more than just the financial security he provides, and most certainly loving a man as a life partner later on in the story, spends days on end in bed with fellow dancer Lise toward the beginning of the book. She thinks while they scry for Lise’s true love that “if I had looked for my own love in that pot, I knew I would have seen only Lise, but she and I weren’t rich women, to make of our tribadism a secret marriage.” So the acknowledgment of the world being a hard place for queers is certainly there, but never becomes the focus.

And these characters exist, and are natural, and play their part in the story. And no one ever questions whether Tipingee or Jeanne can legitimately love or be attracted to both men and women, it’s never implied that they’re confused or fickle or will get over it in time. It’s refreshing, and I love it.

Whew! This should be it on everything that happened in the past month. We should now be back to our regularly scheduled weekly round-up.

It’s been a fun couple of weeks for me. My sister is in town between a semester in Russia and her last semester in Wisconsin (she should have something to say for us about that soon!), and I’ve been spending tons of time with her. We hosted a dinner party last weekend, spent this week getting my apartment from mostly-moved-in to fully set up and looking like a home, and two nights ago broke it in with a housewarming party. It’s been lots of fun, but blogging and spending time with my other friends have been falling by the wayside a bit as I try to stock up on time with her enough to last me the next three months. They say that how you spend the New Year is how you spend the next year, and I would be so okay with spending this year in people’s living rooms with a few close friends. Eating homemade soup, tearing apart neocon craziness, and laughing til it hurts. Bring it on.

Meanwhile, in the world:

I still have reservations about Rick Warren. But this Huffington Post piece my friend Rachel pointed me to makes some very good points. Warren looks far less bad when marriage is not the lense you look through. While I’ll never be a fan, even if he weren’t invested in retaining his right to speak out against homosexuality from the pulpit, we all know marriage is not the lense I look through. And if we’re going to have a country full of evangelicals I’d rather have them be the type that spend most of their energy toward fighting poverty than the ones who spend it talking about the evil gays. And his won’t be the only religious voice present that day. I take back my reservations about going to the inauguration – I’ll be there. Even if I do make faces while Warren’s talking.

Tamora Pierce points out that, in all of the fuss about Warren, almost no one is talking about Reverend Joseph E. Lowery. Who is not only a giant of the Black civil rights movement but also strongly, publicly, consistently pro-LGBT rights. It’s a remarkable oversight, shame on us.

My friend Stacey has a brilliant and optimistic conspiracy theory concerning Warren. She allows that it’s entirely possible that Obama has made a stupid and/or thoughtless mistake in selecting Warren to give the invocation. Neither of us are such rabid Obama fans that we think that’s impossible. But while we don’t know whether he’s devious, we do know he’s very smart. So what if this was a calculated move intended to piss off his base, so that he would have to pass LGBT rights legislation to placate them? He does have more people up in arms about it than I would have predicted, and he’s had to make some strong pro-LGBT rights statements as a result;  maybe he did it intentionally, so he’d be “cornered” into supporting us. I don’t know that I buy it, but I like it as a theory.
Of course, I’d like it a lot more if he’d just openly support us.

The Canadian government is trying to decide whether to send Jane Okojie back to Nigeria, where her bisexuality is apparently punishable by up to 14 years in prison. I always find the equivocation in these cases puzzling and frustrating. The question at hand is, ostensibly, whether she would be safe there. Given that her sexual orientation is against the law and punishable by prison time, and given that it’s now an internationally known case and it’s unlikely that she could go back and be successfully closeted (not, of course, that such a thing should ever be required for safety…) — how is there a question as to whether she’ll be safe? Surely there’s a lot I don’t know about immigration law — American, let alone Canadian — but it’s hard not to suspect institutional homophobia in what seem like such clear-cut cases.

Did you know modern liberalism is directly descended from ancient religious practices that most likely never existed to begin with? Whoa. Couldn’t resist sharing that snippet of crazy…

I have mixed feelings about this pledge some straight couples are making to get divorced if Prop 8 stands. On the one hand, it doesn’t actually help queers for straight people to not be married, and it’s less effective to try to give up your privilege than to fight for everyone to have it. On the other, solidarity and making a statement is important, and it would send a powerful message if this caught on with any meaningful numbers. I do think it’s a useful stance for an ally to take. But on the third and funniest hand, I love the way this turns on its head the religious right’s argument that same sex marriage will somehow destroy the institution of heterosexual marriage/damage individual heterosexual marriages. Apparently, it’s the outlawing of same sex marriage that will destroy heterosexual marriages.

In one of its many efforts to hand the Obama administration a messy disaster and force Obama to anger the religious right by rolling back discriminatory laws and policy, a couple of weeks ago the Bush administration increased doctors’ rights to refuse treatment based on religious or moral objections. This is really a disastrous policy, on any number of levels. It allows doctors to refuse not only abortions, contraception, and fertility treatment for lesbian couples, but to refuse to treat LGBT folks at all because they have religious or moral objections to us. Pharmacists could refuse to fill trans folks’ hormone prescriptions. Doctors could refuse to administer HIV tests, and would no longer be required to inform patients where else they could get the test. Whatever happened to the Hippocratic oath? If you are the sort of person who is going to refuse to care about the health of people you consider objectionable, you should not become a doctor. Leave it for those who have a calling to heal greater than their calling to punish. It is impossible to overstate how damaging this policy is, to LGBT folks and to everyone. At least we can be somewhat confident Obama will not allow this to stand — but it will serve to mightily piss off the religious right when he overturns it, Rick Warren or no Rick Warren. As Alex Blaze writes on The Bilerico Project, “That’s Bush: playing politics with less important people’s bodies for 14 years. Why should he stop now?“

Britain’s Court of Appeal has ruled that a straight man can be the victim of homophobic harassment at work — even though he is not gay, his coworkers do not believe him to be gay, and he knows that they don’t believe him to be gay. While I admit to an initial reaction of “oh, boo hoo, it’s hard to be straight,” I actually think this is a really valuable ruling. On the face of it, it’s unacceptable for this man’s colleagues to call him a faggot, mock him in the employee magazine, and otherwise make his work environment unbearable for him. Of course he should have recourse even though he’s straight. And on a deeper level, it’s important for people to see that heterosexism and rigid gender norms hurt everyone. Unfortunately, I doubt that most people outside the queer world will go this deep with their analysis, but I can dream. Because that’s very clearly what’s happening here; this man fails in some ways to live up to a strict cultural idea of what a cisgendered straight man should be, and he’s being punished for it. The system as it currently exists does oppress all of us — although, of course, not equally.

This didn’t happen in the past month, but on Bilerico’s list of their top 70 most-read posts of the last year I found this look at transgender characters in science fiction. There are even more interesting-looking books mentioned in the comments. And there’s a list of the top 10 books every bisexual should read here. I’ve only read one of the books on it so far, so I can’t speak to the quality of their choices, but several of them have been on my to-read list for some time.

HRC is pressuring Obama to make certain concessions in exchange for picking Warren (there you go, Miss Stacey!) But their call for Obama to prioritize Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, more severe punishment for hate crimes, and unequal tax treatment of domestic partnerships seems to me to again illustrate how HRC, with its lack of an intersectional analysis, often misses the point. I agree that it’s important for Obama to endorse a gender expression-inclusive ENDA, but I don’t know that I would call for anything other than an endorsement even on that in the first 100 days. This man is taking office at an extremely difficult and critical time. I would prioritize things like sorting out the economy, getting started on rescuing the environment, and changing the previously discussed guidelines that allow doctors to refuse people medical care over an LGBT-specific agenda. Being able to afford to keep our homes and feed ourselves and our families is critical — especially to queers, who are more likely to be un- or under-employed. So is being able to count on getting medical care when we need it, and having the earth remain habitable for humankind. I absolutely agree that Obama needs to practice what he preached on LGBT equality, and that he needs to keep the promises he made to secure our votes and not just forget about us once he’s in office. But he can’t do everything he needs to achieve in his presidency in the first 100 days, and maybe we should make sure we will all be alive to struggle for the things on the gay agenda.

I’m not even sure what’s going on with this piece about Ashlee Simpson , whose husband apparently announced on the Howard Stern show that they have anal sex. Is the suggestion here that men who want to have anal sex with women must be bisexual? ‘Cause, um, there’s nothing true about that. Lots of straight men fantasize about anal sex, often having more to do with it being forbidden than with a woman’s ass being the next best substitute for a man’s. Nor is anal sex the only way for men to have sex with other men, though people always seem to assume it is. Any idea what’s going on here?

Mona Charen writes in the National Review Online about same sex marriage being a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad thing. Mostly not on its own merits, but because of the awful things it would lead to (married twins! Seriously, folks, there’s no difference! In which case why do we even bother to have the word “incest”when we could just use the word “gay,” and life would stay nice and simple?) But the really charming part is where she writes, “But what about bisexuals? I ask this not to poke fun or to hurt anyone’s feelings, but in all seriousness. How does gay marriage help a bisexual? I assume that if you are bisexual, you believe that you need to have sexual relationships with both men and women. If you are a bisexual man married to a woman, don’t you need to break the marriage bond to express your bisexuality? If you choose to express just the homosexual side of your bisexuality, then aren’t you gay? Likewise, if you choose to express only the heterosexual side, how are you a bisexual? Why is bisexuality not a recipe for infidelity?’ In all seriousness, indeed. Could she be more disingenuous? Going on to talk about the definition of the word “transgender” she cites the Wikipedia article, so clearly she’s capable of doing at least a minimum of research before making counter-arguments against her “assumptions” without bothering to find out how things actually are (although she then dismisses the many things “transgender” can encompass as “a multitude of sexual deviances,” so no points for her there.) The same five minutes of research that must have required would have told her that there’s a difference between bisexuality and polyamory, and that bisexuality is not synonymous with infidelity. Maybe that’s too much effort to put in for the bisexuals. Someone should tell her that bisexuality is about being attracted to both men and women, not necessarily on whether you act one both or either. The same way she doesn’t cease to be straight when she’s single or not actually at that moment engaged in the act of having sex with a man, we remain bisexual even when we commit to monogamous relationships. And of course we’re attracted to other people while in them, but so are monosexuals — and they probably act on it at about the same rate that we do. Also, thanks for dismissing queers’ objections when bigots compare gay sex to incest, bestiality, and pedophilia as “hurt feelings.” That implies that the statement is true but unnecessarily harsh, rather than a deliberately inflammatory inaccurate analogy designed to get right-thinking Americans offended and disgusted at the thought that they might be condoning such sex. (Oh, wait, I should be the someone who tells her. That’s the great thing about having a blog; it prompts me to do all kinds of things I used to think of but not bother with. Consider it done.) I saw this on Art at the Auction, which takes it apart quite nicely. The Confabulum also has a counter-argument , but it’s more focused on marriage, which I find boring. And the author makes a point of dismissing the slippery slope argument by claiming that there are other good reasons to disallow group marriage, without ever bothering to explain what they are. It’s my favorite when people argue for their rights by agreeing with the majority that some other group still doesn’t deserve similar rights. Give us same sex marriage, we’re just like you, not like those nasty people who want to have more than one partner at once. Those debaucherous perverts.

This is a remarkable piece of wackjobbery. The evils of Santa, gay reindeer, a gratuitous mention of how women should stay home, and wouldn’t it be great if all the queers died. Go ahead, read it for the laughs. (Ok, the last part is more plausible and therefore much much less funny. Did you know that all queers are rapists? Maybe he’s confused because the sin that led to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah wasn’t gay sex at all – it was raping all the travelers that came through town. Which I have to agree is pretty wicked. Also, check out the first comment — with friends like that, who needs enemies?) And speaking of the laughs and wackjobbery, I recently spent two hours with friends tearing apart Dennis Prager’s theory that women should never deny sex to their husbands, giggling the whole time. Thanks to Pandagon for pointing it out to me, and doing a hilarious job of refuting it.

I really enjoyed this piece on the newly developing acceptance for transfolks in Reform and even Conservative Judaism. I’ll have to look up the new rabbinic arguments arguments in support of accepting people as their authentic gender. And check out Transtorah, a new resource on transgender issues for the Jewish community. The piece respectfully referred to trans men (never using that phrase, but saying “transgender rabbi” or “transgender student” in a way that makes the word “man” superfluous rather than pointedly leaving it out). They lost me, though, when they then referred to a trans woman as “a transgender male-to-female literature professor…formerly a man known as [previous name].” They didn’t feel the need to tie the trans men they discussed to their assigned genders with the phrase “female-to-male” or their previous (assumedly) female names, and I don’t know why they did it with this woman.

I want to read this biography of Dusty Springfield now. I don’t pay much attention when people label celebrities of the past as bisexual, as many bi activists tend to seize on their cover relationships, one kiss with a person of the same gender, or misinterpreted cultural context and assign them an identity they very well might not have claimed. I’m fascinated, though, by what the article says about Springfield’s disregard for her culture’s rules and suggestion to “ask the people who go to bed with me” if one wants to know her sexuality. That sounds much more like the kind of approach and identity that’s interesting to me.

And finally, I give you this discussion of the possible benefits female bisexuality can have for men. It classifies female celebrities who’ve fooled around with girls (some identifying as bisexual, some not) as “bisexual straight women,” and posits that they talk about being attracted to other women more than they act on it, and may indeed want to have sex with women but certainly don’t see them as relationship material or potential life partners. Which is especially puzzling since the list includes Lindsay Lohan, who seems to see one particular woman as exactly that. “This sexual trend is spreading like wild fire all over the world and many people are already benefiting from it!” author Janet Sheridan writes.  She explains that female bisexual behavior is not more common now, only more accepted, and my favorite part is her explanation of the aforementioned benefit. You see, women will be more comfortable experimenting with another w0man when a man is present (because the dick reassures her of her core heterosexuality? because really women only ever do anything to turn boys on anyway? It’s unclear).  This will make them feel safe to “enjoy the soft and creamy touch of another female“…no, I am not making this up. So, “this is why it’s ESSENTIAL that you learn how to help women transform their secret sexual desires and fantasies into reality… If you learn to do this, having threesomes regularly will be easier than you ever possibly imagined….If you want to attract threesomes into your life you’ll need to understand the little known psychological secrets that will literally push any woman over the edge to having a threesome with you.” Go on, push women over the edge and out of their comfort zone for your own sexual gratification. Everybody wins!
(For the record: I am not claiming that some women don’t do it for the attention. But the way people dismiss all bi women as doing it for the attention is still offensive. And I don’t even have space here to talk about how the women who do probably do so because they live in a world where pleasing men is the only way to power.)

And a little giggle as a reward for those of you that got through all that:

In Philadelphia with Sarah a couple of weeks ago, I walked by the construction site for the soon-to-be National Museum of Jewish American History. Along the wall outside, blocking your view of the ugly construction site, they have billboards with pictures of prominent Jewish figures and little blurbs about what they accomplished. Next to a picture of Betty Friedan, it said “She invented the feminine mystique.” I’m sorry, what? No. She wrote The Feminine Mystique.  She critiqued the feminine mystique – or if that rhymes too much for you, or you want to play into the word mystique, she revealed the feminine mystique. But invented it? I bet she’s rolling in her grave.

I just finished Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home, which I heard about here. I really enjoyed it, as a novel as well as for its probably bisexual protagonist.

Nidali Ammar is born in Boston to a Palestinian father and an Egyptian-Greek mother. Family circumstances call them back to the Middle East not much later, and Nidali spends her childhood in Kuwait before Iraq’s invasion causes her family to flee to Alexandria, and from there, eventually, back to America. Her attraction to girls is presented very much within the larger context of this life — her parents’ rocky marriage, her father’s rages and determination to keep her from hanging around with boys, her sadness and struggles to acclimate and make friends every time circumstances drag her to a new place. Nidali is a whole person, and her attraction to girls is not the only thing in her life that’s difficult or confusing. It’s so refreshing that queerness, and particularly bisexuality, can be contextualized this way, that there can be a book about a most likely bisexual character that is not only about her sexuality. Nidali as a character doesn’t exist for the sole purpose of being bisexual, and I’m glad that we’ve reached the point where that’s possble. I understand the need for the coming-out narrative, and those are also powerful books, but I’m glad they’re not the only books that exist.

Which is not to say that her feelings about girls aren’t upsetting to Nidali; the few times they come up, they certainly seem to be. After an unexpectedly sexual wrestling match with her friend Rama, the two ignore each other and read magazines the rest of their visit, and Nidali cries all the way home. She’s crying about her bewilderment about the war in Kuwait and the need to leave her home, but I got the impression she’s also bewildered about what just happened and why, and that might be what tipped her over into tears. Later, she finds herself thinking that she’d like to give her friend Jiji her first kiss. She manages it by offering Jjji practice with kissing so she’ll know what to do when her boyfriend kisses her, and she describes the minutes of kissing that follow in rapturous detail. Afterward, she dwells on that kiss and wonders how she can like both girls and boys, what it means that she does. But it doesn’t consume all of her attention; she has a whole life to attend to, and this is only part of it. I appreciate that visibility. Queer presses are very important, but so is having believable, sympathetic queer characters in more mainstream books that people will read for other reasons. The same way I got a look into what it might be like to grow up with Nidali’s ethnic and religious background, other readers will get a glimpse of what adolescence might be like as one discovers one is queer.

Bisexuality is not the only thing Jarrar handles sensitively and well. Nidali’s father’s feelings about Palestine, and the way Nidali herself feels going through an Israeli checkpoint, are presented simply and movingly, allowing the reader space for a reaction rather than telling hir what to feel. I have a bit of a blind spot on the subject of Israel, and the way the narrative refrained from preaching and instead simply shared the characters’ experiences gave me room to sympathize and empathize. This is the same thing I think Jarrar did well as far as Nidali’s sexual experiences with girls, reporting her feelings and actions and confusion and not telling us how to react to them. She’s similarly restrained about Nidali’s masturbation and sexual experience with boys, her struggles due to being mixed-race and never quite feeling she fits in, her mixed feelings about her nerdiness and good grades, the friction in her parents’ marriage, etc. She doesn’t preach about any of them, and it gives the reader a chance to really consider them.

I was about to write that if you’re only reading A Map of Home for the bisexual content, you may be disappointed. But that may not be true; I read it for that reason, and found many other things to like. Nidali’s sexual orientation is nowhere near the focus of the book, and only comes up a handful of times. We know that she never saw Rama again after their experience, since shortly afterward Nidali’s family fled Kuwait for Alexandria. I would have liked to know more about how her friendship with Jiji changed (or didn’t) after they made out; what Jiji’s reaction was, if they ever talked about it, whether and how they justified it to themselves. I would also have liked to observe more of Nidali’s thoughts about these experiences – she seems to struggle with it more than she does with her frequent masturbation or her sexual experiences with boys, both of which are also supposed to be beyond the pale, and it seems reasonable to assume she gives it more than the few pages of thought we see. I’d like to know what she’s thinking, and what if anything she concludes about herself. Given her background, it would make sense for her to decide that regardless of her feelings for certain girls, she will of course eventually marry a man — after all, she likes them. She doesn’t necessarily have to give up her chance at happiness in order to be normal. But we don’t know if that’s how she’s framing it for herself, or whether she’s framing it for herself at all.

I do wish we could have stuck with Nidali a bit longer. As the book closes, she’s getting ready to go to a small liberal arts college in Boston. If she’s going to encounter queer ideas and develop an identity and ethos around or in opposition to them, not to mention finding queer girls to befriend or date, she’d likely do so there. And she’s rebellious enough and willing enough to challenge herself and the expectations of others that it seems a strong possibility. It’s a pity we don’t get to know. But the soft focus on Nidali’s sexual orientation, and the lack of politics around that and everything else, are among the things I enjoyed most about this book. While it would also be fun to watch a character go through the process of becoming politicized, I suppose in this case I can’t have it both ways. And by not following Nidali until she’s partnered, we avoid the conundrum of discovering whether she’s “really straight” or “really gay” based on her partner’s gender, and she has the space to feel of what she feels and be all of who she is. All in all it’s a beautiful, engaging book, and I enjoyed the time I spend with Nidali.

In one of those feats of coincidental timing that the world is so good at, I read an article about YA fiction (in the newest Bitch magazine) that interviewed Sara Ryan, just after I posted my last book review here and several people recommended Empress of the World to me. I borrowed it from a friend, and really enjoyed it.

I’m starting to wonder if I’m getting too old for YA fiction, especially the kind that takes place in high schools (as opposed to the speculative fiction kind.) I realize some people never get too old for YA fiction, but I might be. The past few books I’ve read have just felt like sketches rather than novels, without the level of character and plot development that I look for. And I like lots of denouement, with all of my loose ends neatly tied in, while very uncertain endings seem to be in these days. But that said, I quite liked Empress of the World, and I especially like how Sara Ryan handles her characters’ sexuality.

The book takes place over the course of a summer, at an academic summer camp similar to the one I went to. Our protagonist, Nic (short for Nicola) meets and quickly develops a crush on a girl named Battle. The two of them and the rest of their group of friends deal with loads of academic work, various family drama, and their attraction to each other.

One of the things I like most about the book is that all of the characters (save one, who seems to be pretty much a plot device) are real people with real troubles, things other than their sexuality. This is not one of those books that takes place in a world where the trials of being queer happen in a vacuum, and I appreciate that. There are trials to being queer – Nic and Battle’s friend Katrina has an oh-so-familiar reaction to Nic’s interest in girls, rushing to make clear that she’s totally straight even while she’s being supportive, just in case Nic should interpret her hug as a come-on – but it’s nice when needing to come out doesn’t define a character’s relationship with her parents, or consume all of her attention, because she’s real enough to have other things going on in her life.

In fact, Nic and Battle approach their sexuality with refreshingly little angsting. Nic seems confused for a few pages, wondering how she can get so tongue-tied and awkward around certain boys <i>and</i> certain girls, but she accepts it pretty quickly. She seems to have had an inkling even before, watching a girl change costumes during the school play (right before a major crush on a boy.) And even when she’s confused, she’s not horrified or disgusted with herself. She’s anxious about her crush on Battle, but because she has no idea if Battle likes girls, not because she’s appalled that she herself does. That doesn’t seem to strike her a impossible or undesirable. My favorite moment is probably when she’s musing on the heteronormativity of her surroundings, and wondering if anyone else could be anything other than straight – “and there’s another boy i’ve seen, i think he’s in katrina’s class, who often wears long velvet skirts and lots of black eyeliner. but i believe this to be fashion statement rather than a declaration of sexuality, since i have observed him making out with various angst crows.

“i suppose he could like boys, too, though.

“i of all people should remember that.” Indeed. I think we’ve all caught ourselves thinking that one, and having to stop and point it out to ourselves. And yay, acknowledging the possibility of male bisexuality.

And when Battle runs into the arms of a convenient boy when things goes wrong between her and Nic, Ryan never gives us reason to think that it’s because he’s male, rather than because Battle needs a rebound and a distraction. Battle is avoiding her problems, but those problems don’t necessarily involve being attracted to girls. We never observe her internal monologue, and I won’t pretend to know whether she’s ever been attracted to a girl before or what her sexuality is and how she feels about it, but it’s neat to have two character in the same book come across as bisexual. It’s lovely that, even while she’s making out with a boy, the reader isn’t given the impression that Battle’s actually straight after all and was just trifling with Nic’s heart – I am so over that, and so glad it’s not the moral to this story.

I did find Battle to avoid her problems in a way that I don’t find admirable but the book seems to. I’m just not that into the take-home message of “Words don’t always work.” As a queer woman, I’m a champion processor. And while I recognize that the amount of talking I and most of the people I know do about our feelings and needs can be a little excessive, I’m not ready to swing that far in the other direction. I agree with Battle that one shouldn’t assign narratives to people because one doesn’t know their stories, but not that words are so imperfect that it’s better not even to try to communicate meaningfully with the people one cares about. Nic and Battle might have had a much easier time of it if they hadn’t spent a good chunk of the book avoiding each other, while Nic repeated to hersef Battle’s motto of “Words don’t always work” (which one assumes Battle was doing, too, since she was the one who ran away when something went wrong instead of trying to talk it out. That strikes me as excessive armor, not wisdom.)

So: A+ on bisexuality, and solid story and storytelling, too, despite my quibbling. It seems The Rules for Hearts catches up with the same characters several years later. I’ll definitely be checking it out.

I just finished Brent Hartinger’s Split Screen (Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies/Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies), this year’s Lambda Literary Award winner in the Bisexual category. It was cute, but I have to say I was disappointed. I have trouble believing there wasn’t a better bisexual book published all year. Especially since I’ve read three of the other nominees — Look Both Ways, Landing, and Baby Love — and liked all of them better.

Split Screen is two books in one, following two different characters through the same story – Russel, the 16 year old gay protagonist of two of Hartinger’s previous books; and his bisexual best friend, Min. They work as extras in a zombie flick, and each have romantic trouble along the way – Russel in choosing between his long-distance boyfriend and the ex who wants to get back together with him, and Min deciding whether she can date a girl who won’t risk losing her cheerleader friends by coming out of the closet.

I read Min’s book first (my own little feminist statement), but it felt like an afterthought: “Look how funny it is that so much can happen when Russell’s attention is elsewhere!” Hartinger seems to understand what should make up a teenage girl’s inner life, and many of the sentiments expressed were dead-on, but it didn’t seem to flow. It felt like an illustration of why writing teachers harp on “Show, don’t tell.” On the other hand, his politics are pretty good (even if he did title the book about a boy with the title of the movie it’s about, and the book about a girl “Bride of” same – why, horror genre? Why?), and I appreciated the presentation of bisexuality. 9 pages in, we find Min thinking to herself,

Most people really don’t understand bisexuality. I hate it when people talk like bisexual people are indecisive, unable to make up their minds. It’s not a question of being changeable, like a sea anemone, able to switch genders.I don’t shift or waver or change, and I’m not on my way to anything other than being bi; I’ve always been bisexual, and I always will be. Why is that so hard for people to understand?
It’s also not the case that I’m attracted to all guys and all girls — “anything that moves,” as some people like to say. Like anyone, I’m only attracted to some people — some of them guys and some of them girls.

Thanks, Brent! That’s pretty awesome. As is the way Russel also accepts Min’s bisexuality as permanent and meaningful, when he’s narrating. But I was disappointed that Min is presented as being sanctimonious and uncompromising because she doesn’t want hide who she is to be with her closeted girlfriend. Not wanting to sneak around and misrepresent your politics and desires seems pretty reasonable to me, so the way the book pushed her to take chances and be more open-minded felt a little off.

Russel’s book read much better. Unsurprisingly, Hartinger seems to have a much better idea of what it’s like to be a gay high school boy than a bisexual high school girl, and either I’d gotten used to the woodenness of the writing by then or the writing on that side was just better. It seemed pretty clear that readers were expected to read this half first, but you didn’t have to — it made sense the way I read it — and I’m going to chalk that up to the series being about Russel, rather than everyone always putting girls second. And Russel’s dilemma (stay with a boy who lives 800 miles away, or dump him for the guy who 8 months ago joined in with his friends to call you a fag rather than come out, but has now come out to win you back?) seemed much less clear-cut to me, so I didn’t find myself thinking he was handling it horribly wrong. And his parents’ reaction to finding out he’s gay was a believable side plot. All in all it wasn’t a bad way to spend two days’ worth of train rides, but I thought Lambda could have done better.

Did anyone else read this? Am I totally off base here – is it fever brain from this nasty cold making everything seem wooden?