Oh YA novels.  I love your innovation, your zippy pace, and your relate-able tone.  But just between you and me, YA, there are some problems between your pages.  As a bisexual person, I can’t help but notice that bisexual characters in YA lit have their own collection of harmful tropes that rear their ugly head with alarming frequency.  And YA, these things have got to go.   

6)  I’m drowning in biphobia.  Imagine reading a scene where a character says horribly racist, sexist, or homophobic things to bully another, and the writer never makes it clear that this verbal abuse  is unacceptable.   Seems like some pretty shady writing huh?  Might make you go ‘wtf???’ and put the book down?   Well this happens to bisexual characters all the time.   

I’m gonna pick on the low-hanging fruit of Alec from the Mortal Instruments/Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare.   When he is feeling insecure in his relationship with Magnus, he resorts to catty comments about how liking both sexes is nasty.   Magnus and all the other characters just let this slide.  Alec is resorting to stereotypes and slurs and everyone acts like this is no big deal.  

Putting up with verbal abuse is just seen as part of the package for bi characters, so much so that it is rarely even noticed much less remarked upon or corrected.    

5) Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.  We can be the quirky best friend, the mysterious love interest, the sister you barely see, or the ex that broke your heart.  But bisexual characters exist mostly in YA novels to prop homo and heterosexual characters up.  We are rarely the stars of the show.  

Now I know bisexuals are not the only group with this problem.  Just about every minority / historically disadvantaged group has this problem with their representation in literature.  But it doesn’t make it suck any less when you’re looking for yourself in literature and you have to make due with side characters.   

4) The Case of the Missing B-Word.  There is nothing wrong with not liking to be labeled or with needing time to figure out what label works best.  However, a great many characters in YA lit who have emotional and sexual relationships with both genders avoid or actively stigmatize the word bisexual.   Nearest I can tell, authors think they are being open-minded with their characters by writing them this way.   But by having no characters that use the word bisexual, it sends the opposite message - that bisexuality is something to be ashamed of or that there is something wrong with identifying this way.  Or worse yet, that we don’t really exist.   

The most egregious example of this is in The Bermudez Triangle/On The Count of Three by Maureen Johnson when Avery snaps at her friend for suggesting she is bi after having had relationships with boys and a girl.   Her reason?  "The bi girls, they go back and forth" i.e. bisexuals are sluts.  Does any character ever correct this bi-bashing?  Nope.   It’s left to stand and it’s unclear how Avery identifies at the end of the book besides vehemently not bisexual.  

3) Girls, girls, (cis) girls   Finding a bisexual male in YA literature is like looking for a unicorn.  There is also a complete lack of transgender bisexual teens or teens who identify with a non-binary/genderqueer identification.  While the bisexual community doesn’t have a perfect track record on trans* issues, there are a LOT of trans* and genderqueer bisexuals.   They’ve been an active part of our community for a long time, and so it’s odd that when you do have trans* characters in a YA book, they are almost always hetero/homo.  

Also I’ve noticed that a book about bi males will not receive nearly as much attention as books about lesbian, gay, transgender, or bisexual female characters.   There will be fewer reviews, fewer awards, fewer blog posts, and much less buzz.  Lists of LGBTQ books put out by prominent organizations will often have no books with bi male or genderqueer persons.  

2) Caricature not character.  I’ve read some amazing YA books where teen characters have intricate back stories that explain their decisions and are allowed to change, learn, and grow from cover to cover.   Bisexual characters are not often afforded this luxury.  

Probably the worst example of this is The Difference Between You And Me by Madeleine George.   The lesbian character gets her dynamic relationships with family and friends explored, where the bisexual character barely has family mentioned.  We know all about the lesbian character’s feelings, but only get a small window into the bisexual character’s feelings and it’s pretty much only one feeling - anxiety.  We know the motivation of the lesbian character to be reasonable based on the life experiences relayed to us, but the bisexual character can just change her mind with no explanation.  

It’s trading on caricatures of bisexual people as fickle or slutty or incapable of commitment.  Instead of giving reasons why these characters may be this way, they just are.  And then at the end of the book, no attempt is made to change them.   Because they just are.  

1) Voicelessness.   This is probably the worst one.  It seems without fail that when an ensemble book has a bisexual character, the pivotal events in the life of that bisexual character will not be narrated by the bisexual character themselves.   It will probably be narrated by some other character in the book.   

The two biggest offenders of this are The Difference Between You And Me and The Bermudez Triangle/On The Count of Three.   In both cases the break ups and the break up aftermath are narrated by the lesbian character in the moment, and the author never goes back to give us the bisexual character’s side of the story.  There might be a mention of being sad, but whereas we get to live in the other character’s pain and experience it fully, we don’t get to do that for the bisexual characters.   

It also sets up a weird dynamic where a book can pat itself on the back for having bi characters while keeping them flat, one-dimensional, or even packing the book with implicit and explicit stereotypes. 

So please YA, can you clean up your act?  

- Sarah