Below are simply my favorite bisexual books of the year, thus far. What’s clear is that I need to deepen my search for more male, trans, and nonbinary bisexual narratives, which are fewer in number, though far from nonexistent. This Bisexual Awareness Week, I hope you celebrate by finding your next read on this list, and educate yourself about the myriad bisexual narratives and possibilities out there. Quote: She rolled onto her back. “Okay,” she said, looking at the ceiling. “I guess you’re not really gay anymore, anyway.” The choreographer could have smashed me into the ground, he could have broken all my bones, and I wouldn’t have felt so annihilated. “What the fuck do you mean, I’m not gay anymore?” She sat up and flipped her golden hair onto her back. “I mean, you can identify inwardly as queer,” she said, “but now you’re straight-passing. You have straight privilege.” “And nothing that came before matters?” I said. “Of course, it does,” she said. “But how you’re perceived matters a lot.” I felt myself shrinking from the edges of my body, gutted and ready to collapse. Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie via Indiebound. Quote: I remembered the push and pull I was so accustomed to feeling between myself and other women, somehow deeper than the usual negotiations social events required: Often neither of us offered to lead, and I would become overwhelmed with the responsibility of arranging whatever situation arose between us. There was anxiety as well as pleasure in the negotiation. It was nerve-racking to avoid the seat of power, to work around it or pretend we had transcended it by virtue of our queerness. These machinations had never occurred to Nathan. Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie via Indiebound. Quote: A way that bisexual researchers often talk about this is that the bi in bisexual means two, but the two are not men and women, they are same and other. Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie via Indiebound. Quote: She taught me how to kiss and then let me get to second base, so I’m not just being nice when I say her breasts are great. They’re not big like she wants them to be, but they’re these soft, brown drops of heaven. The night we fooled around confirmed that I did indeed like girls that way and Fabiola did indeed like boys that way. We soon discovered, however, that the two of us were way better off as friends than anything else. That dynamic really works for us. Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie via Indiebound. Quote: I didn’t know what I was, if I liked boys or if bisexuality was real. In my family growing up, homosexuality was a sin, but bisexuality was worse, because it seemed like more of a deliberate choice. It also implied having multiple partners in one lifetime, which made someone a slut. Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie via Indiebound. Quote: Several times in the past few weeks she’d locked eyes with her roommate; whenever this happened Karina would quickly look away, her expression flattening into blankness. Still, Louisa didn’t put too much stock in this: Karina had recently started dating a senior named Preston Utley, a cocky, handsome boy built like a football player[.] Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie via Indiebound here. Quote: Sometimes kids at school called us lesbians. They thought we were together. We were whatever about it. Maybe we were lesbians or maybe gender didn’t make much of a difference to us, or maybe we believed in the power of desire over and above anything as simple as genitalia. We didn’t really think much about it; didn’t really care. We let them call us lesbians because what we really were was soul mates. Get it from Bookshop or from your local indie via Indiebound here.
