Reviews with content warning for Sexual harassment - Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

I enjoyed reading this book, and I learned a few things. However, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone. If you know a lot about bisexuality like I do, it will retread a lot of ground. If you don't know much about bisexuality, you will come away from this book with a very skewed idea about bisexual culture and history.

The history chapter was just too short, and it was entirely focused on western Europe and the United States. It was very strange. An entire quarter of the chapter was about one dude who wrote a book that touched on bisexuality in the early 1900s. It was an interesting vignette, but it took up way too much of the chapter. In my opinion, it was not nearly as important as she made it out to be. I think she wrote more pages about this one guy than she wrote about Stonewall. The history chapter also abruptly stopped in the early 90s. She just wrote a wrap up paragraph that basically said that bisexual visibility has increased since then. Summing up 30 years of history in a paragraph or two is ridiculous. I did learn a few things from the chapter, but it mostly just filled in details about things I already knew. If you were new to LGBTQIA history, this would give you a really skewed, whitewashed vision of what happened. This chapter is the main reason I would not recommend this book to anyone.

I did really enjoy the chapter about whether or not queerness has a biological basis. It was interesting to hear about some of the discussions, research, and controversies around this question.

At one point, she discusses same sex sexual encounters in prison. She quotes men who had sex with other men in prison but still identified as heterosexual. She made a comment that she really thought these men should interrogate their sexuality more because they chose to engage in these sexual relationships; her reasoning was that they could have just masturbated alone if they weren't actually into sex with other men. She said it was their internalized homophobia that prevented them from identifying as bi. She was way out of line with this whole discussion. Everyone has the right to define their own sexuality. She doesn't know what it's like to be in prison for a long time. When someone describes their personal identity and experiences, believe them. "Actually, I think you're bi because you engaged in sex with other men while you were in prison, and I really think you should do some soul searching about that" is a really foul thing to say. These men opened up about their experiences and what those experiences meant to them, and she misappropriated their words to make a point that directly contradicts what they were saying. It was smug and gross.

She wrote a chapter about oppression of bisexual people around the world, and she discussed how bisexuals are explicitly denied political asylum on the basis of their sexuality. I thought that portion of the chapter was well done. My issue with this chapter is that it is the only chapter that featured bisexual people outside western Europe and the United States. In her book, bisexuals in Uganda and Poland don't contribute to bisexual history and culture; they only exist as oppressed people. She does try to counter the narrative of European/American superiority by pointing out that a lot of the violent homophobia in African countries is a legacy from European colonialism and by highlighting conversion therapy that happens in the United States and Europe, but the narrow focus of the rest of her book undermines that effort.

I think that the idea of this book is super important. There isn't a lot written explicitly about bisexuality; you have to unearth a lot of bisexual history from books that focus on the whole LGBTQIA movement. It can be tedious and difficult to create a unified narrative. I just wish she had done this in a more inclusive way. I get that she wanted to write a short book to provide a general introduction, but her brevity left the narrative incomplete.

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violetaudrey's review against another edition

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informative inspiring fast-paced

5.0

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larbster90's review against another edition

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informative inspiring fast-paced

5.0

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dianavdavidson_'s review against another edition

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informative medium-paced

3.25

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pythonesque's review

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challenging emotional informative sad fast-paced

3.75

Mainly focuses on Western problems with a quick glance at extreme cases of queer-phobia in Africa, but hey, there's not much adequate materials on this topic at all, so... Better a small fish than an empty dish

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toffishay's review against another edition

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emotional funny informative fast-paced

4.0

If you want to learn more about bisexual history, particularly in the West, then this is a very good read and a good resource. I liked the plotting and I think it touched on a variety of important topics that explain bisexuality as a concept today. Some of the writer's self-insert moments were fun, but others felt like it took away from the flow. I also think that this book has a very Western and white perspective. The book does address bisexuality around the world at points and talks about the differences of nonbinary and trans experiences with bisexuality, but not much. This is explained a lack of literature on these themes, which makes sense and the notes and references in the book would be good resources for additional readings and some of those sources are more diverse.

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peachuchu's review

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challenging informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

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