11 must-read books featuring bisexual stories, from Virginia Woolf to James Baldwin
In honor of Bisexual Visibility Day (aka Celebrate Bisexuality Day), here's a list of books featuring sexually fluid characters and themes.
In honor of Celebrate Bisexuality Day (also called Bisexual Visibility Day) on Saturday, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most noteworthy books featuring sexually fluid characters and themes from the past century. The collection of titles celebrates the evolution of bisexual storytelling, from trailblazing classics that play with metaphor and form to the wildly popular young adult romance novels and frank memoirs of the current era. Together, these works speak to the array of individuals and experiences that make up the often overlooked, majority contingency of the LGBTQ community.
Virginia Woolf’s time-traveling, gender-bending classic, “Orlando: A Biography,” can be seen as a model for how the last century’s fantasy and sci-fi books have treated bisexuality. In the novel that spans Elizabethan to late-1920s England, the titular hero — inspired by Woolf’s longtime muse, Vita Sackville-West, a successful writer and noted bisexual — makes love and art across Europe, first as a male and then as a female who comes to embrace gender-nonconformity. Well ahead of its time, the experimental work was immortalized decades later in Sally Potter’s 1992 film “Orlando,” starring a swashbuckling, androgynous Tilda Swinton. Like its source material, “Orlando” presents a fantastical, frolicking world in which the protagonist’s exploration of sexuality through their diverse lovers is taken as fact rather than a point to be belabored.
There’s no doubt that James Baldwin’s queerness permeates his larger-than-life works. In his celebrated, semi-autobiographical debut novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” Baldwin’s 14-year-old protagonist is grappling with his attraction to a male member of his father’s congregation, amid having his first religious experience. But in his second novel, “Giovanni’s Room,” Baldwin dedicates the entirety of the work to questions of identity, both sexual and racial. Written from Paris, the novel centers on a white American expat who is discomforted by the men in his life, especially a swaggering Italian bartender named Giovanni, because of their queerness and in spite of his own. In the nightlife venues of 1950s post-war Paris, the protagonist, David, engages in love affairs with men. But in the daylight, he wears his attraction to women like a badge of honor — one that can protect him from the humiliations of life as a gay man.
When Anne Rice published 1976’s “Interview With the Vampire,” the first novel in her “Vampire Chronicles” series, she found herself with a critical flop and an immediate commercial success that launched her prolific career. It also spawned a dozen more books about Louis and Lestat and their path to becoming bitter enemies. The first installment introduces the vampires’ early relationship, which is characterized by passion and enlivened by the young child, Claudia, they take in — becoming what Rice eventually described as the “first vampire same-sex parents.” But in 1985’s “The Vampire Lestat,” Rice dives much deeper into the characters’ tumultuous relationship by way of Lestat’s backstory. In this second novel in the series, the volatile vampire’s traumatic early life comes into focus as numerous male and female lovers from his mortal past are introduced.
Ernest Hemingway certainly isn’t famous for writing about queer romance, but “The Garden of Eden” is anything but typical Hemingway fare. The posthumously published novel — which the author worked on intermittently from 1946 to his death in 1961 — centers on a pair of wealthy American newlyweds who begin experimenting with gender, polyamory and same-sex lovers during their summer in the French Riviera. But what begins with gender play and bedroom games results in the two falling in love with the same woman, with disastrous and sometimes unhinged results. Over the years, many have chalked up the uncharacteristic bohemian quality of “The Garden of Eden” to the fact that Hemingway’s original, unfinished manuscript was heavily edited for publication. But, nevertheless, it does have a head-turning effect coming from the straight, hyper-masculine writer of “The Old Man and the Sea.”
Rating: 5