At the tail end of 2011, I was freshly out of a multiyear relationship and weirdly obsessed with Comic Life, a piece of Mac software that may or may not exist anymore that made it easy to create photo comics.
The way Comic Life worked was this: you’d choose a page layout, and drop photos into into each panel, and then you could choose different filters to make them more artsy looking. Then you’d add speech bubbles and text panels and, voila!, a photo comic.
Initially, the comics I made were just weird little jokes. I have no idea where it lives anymore, but one was a recreation of an IM conversation I’d had with a friend, where she was represented by my cat and I was represented by a Pirate Hello Kitty toy a friend had gotten me. (I would append it here but I have no idea where it lives now.)
But eventually, the emotional chaos of being newly single combined with being 29 and trying process what it was that my twenties had even been led me to a totally different project: I started making comics based on my old journal entries.
Specifically, I made comics based on the LiveJournal entries I’d written about sex and dating in my early twenties, from the spring of 2005 until the spring of 2007 (ages 22-24). I think this may have been the first one that I put together:
It became something of an obsession. Initially, I just posted all the comics online, on my website, for all my friends to read. But then a few years later — I want to say 2018? — I got it into my head to assemble them into a little ebook. (You can buy it here if you are so inclined, I will probably also release it one comic at a time to patrons eventually.)
Anyway. I bring all of this up because maybe a year ago, when I was strapped for cash and also newly into this whole Professional Bisexual™️ gig, I was hyping the comic hard, and someone asked me if it was an appropriate gift for a young bisexual girl, because he wanted to be a supportive ally and give his newly out daughter a comic she might like.
And my response was, well — I mean firstly, I didn’t want to say it was definitely appropriate for teens or anything because while it is emphatically not porn there are quite a lot of explicit discussions of sex throughout the comic, and I wasn’t trying to get accused of perverting the youth. So I gave him that disclaimer.
But that was the easy answer to give. Because the question of whether this comic was specifically bisexual just gave me a lot of pause.
Here are some details about who I was when I wrote those comic entries:
I was just a year out of the abusive relationship that I’d gotten into when I was 18, and only a few months out from having shut down the indie porn site that I’d founded while in that abusive relationship. I had been out as bi for nearly a decade, and had dated and been in love with multiple women (though never seriously dated any of them, not in the exclusive, monogamous, for more than a few weeks sense). And also, I pretty exclusively wanted to date men.
It wasn’t that I saw myself as straight — I knew very intensely that I was not, and routinely had crushes on women — and yet also, I wanted a boyfriend. And my casual hookups were mostly with men. And that is what’s reflected in the comics. While there is a nod to a threesome at one point (and while I did have experiences with women during this time period that just didn’t make it into the comic), the comic itself is, more or less, a documentation of my complicated and fraught attraction to men.
Which brings me to the central question of this essay: can that be considered bisexual art?
The simplest, most basic answer is: yes, of course, I was an out bi woman when I wrote the journal entries, when I made the comics, and now.
But I must admit I find that answer unsatisfying in its insistence that to be bi is to do bi, that there is nothing more to it than that.
A more complex — a more intellectually satisfying — response would be that even as this story is largely about my attraction to and relationships with men, the nature of those interactions, those attractions, cannot be separated from my inherent bisexuality. It’s not exactly that I don’t think that a straight woman could have written those journal entries, not exactly that I don’t think a straight woman could have lived these moments, but it is that I do not think my bisexuality can be discounted here.
There was a part of me, back then, that was desperate to prove that I was worthy of men’s attention and specifically male love; I wanted a boyfriend because I wanted to know that I deserved to have a boyfriend more than because I was exclusively called to romantic intimacy with men. And part of that was because I was recently out of a multi-year abusive relationship, and part of it was because I was worried that I’d rendered myself undateable by doing sex work, but also — it just strikes me as very telling that my cultural lodestar in that moment, the movie I would think of when I tried to describe my plight, was Chasing Amy, a film about a bisexual woman who is rejected by her boyfriend for being too much slut.
There are other films, other stories, about women whose sexual pasts come back to haunt them, and yet it was the bisexual one specifically that called to me, the bisexual woman’s story that framed my fears about not being good enough for men.
I do not think that that is a coincidence. I think that there has always been something bisexual about my attraction to men, always something that I have been trying to prove, always some tension that I have been wrestling with, in part because my attraction to men cannot be separated from my attraction to women, because these two aspects of myself exist in conversation and sometimes in conflict with each other, because that is simply how my own bisexuality manifests.
And none of this is to say that this is some universal bisexual experience, not least because I do not believe that any such thing exists. But yes, I do believe that my stories of sex and dating with men — as well as my stories of sex and dating with women — are inherently bisexual, not simply because I am a bisexual who is doing the sex and dating, but because no matter the gender of the person, of the people, that I am involved with, my bisexuality is always in the room with me, shaping the choices, the decisions that I make.
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