By Allison Cipriano, PhD
Bailey Merlin’s Bi All Accounts: An Anthology of Bi+ Voices is a warm, bright light of visibility in a world that feels increasingly cold, dark, and isolating for so many in our communities.
This work appeals to readers across a wide range of formats with its inclusion of fiction and non-fiction stories, poetry, visual artwork, and essays where the personal and academic are beautifully interwoven. Whether you want to more fully understand bi+ realities, are longing to feel represented, or are simply looking to engage with work about marginalized people that is complex and emotive, an enriching read is guaranteed.
The selected stories, poems, essays, and visual art pieces are individually and collectively compelling in their insistence on authentically representing bi+ experiences. This authenticity necessitates embracing and reflecting the fullness and nuance present in the lived realities of those who are attracted to people across multiple categories of gender (e.g., women, men, nonbinary people, agender people, genderfluid people, etc.), referred to as bi+ throughout. It requires that embrace to be unconstrained by desires to be viewed as respectable or easily comprehendible to those who are unwilling to support us exactly as we are, messy liminalities and all.
Together, the authors in this anthology expertly reflect the humor, fear, compassion, trauma, desire for connection, isolation, love, exhaustion at explaining the same basic things all the damn time, and defiance in the face of erasure, hatred, and violence that I have witnessed among bi+ people. In fact, just about every experience related to being bi+ that a community member has shared with me, across professional and personal contexts, is represented in the pages of this work. I found the continual depiction of the ways bi+ people internalize and become occupied by interpersonal and sociocultural messages of denial, questioning, invalidation, and erasure of their own identities to be painfully accurate in its portrayal of the psyches of many bi+ people. Of course, there are too many bi+ experiences represented worth noting to list here succinctly—that’s the nature of writing about the bi+ community in a nutshell. Some stand out as important to name due to the rarity of work about them within this community, though, including the leveraging of anti-bisexual stigma in intimate partner violence; navigating compulsory heterosexuality and monosexuality; the perceived complexities of intersecting bisexuality, transness; polyamory and/or race and ethnicity; the courage and fear wrapped up in acting as bi+ representation and intervening in binegativity in real life; and the unbridled joy of being seen fully and met with support rather than dismissal, scorn, doubt, or accusations.
A major theme throughout is the quiet violence monosexual (single gender attracted) family members, friends, and partners continually impose on their bi+ loved ones. Presenting oneself authentically can at once mean being treated as a disturbance to the aesthetic of straight family weddings and as an attention-seeking imposter in Queer contexts. Bi+ people receive messages that they don’t quite fit in, that there is something off about them that should be changed if they want to feel acceptance and belonging with others.
A related theme is the work bi+ people engage in to make themselves and their sexualities smaller to appease others, until they just can’t anymore. One can only be treated as “too much” so many times before they internalize it and get to work erasing their own multitudes. However, this work—the work of holding ourselves back from correcting and explaining, of going along with assumptions made because it is easier for everyone else, of swallowing direct minimization of our lived experiences born out of misguided notions that erasure (invisibility forced on those begging to be seen) is privilege—wears on us over time. We don’t avoid harm when we become our own erasers, and this book reminds us that we don’t have to cut ourselves down to fit into others’ rigid bounds of acceptability.
In my research as a psychologist, I am currently focused on bipositivity: positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviors toward bisexuality, bisexual people, or other identities and people sharing multiple gender attractions (e.g., pansexual, queer). A common misconception about bipositivity is that it is only felt when discussing positive characteristics or experiences we have as bi+ people. On the contrary, bi+ people experience bipositivity most when their lived realities are reflected fully, including their challenges. To read Bi All Accounts is to feel the truth of our community—the weight of stigma, erasure, and violence alongside the essential respite felt in moments of understanding, support, and joy found through connection. This book is a shining example of bipositivity for our community. It has been added to my growing collection of texts contributing to bi+ visibility and positivity with which I proudly display in my office and encourage engagement.
Bi All Accounts is an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to gain a better understanding of bi+ people and is deserving of space on shelves devoted to LGBTQ+ texts everywhere.
Allison Cipriano, PhD (she/her), is a bisexual and queer woman and critical social psychologist who is currently an Assistant Professor and Program Director of Social Psychology at Ball State University in Indiana, in the U.S. She regularly teaches, conducts research, and writes about the lived realities of people with marginalized identities and/or experiences.
