Roxane Weary is bi, like blue is a primary color. Sometimes people ask me, “But why does she have to be bi?” which always makes me want to say, “But why do you have brown hair?” (or, depending on the person’s tone, “why do you have to be an asshole?”). I didn’t “make” Roxane Weary bi — she just is. Though she’s a character I created, she doesn’t feel to me like a person I’ve made up so much as a person I’ve discovered and gotten to know, and who lets me write mysteries about her.
I’ve always loved a good mystery. As Jennifer Egan recently put it in her brilliant novel "Manhattan Beach," reading a mystery during troubling times is like “the winnowing of diffuse danger into a single corrupt soul,” into someone who’ll actually get caught. Unlike in the real world.
But the mystery/crime fiction genre is unlike real life in a number of ways, and not all of them good. It pains me to say that, to love a genre that, as a bisexual woman, does not love me back. Bi characters are pretty rare in pop culture suspense, and on the off chance that you do come across one, it’s usually meant to signify that the character is untrustworthy or dishonest.
Take the recent ABC show "The Family," which featured Bridey, a pushy reporter who has sex with the brother and sister in the same family in pursuit of a scoop and is ultimately murdered. Or look at Naomi Campbell’s Camilla on "Empire," a conniving, duplicitous bi woman who’ll sleep with anyone to get what she wants, and who ultimately murders her wife and is forced at gunpoint to commit suicide.
Grim, right?
Pop culture suspense has a history of treating bi characters this way. These types of narratives stem from the pulp fiction era circa the 1940s — tough-guy heroes, femmes fatales, “deviant” queer characters who, if they’re included at all, are “punished” for their wicked ways by the end of the story. How? Dying gruesomely, much of the time, but any punishment would do as long as it meant an unhappy ending. A story with a happy ending for a queer character was unheard of.
But because this was the first time in history that queer characters were being represented at all in popular fiction, even if the portrayal left a lot to be desired, that representation was a big deal for the queer community. Unfortunately, even though almost eight decades have passed since the golden era of pulp novels, the trope of the “deviant queer” still persists sometimes, especially in crime/mystery books and television, which borrows more from the pulps than other genres do.
Allow me to use "Law & Order," that long-running barometer of American anxieties, to illustrate.
Bisexuality as a plot device: in the season 10 episode “Panic,” police suspect a female mystery novelist of having an affair with a married, male FBI agent, only to discover the shocking twist that her affair is actually with the man's wife.
Bisexuality as untrustworthiness and mental illness: In “Obsession” (season 15), a crazed female stalker murders a male talk show host after having an affair with his wife, and she claims she only did it because her lover told her to.
Bisexuality as “rebellion against social norms”: Season 9’s “Sideshow” concerns an assassin who is also a prostitute, a drug dealer, and — you guessed it — bisexual.
And, in the ultimate depiction of the deviant bisexual, Nicole Wallace from "Law & Order: Criminal Intent": the bisexual loner serial killer and poisons expert who murdered a number of lovers and drowned her own daughter. So wicked that she appeared in five episodes over the course of four seasons!
I watched a lot of "Law & Order" during my formative years, so you know that got into my head.
It’s worth mentioning that gay and lesbian characters in popular fiction have gotten the same treatment over the years, but as representation is starting to improve for them, bi characters are still stuck back in the pulp novels. Whether life imitates art or the other way around, it’s a fact that the B in LGBTQ+ is a little hard to nail down.
To be honest, we’re kind of used to not being taken seriously. To being told we don’t really exist; that we’re either gay or straight and to just pick one; that we’re confused, or “just experimenting”; or that we’re greedy, slutty or fickle. We get this from heterosexual people, but also from people who identify as firmly gay and lesbian. It can feel like getting picked last for dodgeball. We’re just standing out here, not a member of any team.
When I sat down to write "The Last Place You Look," I knew I wanted to try something different from all of that — something bi readers could feel excited about, instead of just having to roll their eyes at yet another craptastic representation. Enter Roxane Weary. Getting to know her was like making friends with someone on the internet. She revealed concrete details about herself first, and then I got to know her voice, her point of view, what makes her different. She’s 34 years old and has been an out bi woman for half of her life. She has a rich personal life, including relationships with her mother and her two older brothers. She’s romantically involved with both a man and a woman in the book and has meaningful emotional connections to both — neither of these relationships is just about sex.
It was really important to me to write Roxane’s story this way, to show that a bi character can fill the same role in popular fiction that gay or straight characters can, and not because being bi is like being “both gay and straight at the same time.” (But blue is a primary color, not made up of other hues.) And her sexual orientation is just one of many shades to Roxane’s identity, not the defining aspect of her character or the book’s plot.
In the future, I hope for more shows like "The Bold Type," "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and "Station 19," which include bisexual characters who exist outside the negative stereotypes that are all too common right now, who get storylines that are as well-developed as their straight counterparts. Instead of queer characters being queer, let’s have queer characters being people for a change.
I hope to see a long list of other mystery novels with bisexual protagonists to keep Roxane Weary company. But most of all, I hope that someday, the “B” in LGBTQ+ can just be — that we can exist without having to define our identity, and without having to come out again and again (once is definitely enough). And till that future gets here, I’m more than happy to keep pushing toward it.
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