Two Boys Story
Ifear this comparison I’m about to make between two gay romance narratives will perpetuate queer people being too overly critical of their own community.
So let’s just make this clear now: I’m about to talk about two lovely stories. My placing one against the other is purely due to the circumstance of my having read one right after the other. What I say here speaks to my feelings regarding the current state of what is and is not represented in queer pop culture in general.
Nothing can represent everything for everyone, but when you haven’t seen enough of one kind of representation and too much of another, unintended lack of inclusion can feel more pointed than it is.
Let’s start with ***Bloom***, a cute YA graphic novel written by Kevin Panetta and illustrated by Savanna Ganuchaeu. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29225589.Bloom
I liked *Bloom*. It’s cute. A post-high school romance in which two boys, Ari and Hector, bond over baking. I liked the characters. The art was crisp and effective. But the story also felt too light, like a meal without enough nutritional value.
There’s a subtle depth to the writing — I especially liked its treatment of quietly dysfunctional friend groups — but every conflict has a sitcom-like ability to be resolved easily and conveniently. Difficult topics like economic hardship are resolved in an easy wish fulfillment kind of way, when I feel like they ought to be more complex and open-ended.
Ari is a realistic, sometimes irritating, relatable protagonist, but Hector is a little too perfect. His charm and contrast with Ari giving the impression of depth where, once you think about it, there isn’t enough. I wouldn’t call him a Manic Pixie Dream Boy, but he’s not enough of his own person in the story either.
In all *Bloom* gave me a nice warm buzz when I finished it, but it was a fleeting feeling.
More than anything, it triggered questions for me about what we want to deal with when we read queer romance narratives. Like, I’d like to see more queer narratives actually deal with questions of identity more on the page.
Again, though, this lack is endemic to queer literature in general — particularly work aimed at YA audiences.
In a romance between two boys, the word “gay” isn’t mentioned once in *Bloom*. Nor bisexual, nor queer, nor any other such identifying term. My inner-rebuttal is “Well, do straight romances have to mention the word ‘straight’?” No, but having queer characters not engage with their queer identities on the page feels disingenuous to my real, lived experience.
Two Friends In Relationship
**I didn’t realise I was bisexual for a long time. I’d always been friends with girls, but as a kid I never thought about girls in a romantic way… whereas I had ‘crushes’ on boys, who I obsessed over, and who I wanted to kiss and hold hands with and be with forever.**But the first time I watched a film or tv show and felt sexually attracted to the person on the screen, it was a woman – a scene in American Pie, I think! I assumed the feelings were because I wanted to “be” as attractive and sexy as the woman on screen, so I didn’t think too much about it!
It wasn’t until I was 18 that I properly started having sexual fantasies and desires, and more than half of them were about women. I was freaked out, but I was in denial and firmly convinced myself that the thoughts about women were just a phase, or just something I found sexually exciting because it’s a bit ‘different’.
But by the time I was 21 I realised I was unhappy, that being in denial about my sexuality was affecting my relationships and that I couldn’t ignore it or make it go away. I realised that, contrary to what I’d thought all my life, I wasn’t the same as everyone else.
Accepting the fact that I wasn’t “straight” was really hard. It was made harder by not fitting properly into the categories people try and put us all in – “gay” or “straight”.
This is Sample of Relation to same Gender.
I distanced myself from my friends and I couldn’t stop thinking negative thoughts about myself. I spent nights lying awake, thinking things like this:
**“What if I’m gay?”**
*You’re not gay, you’re bi, but that’s not a problem!*
**“I don’t want to be gay”**
*You aren’t, but you are bi, and there’s no reason not to want it either way. It isn’t something that defines you as a person, it’s honestly absolutely fine, and you will be OK.*
**“What if being bi means I’m never happy in my relationships, whether it’s with a man OR a woman? I like men in a different way than I like women, maybe I’ll never fall in love and be happy!”**
*You will be happy in a relationship, I promise – very soon you’ll wonder why you ever thought this was a problem!*
**“What if this means I can’t have a family, have children, do all of the things I want to do in my life?”**
*It doesn’t mean that at all. There are still ways of having the life you imagined when you thought you were straight so don’t worry, but you will be so much happier, having accepted your sexuality, that the life you imagine for yourself will become so much richer!*
**“Why am I bi, or gay? It doesn’t make sense biologically. Is it because there’s something wrong with me?”**
*There is NOT anything wrong with you – society is to blame for making you think that. Love is love, between whoever, and it’s all completely normal. There are species of animals which have gay relationships even, google it – it’s really not ‘weird’ like people think it is.*
@BisexualStory