Julia Shaw

And maybe it feels scary.

But if you realize that actually you've got gay friends or you've got friends who are into certain kinds of fetishes or you've got friends who are whatever sexuality sort of aspect you're talking about, you suddenly go, oh.

It's going to be much harder to dehumanize these people.

And this is where all of this kind of comes to me from a really sad place.

You could talk about bias as this project of love and how I was finding the community.

I was trying to write something that would sort of bring us all together.

But it's also because I'm constantly terrified that my rights are going to be stripped back.

And we know that the laws around homosexual behavior and the rights around bisexual people as well, they're in flux.

There's no straight line of acceptance.

And just because right now I happen to live in a time and place where I'm allowed to be openly bisexual and I can engage in homosexual activity, that doesn't mean that that's going to stay, not even necessarily in my lifetime.

And so I think much like writing evil at a time when you're not at war and you're able to think really deeply about these important issues, I think we also need to be thinking about things like sexuality and other issues that are important to us.

And if we want to preserve our rights, we need to normalize these issues and make sure that they're visible so that people find it harder to dehumanize those communities.

And so I'm always terrified that bisexual people are going to be hypersexualized, dehumanized again, and that there's going to be laws against basically just who I am.

Yeah, a lot of people felt seen by the book.

So it was really beautiful, the fan mail I got and the sort of responses to the book.

And I got them from all over the world.

And so in the book, I also spoke with some researchers who were stationed or doing research in countries where bisexual behavior specifically is illegal or homosexual behavior was illegal.

For a long time, bisexuality was, especially in women, well, actually homosexuality in women in general, was sort of seen as, it was a blind spot.

Because what counted as sex is sex with a penis.

And so women can't have sex with one another.