Review: Go The Way Your Blood Beats
An intriguing premise that falters in scope and ambition
If you tried to deduce how many bisexuals were in the population solely off the number of books that specifically address bisexuality, your guess would be way off. There are a few Bi 101 books marketed at teens and young adults, a small body of psychological and psychoanalytic literature, and a couple of notable books of essays from the 90s and 00s, such as Getting Bi (2005) and Bi Any Other Name (1991); I’ve also heard positive things about Shiri Eisner’s Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution (2013), though I haven’t gotten around to reading it myself yet. Sustained critical work on bisexuality is, however, generally conspicuous by its absence.
This is partly inevitable, given the nature of bisexuality. The spread of our experiences cannot be easily corralled into a cogent group; we run the gamut from heterosexual* to gay, and the desire to cleanly separate our culture and identity from gay culture and gayness has always been rooted in both biphobia and erasure of queer history. The fact that we cannot be, and shouldn’t be, disentangled from ‘gay’, does however mean that writing on bisexuality can end up defensive above all else, while being stripped of substantive content: we’re real, we’re not fake, we’re real, we chant, and, like, sure, but then what? What reality are we talking about when we say bisexuality is real?
Anxieties about bisexuality having unique content, or ‘enough’ content, can utterly mess up our priorities, from pushing for bisexual stories that portray an inhumanly perfect equilibrium between the ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ worlds, to falling into unhealthy patterns of moralising, pathologising and/or legislating our own attractions. This is why I value the rare works that embrace bisexuality as both important in its own right and productively enmeshed with other sexualities, and that convey a legitimate joy and care about the whole messy endeavour, rather than the tentative, meticulously calibrated, slightly soulless representation I’m used to in books and TV, which tends to fear bisexuality’s inherent mess and overlap so much that it clings to a few well-trodden patterns — which are usually tired at best and awful at worst.
(Examples: the visual-titillation bisexual; the tacit bisexual who is lauded for ‘normalising’ us for some reason; the Spicy Love Triangle bisexual; the ‘I’m just a self-hating gay’ bisexual; the bisexual whose main arc is convincing their friends that they’re neither gay nor straight, which always strikes me as insultingly limiting.)
So, when I found Michael Amherst’s Go the Way Your Blood Beats (2018) in the Repeater Books sale, I was pretty stoked. Repeater is an offshoot of Zero Books, which has some real gems in its catalogue in both political analysis and cultural studies, and Repeater is also making a name for itself in cultural works: I can vouch for the excellence of Alex Niven’s recent New Model Island. So, I picked it up for obvious reasons: I’m a fan of bisexuality, of desire, and even of truth, on special occasions. I’m not personally a fan of the title (it has a kitschy edge for me, and perhaps I’m a touch instinctively squeamish about the image of my blood pulling me anywhere) but it’s a quote from James Baldwin and Baldwin is a recurring influence on Amherst, so it’s unquestionably fitting.
I’ll disclose at this point, since I’m not too keen on the mid-review surprise dunk: I’m not a fan of this book. There are some interesting things going on in it: I like how Amherst breaks down the flaws in the ‘bisexuality as stepping stone’ idea, given that bisexuality is its own state of tension rather than a calm pre-gay oasis, and the book embraces productive incoherence in a way I find necessary for theorising bisexuality (‘the way I feel, the way I inhabit myself and the values I espouse do not cohere. They do not form a neat politics, a tract. But then why should they?’). The idea that we should use language to ‘invent’ rather than to ‘define’ is one I hold close, as well.
My issue with Go the Way Your Blood Beats isn’t that anything is drastically wrong with its content. There are a couple of statements that seem designed to raise the hackles, such as the old bugbear about heterosexuals having non-normative sex using ‘queer’, but ultimately Amherst may be right in arguing that straight men using ‘queer’ for themselves would probably be symptomatic of a positive turn. But the book is hampered by some serious oversights and limitations in scope, and, like some other bi-specific texts, lacks the rich life-content that elevates the best queer creative work. Amherst does attempt to create that content, mostly through this device described in the blurb:
Interwoven with anonymous addresses to past loves — the sex of whom remain obscure — the book demonstrates the universalism of human desire.
I like the extracts in question —stylish, heartfelt italicised paragraphs recounting resonant moments with past lovers — but it’s patently untrue that the ‘sex’ of the lovers in question ‘remain obscure’, since Amherst deliberately indicates in each one whether the lovers are facing the public risk associated with being a ‘gay’ couple or not; only a couple of extracts are genuinely ambiguous. It’s probably unfair to say this cheapens the whole endeavour, but the blurb and Amherst’s ‘clues’ frame the quotes as a kind of guess-the-partner’s-gender game, which I feel like the reader is meant to feel deterred from doing, but which also distracts from the more meaningful resonances of the extracts. There are better structures through which to convey the idea that the gender of one’s partner both does and does not matter.
Sex and gender gesture to a much larger oversight in Go the Way Your Blood Beats: despite repeatedly quoting Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, a memoir that is explicitly concerned with transness and breaking down the idea of the ‘trans journey’ (‘I’m not on my way anywhere’) in a way that could be taken as resonant with bisexuality, Go the Way Your Blood Beats is somehow completely clueless as to the existence of trans people. In 2018, this looks either careless or deliberate, and the oversight isn’t helped by Amherst’s constant conflation of sex and gender, uncritical use of the term ‘same-sex’ desire, and uncritical deployment of the work of transphobic theorist Julie Bindel (he at one point disagrees with her, but appears genuinely surprised that she expressed a biphobic viewpoint, suggesting he’s not familiar with her more recent controversies). And, of course, the lack of mention of trans people means no mention of non-binary people, who would merit a welcome mention in a book that is clearly interested in doubt, privacy, incoherences, and category breakdown.
Race is a less conspicuous oversight in the book, given Amherst’s use of Baldwin, but the book unquestionably centres whiteness and doesn’t do anything with the racial component of Baldwin’s work, except to note that he compared the fight for racial equality & the need to reject the assumptions of the oppressor with the need to do the same in the case of gay liberation. There are several occasions in which race and racialised experience is picked up as an example of a precept that is then applied to an unracialised (read: white) queerness. There’s one paragraph talking about Munoz’s Disidentifications and the ‘constant acts of identifying and counteridentifying’ experienced by queer people of colour, which is a welcome addition, but it’s also a drop in the bucket. The book is also clearly androcentric, with women’s bisexuality treated more rarely and more shallowly than men’s. The book is a personal memoir of a cis, white, bisexual man, but the focus is trained off Amherst himself enough for these failures in scope to be manifestly noticeable.
Overall, I think Go the Way Your Blood Beats fails both through its oversights and the material it analyses. A good chunk of the book is dedicated to celebrity coming-outs: Tom Daley being referred to as gay when he hadn’t disavowed attraction for women, straight columnists claiming the possession of knowledge which they can wield over ‘closeted’ celebrities, the punitive treatment of musicians like Neil Tennant for not coming out as a clear category of sexuality, etc. Which is all fine, but I think the focus on celebrities, on quotes of The Argonauts that don’t even engage with a massive core element of its subject matter, on vignettes of literary analysis that are cogent but never startling, indicates that Go the Way Your Blood Beats lacks a certain ambition in its material. This isn’t an issue I have with pop culture analysis, to be clear — one of the few truly striking passages is this one:
When I was fourteen, the BBC broadcast an adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. The romantic lead, Paul Montague, was played by Cillian Murphy. His wasn’t an interesting character, on reflection, but when my sister asked me what I wanted for my birthday that year I was emphatic: I wanted the soft-leather, prospector’s hat worn by Paul Montague. My sister got as far as speaking to the costume designer at the BBC and was informed it was an original and would cost £700 to remake. My sister asked me if I still wanted it. I have no idea what she would have done had I said yes, particularly given she was only twelve herself.
I now know it wasn’t about the hat.
That being said, I don’t think it was about sex either. I wanted to be Cillian Murphy, to know Cillian Murphy, to have something of Cillian Murphy. Yet, I don’t think I ever wanted to have sex with him. I simply can’t not look at Cillian Murphy. He is my most enduring relationship.
I love this section because it’s irreverent yet inquisitive, personal yet philosophical, and it’s just very compelling! That last paragraph really cracked into my own experiences of nebulous desire towards characters in TV and literature, and how bisexual people often feel pressure to feed those experiences into a more definitively sexual matrix than was likely felt at the time, in order to backdate (and therefore validate) our own gayness. Nothing about this passage is limited to bisexuality, but it conveys what I believe to be something both widely insightful and distinctively bi through its freshness and self-inquisition. If the book had more passages like this, I’d be a fan.
As it is, Go the Way Your Blood Beats is a short and diverting read, it’s cleanly written, and it has a few novel insights on how privacy, knowledge and power, among other things, intersect with bisexuality. But it’s at times strangely colourless, its faults can make it a more frustrating than rewarding read, and if you’re expecting brilliance, you’ll probably have to keep waiting.
6/10
