Tue. September 1, 2020
Becky Albertalli, the author of Simon vs the Homo Sapiens, the gay teen coming-of-age novel, has come out as bisexual following criticism for "telling LGBTQ stories."
Albertalli's novel was adapted into the 2018 film Love, Simon. The film inspired the Hulu show Love, Victor.
In an essay for Medium titled "I Know I'm Late," Albertalli announced that she's attracted to men and women. The novelist came out after facing criticism for writing queer stories.
"I'm thirty-seven years old. I've been happily married to a guy for almost ten years. I have two kids and a cat. I've never kissed a girl. I never even realized I wanted to," Albertalli wrote.
"But if I rewind further, I'm pretty sure I've had crushes on boys and girls for most of my life. I just didn't realize the girl crushes were crushes."
"It just never occurred to me that these feelings were attraction."
Albertalli said that she was accused of being "the quintessential example of allocishet inauthenticity."
"I was a straight woman writing shitty queer books for the straights, profiting off of communities I had no connection to."
"Let me be perfectly clear: This isn't how I wanted to come out. This doesn't feel good or empowering, or even particularly safe."
She added that she was coming out because she was "exhausted" after years of being "scrutinized, subtweeted, mocked, lectured, and invalidated just about every single day."
Albertalli's latest novel, Leah on the Offbeat, is a spin-off to Love, Simon that focuses on a bisexual teen.
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