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.