An Ode To The Complicated And Devastatingly Accurate ‘The Bisexual’
'The Bisexual' is still one of the most accurate depictions of bisexuality that exists.
Representation of bisexuality has vastly improved over the last two decades.
Long gone are the days where Carrie Bradshaw and her gals would sit around ruminating that bisexuality didn’t exist, or that it was just a “layover on the way to gaytown”. The days when even The L Word dismissed bisexuality as “gross” are thankfully behind us too.
Bi representation did fumble a little throughout media during the 2000s to early 2010s. While many characters (Piper in Orange Is the New Black, Delphine Cormier in Orphan Black, Charlize Theron’s character in Atomic Blonde) who experienced attraction to multiple genders appeared in media, hardly any of them used the word bisexual.
That slowly began to change in the mid to late 2010s. Characters like Rosa Diaz (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), Adam (Sex Education), Petra Solano (Jane The Virgin) and Darryl Whitefeather (Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) began to pop up on our screens, proclaiming their bisexuality loudly and proudly.
Most, if not all, bisexual narratives in the media centre on the character realising they aren’t heterosexual and subsequently breaking away from heteronormativity by exploring relationships with different genders. Many of these narratives acknowledge adequately the common experiences of many bisexuals — but in focusing on a character’s journey out of heteronormativity, their experience of actually entering and experiencing the queer community is forgotten.
But this is where Stan series The Bisexual sets itself apart.
The Bisexual Inverts Popular Narratives
As its title suggests, The Bisexual is about bisexuality. Specifically, the bisexuality of 30-something Iranian-American, Leila. Leila, played by series creator Desiree Akhavan herself, lives in London with her long-time girlfriend and business partner, Sadie. But when Sadie proposes, Leila decides they need to take a break. It’s during this break, after years of living as a lesbian, that Leila moves out of the apartment she shares with Sadie and admits to herself that she’s bisexual.
Straight away, Akhavan inverts the stereotypical narrative treatment of bisexuality in media. In the first episode, Leila goes to meet her friends at a lesbian bar for the first time since separating from Sadie. When one of her friends mentions their new girlfriend is bisexual, Leila’s friends bork at the idea. “All the girls you date are sex tourists!” one responds, “Does anyone know an actual bisexual?” she asks. Leila herself, visibly uncomfortable, nervously agrees. “I’m pretty sure bisexuality is a myth,” she says, “created by ad executives to sell flavoured vodka.”
It’s a familiar scene. The bisexual sits in silent dread as the people around them belittle and invalidate their identity — and Akhavan cleverly shows how being bisexual means reckoning with the invisibility that is enabled and enforced by straight and non-straight folks alike.
The straight part of that equation is represented in the form of Leila’s new straight roommate Gabe who almost incessantly prods Leila about her bisexuality in the least tactful way possible. In episode 2, while they’re out clubbing, Gabe asks, “So, if you were straight who would go for, apart from me?” Leila dryly replies, “Well, if I can’t have you, Gabe, I might as well fucking kill myself.”
It Doesn’t Exist To Teach People What Bisexuality Is
As listlessly ignorant as Gabe is, however, he becomes a rock for Leila as she navigates the liminal loneliness that comes with her breakup and bisexual exploration.
Gabe accompanies Leila to pubs and clubs, a sort of hapless wingman with a good heart that keeps Leila from self-imploding. After a handful of dudes reject Leila at a club, she tells Gabe she’s going to give up and run back to Sadie’s, but Gabe doesn’t let her. Instead, he invites her to “sway” with him until they’re lipsyncing with abandon to Mickey and Sylvia’s ‘Loverboy’. But Leila still calls him out for casual biphobia. “Why do you act like I’m a different species to you?” Leila asks when Gabe questions whether or not she’d want kids because she’s bisexual.
But Desiree doesn’t just stop at showcasing biphobia in both straight and queer circles. Throughout the series, she also dives into how internalised biphobia and homophobia have shaped Leila’s life and views of herself. In the series’ second episode, she admits that if a man had swept her off her feet, she might have chosen, “the path of least resistance.” She also confesses that had she’d been sure of her attraction to men she wouldn’t have put her Iranian parents through her coming out.
Leila’s internalised biphobia and subsequent reckoning with it in her newfound freedom see her express generational differences between herself and younger LGBTIQ folks too. In a scene where Leila is helping Gabe’s 20-something drunk girlfriend, Leila articulates the strange generational gap emerging in the queer community between older millennials and Gen Z.
“I just get the sense,” she says. “[The internet] is changing your relationship to gender and sexuality. In a good way. But in a way, I can’t relate to.” Generation gaps are nothing new, but to see it articulated so specifically through a queer lens is rare and something only someone like Akhavan, who is bisexual herself, could authentically bring to the screen.
It’s in these moments, The Bisexual sets itself apart from the more prescriptively clean coming-out representations of bisexuality. Leila doesn’t always say the “right” thing because unlike popular representations of bisexuality — take Rosa in Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Adam in Sex Education — Akhavan’s story isn’t here to teach people what bisexuality is.
Instead, The Bisexual is a series about a woman’s messy, irreverent bisexuality and how it interweaves with her life, her ethnicity, and chosen family. It’s not educational, or “good” in a moral tick-a-box sense, but it is honest. And, if I’m being honest, I’d take the chaotic specificity of honesty over prime-time approved bisexuality, any day.
Happy bisexual awareness week! The Bisexual is streaming on Stan.
Merryana Salem (they/she) is a proud Wonnarua and Lebanese–Australian writer, critic, teacher and podcaster on most social media as @akajustmerry. If you want, check out their podcast, GayV Club where they yarn about LGBTIQ media. Either way, she hopes you ate something nice today.