As it was just Bisexuality Awareness Day last week, I got thinking. As a bisexual person, I'm basically contractually obligated to always be aware of it. Being aware of one's own sexuality, especially when that sexuality is seen as in some way "outside the norm," means being aware of the ways in which that sexuality is represented. Bisexuality honestly gets the shaft a lot in media, even as we move towards better inclusion of same-sex couples in movies and TV. It seems like for some people, it's easier to define people as one thing or another, rather than a little bit of both.
I remember when ads for "Orange is the New Black" first started getting pushed. It was kind of a big deal, for a few reasons; it was one of the first Netflix-exclusive shows and a show with notable gay characters in its central cast. But there's this one line that got tossed around in every trailer I would see prior to a Youtube video. Here's the ad for the show's first season. Let's see if you can spot the problem.
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Did you find it? It's not too far in, that key line.
"You were a lesbian?"
"At the time."
So, here's my thought process. I see this - me at 18, who is just then starting to come to terms with his sexuality - and I try to give it the benefit of the doubt. It's only one line, after all. How bad could things really be? The show runners were brave enough to write a very openly bisexual main character in Piper Chapman, something we only rarely see in just about any kind of media or storytelling one could name.
As things went on, through the entire two and a half seasons I was personally willing to put myself through, it became increasingly obvious that "Orange is the New Black" exists in some sort of strange realm in which bisexuality is incompatible with any function of human thought. Characters refer to Piper as strictly straight or gay; hell, so does she. The climax of the whole thing, for me, comes at a point where her fiancee has a conversation with her brother about it, and we get the only reference to bisexuality that the entire show is wiling to make by name. Even then, it's...well, it's not great. Piper's brother, an awkward woodsy-type named Cal, listens to Piper's fiancee's constant worries that the woman he loves is gay, all despite the clear loving relationship the show maintains for the two of them. Cal's response is "I’m gonna go ahead and guess that one of the issues here is your need to say that a person is exactly anything".
“I’m gonna go ahead and guess that one of the issues here is your need to say that a person is exactly anything.”
Alright, sure, that's a good way to look at it. Maybe this is the lead-in to the show getting smarter about sexuality and how it works.
“She was not a lesbian anymore, not with me. You know? Then she’s in prison, what, a few weeks? Bam! A lesbian again. Or bi? I don’t even know.”
Oh. Or we can just have that, I guess. This comes after Piper has made it abundantly clear that her entire conflict as a character - really, the main thing that makes her an interesting protagonist in the first two seasons - revolves around the fact that she does truly love her fiancee, but is also falling back in love with the woman whose history with Piper drew her behind bars to begin with. The fact that her fiancee takes ages to reach the conclusion that she swings both ways, only to reject it just as fast, is not even just a matter of offending anyone; it's a stupid way to handle it.
If you're writing a story with bisexual characters, acknowledge it if it comes up. The "wait they used to be straight but now they're gay" switcheroo gag isn't funny, it's just plain bad writing. There are a lot more storytellers starting to handle it well (especially in the world of webcomics, but that's another article). I don't feel personally wounded, just disappointed. We've mostly moved past the point of a gay character's sexuality being played purely for laughs, so let's do the same here.
