Carrie Bradshaw — that beautiful heterosexual ditz — once mused that bisexuality is “just a layover on the way to Gaytown.” It’s been over two decades since that infamous Sex and the City episode, and as it turns out, people like the views here. Some have booked a permanent stay. Others, after a long tenure in Gaytown, are now wading into our luxurious waters. Welcome: Drop your bags and come explore.
In 2024, bisexuality became a cultural destination. Moviegoers turned up to theaters to watch Kinsey moderates wreak havoc on their relationships, a trend that started with last year’s steamy marriage drama Passages and French procedural Anatomy of a Fall and extended into this year’s sapphic neo-noir Love Lies Bleeding. The spring’s buzziest film, the tennis romp Challengers, is that meme fantasy about having two boyfriends who are also boyfriends with each other realized onscreen. Meanwhile, TV comedies created ludicrous plot points out of sexual fluidity: A cruise-ship medical staff had a drunken threesome on Dr. Odyssey; a clueless straight girl microaggressed her bi boyfriend with attempted pegging on The Sex Lives of College Girls; and a zoomer comedian narrowly avoided victimization by a gay Republican with a piss kink on Hacks. Novels about wanton queers who more or less “just ended up with people,” to quote the protagonist of Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, swept group chats across the country. “All the bi bitches know the fuck is going down,” proclaims Tyler, the Creator, on one of the biggest tag-team rap smashes of the year.
Have we finally arrived at a world of borderless sexuality? “All the kids are going bi,” Sex and the City’s Samantha Jones chirped to Carrie in the aforementioned “Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl” episode, before the latter fumbled a sexually progressive younger man. (For the au courant Samantha, women and even gay guys were on the table.) Newsweek famously announced the arrival of the peculiar in-between species bisexuals (“Not gay. Not straight. A new sexual identity emerges”) in 1995. When Sex and the City’s own investigation aired in 2000, the “kids” in question were younger Gen-Xers. But the prophecy of widespread bisexuality didn’t pan out for millennials coming of age, who punted to the next generation. “Everyone under 25 thinks they’re queer,” says Leila, the unmoored 30-something protagonist of Desiree Akhavan’s 2018 British comedy, The Bisexual, who upends her lesbian life to explore having sex with men for the first time. Leila, the daughter of Iranian immigrants, fought so hard to be accepted as gay that she sees bisexuality as a shameful betrayal. Not to mention, it’s kind of cringe: “It’s tacky, it’s gauche. It makes you seem disingenuous, like your genitals have no allegiance,” Leila gripes.
When I tell other queer people, “I am writing about bisexuals,” the statement comes punctuated with an implicit “LOL.” It’s cool to sleep with individuals across the gender spectrum; I and nearly all of my under-30 close friends do. But it’s awkward to refer to yourself using the B-word, which comes loaded with bad associations: indecisive floozy, annoying pedant, wannabe-oppressed little sibling of the gays. (“Pansexual,” which falls under the bisexual umbrella, is less frequently used.) Identifying as “queer” seems more convenient and tasteful, as is leaving others to deduce your sexual proclivities from shadowy rumors of your varied liaisons. (“Maintain nonchalance & never insist upon yourself,” advises my favorite tweeter-philosopher @fuglibetti.) It seems like the only way to pull off public bisexuality is to be so undeniably sexy that your erotic availability practically becomes a matter of public good, à la Aubrey Plaza (verified) — or better yet, United Healthcare CEO shooting suspect Luigi Mangione (rumored).
BREAKING; LUIGI MANGIONE BI CONFIRMED pic.twitter.com/DjLprHWzq8
— 34th Street Magazine (@34ST) December 9, 2024
But times are changing. According to a Gallup poll from last year, almost 60 percent of LGBTQ+ adults identify as bisexual; it’s the most common sexuality named by Gen Z, millennials, and Gen X, with each successive generation more likely to identify itself as bi than the prior one. Sexual and gender nonconformity have flourished in tandem. The perennial “bi girl with boyfriend” at Pride discourse has slowly matured to recognize that the “cis het boyfriend” might actually not be cis or het at all. The proudest bisexual I know is a trans guy; other friends who occupy this expansive category include lesbianish women who’ve dated formerly gay dudes and cis bisexuals done dirty by rogue nonbinary ones. (Many such cases.) Newly minted bisexuals come into circulation, forged by the heat of unexpected desires; old ones explore new ridges. What bisexuality looks like has complicated and expanded, and, in turn, it has weakened as a punch line.
I’ve witnessed this at parties and in pop culture. After decades of spotty jokes about bisexuality — “They invented [it] in the ’90s to sell hair products,” joked 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon — and ambivalent minor portrayals, television went through a “bisexual boom” in 2018. Writers’ rooms furiously scribbled coming-out arcs for sitcom characters, programming against age-old stereotypes of bisexuals as amoral philanderers. Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Rosa Diaz, Crazy Ex Girlfriend’s Darryl Whitefeather, and Jane the Virgin’s Petra Solano entered the burgeoning pantheon of respectable bi-cons. These were mostly wholesome introductions for mainstream audiences, “representation matters” stuff. Heartstopper and the YA universe aside, 2024 was different. Bisexuality collided with age gaps and polyamory to fuel a collective obsession with messy power relationships. Respectability went out the window. The message shifted back from “we exist” to “we fuck.”
Swapping churros, sucking toes, shvitzing in saunas; this is what swinging both ways looked like in the movies. Don’t even worry about reinforcing stereotypes; it’s cool now to be a depraved slut. (Imagine the fan-edit explosion that would follow a Basic Instinct remake.) Luca Guadagnino edged audiences with a near-threesome in Challengers. “She’s the hottest woman I’ve ever seen,” Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) marvels, gripping his best friend Art Donaldson (Mike Faist)’s thigh as they salivate over their mutual crush, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). The boys invite Tashi to their shared motel room, where she orchestrates a three-way make-out, then slyly withdraws so it’s just the two of them kissing. Later, they taunt each other with conspicuously phallic food objects, steam half-naked, and collapse into each other’s arms. Challengers thrives off of this homoerotic tension. Whereas many woman have lost sleep over the idea of their man being secretly gay for his best friend, Tashi — like everyone seated for the movie — seems to be rooting for them to fuck.
Plenty of sex happened in Loves Lies Bleeding, a sapphic romantic thriller almost literally about killing for good pussy. Bucking the usual narrative, the bisexual love interest doesn’t abandon her girlfriend for a man; she beats him to a pulp. Lou (Kristen Stewart), a skinny lesbian gym manager, is stuck in small-town New Mexico cleaning shit when bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O’Brian) tumbles through. The pair quickly start living together, enjoying blissful days of shared breakfasts and sex. “I want to stretch you,” Lou murmurs in the bathroom, extinguishing a cigarette to free up her fingers for better use. But the girlfriends get their hands dirty in other, unpredicted ways: Jackie murders Lou’s abusive brother-in-law (Dave Franco), her one-off hookup, as an unsolicited act of service, triggering intervention from Lou’s kingpin father. There’s no question that Jackie is loyal; she’s just doing too much.
In real life, too, women clamored to prove they’re for the girls. Billie Eilish bragged so much about cunnilingus that she might as well have appeared on a billboard, mustachioed, with the caption “Got Munch?” SZA flustered Amelia Dimoldenberg by proposing to stretch out the Chicken Shop Date host with a strap-on. Cardi B recently posted herself, legs wide open, with the caption “Dykey B,” then doubled down by stating, “I bend b*tches in real life.” And don’t even get me started on the Wicked press tour. The biggest spokeswomen for loving women were sapphic pop superstars Chappell Roan and Reneé Rapp, who’ve dated men in the past and now firmly identify as lesbian. Nonetheless, they’ve contributed to the mass awakening of newly bisexual women, who drive LGBTQ+ identification with such numbers that they’ve become, to some wary monosexuals, an omnipresent swarm. Inevitably, some of these women may progress onto different labels (or none), which is fine. In an ideal world, any sexuality could be a “transitional state.” A lesbian could have Troye Sivan as her hall pass if she wants.
In said utopia, who we sleep with would constitute less of our identities. You wouldn’t owe anyone legibility; you’d just do you. Aligning with this vision, some television series left their protagonists’ bisexuality mostly unremarked. On Dr. Odyssey, the titular M.D. (played by Joshua Jackson) exploits ambiguities in maritime law to have a MMF threesome with his direct subordinates — and flirts with a real-life Ken doll who unexpectedly dies of sepsis. Hacks finally lets its token zoomer, Ava (Hannah Einbinder), settle into a stable gay relationship after hooking up with a suicidal male scammer, they/them tenant, and hot lesbian cruise-goers. Her sexuality was already spelled out in the pilot. This season, her career, not her lifestyle, takes charge. In a few cases, bisexuality was served up for moral instruction: The Sex Lives of College Girls presents Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) with a dashing new romantic prospect, Eli (Michael Provost), who confers important lessons like “don’t try to peg a guy without asking.” A corrective to skittish-straight-girl-meets-bi-guy subplots seen in Sex and the City and Insecure, Kimberly overcomes most of her preconceptions. Though their relationship still lands on a slightly homophobic note when, after a few episodes, she dumps Eli because he’s too into molly and raving. Her loss.
Two conflicting perceptions of bisexuality still compete for space: In one, bisexuals are insufficient radicals, clinging onto heterosexuality out of cowardice. In others, they are renegades disrupting the social order by refusing to pick a lane. The former view triumphs in real-life queer spaces, while pop culture wields bisexuality for transgressive ends, not always successfully. (And what about loner bisexuals who have no game?) Across the board, bisexuality surfaces, even faintly, as an answer to a voguish question: What if there’s more to life than what I’ve been told? In Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, middle-aged CEO Romy (Nicole Kidman) comes to terms with her taboo sexual desires while conducting an affair with her intern (Harris Dickinson). It’s a heterosexual age-gap drama, but Romy absorbs inspiration from her cheating gay daughter (Esther McGregor). Her world opens up; unexpectedly, she kisses a girl at a rave. Babygirl caused a stir before it even debuted to the public. It reflects a cultural moment when it seems good, or at least interesting, to be greedy, selfish, and messy, traits historically attached to going both (or multiple) ways. And then there’s the fact that Romy, to borrow from John Waters, “laps up milk from a bowl like … like … well, like a pussy.”
Maybe you’re worried about queer baiting. I’m not. Surging in the background of our sexually fluid media culture is a right-wing political agenda insisting upon two assigned genders and one future: the heterosexual nuclear family. In the face of winnowing options, there’s something powerful about refusing the binary choice of boy (stoic, dominant) or girl (sweet, subservient). This year, outside of the manosphere and the trad universe, queer celebrities made headlines for gender play. Stewart lounged in a jockstrap on the cover of Rolling Stone; Doechii, flippantly responding to haters who claimed she looks like a man, graced Paper in full drag, adopting a hunky bi-guy alter-ego named Ricardo. (“When I put on the prosthetics, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m attracted to myself right now. I wish I could fuck me,’” she declared.) Bless her for the bi-for-bi anthems “Denial Is a River” and the Tyler, the Creator collaboration, “Balloon.”
Onscreen and in press circuits, film’s leading young hunks — Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Drew Starkey, Timothée Chalamet, and more — explored a softer masculinity. They were doted upon, feminized by fans; they were men and, as Reneé Rapp and Bowen Yang cooed to Jacob Elordi on Saturday Night Live, “so babygirl.” If they weren’t gay, they signed up to play it anyway. In many cases, these actors’ projected queerness made them more, not less, appealing to women. The roles reversed: Instead of lecherous guys salivating over girl-on-girl action, it was horny fangirls gawking at twinks. (Thanks, Luca.) Men got screwed and screwed over: Industry’s Rob Spearing (Harry Lawtey) submits to the manipulations of his co-worker Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela), who herself fell under the spell of a worldly older woman in season two. He also plays whipping boy to a gay financial analyst going dick-out in a sauna (Joel Kim Booster), giving him his very own Challengers moment.
Is Rob bisexual, “heteroflexible,” or the totally gay victim of overwhelming internalized homophobia? That’s for Industry writers to decide — or not. In the real world, exact self-understanding is elusive; curiosity should be enough. Online, I’ve seen anxious young women scrupulously police their own desires, confusing feminism with a total separation from men. Building upon a strand of online culture catalyzed by the 2018 publication of the Lesbian Masterdoc, a viral guide that purportedly diagnoses patriarchal brainwashing (“comphet,” or compulsory heterosexuality), they reprise political lesbianism without even knowing about Adrienne Rich. (The Lesbian Masterdoc creator allegedly came out as bi anyway.) Zoomers across the LGBTQ+ spectrum defer sex to tunnel into themselves. Queerness becomes pure concept instead of embodied practice. My friend Holden, aforementioned “proudest bisexual” who’s fed up with unnecessary abstraction, laments: “What does ‘queer’ even mean?” They add, “‘Bisexual’ puts ‘sex’ back in.”
Desire is not a test we can prepare for. We’re always at the risk of meeting someone who rewrites who we are. In one of my favorite books of 2024, Miranda July’s All Fours, a married middle-aged writer in L.A. sets out on a cross-country drive and only makes it 30 miles out to Monrovia, where she falls for a younger man. Davey is a Hertz employee with professional breakdancing dreams, so ludicrous she feels “as if all the people in my life were watching and couldn’t believe I was hanging out with this person.” And yet they are deliriously in love. The two never consummate their affair, just invent novel types of foreplay (tampon things). Instead, her real awakening comes during a surprise visit to his former lover, a 60-year-old antiques-mall worker named Audra, that ends in surprise sex. “It suddenly seemed natural and sweet to fuck all my friends,” says the unnamed narrator. She, a heterosexually coupled woman whose former lesbianism “is never far,” finds a girlfriend, reconfigures her marriage, and realizes that aging doesn’t mean the end: “A person with a journeying, experimental soul should be living a life that allow[s] for it.” All Fours is about searching for yourself outside of stock narratives. It’s about a writer, a perimenopausal woman, a hot mess — a bisexual, maybe, and definitely a real fucking person.
Related
