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Carrie agonizes over whether bisexuality is just “a layover on the way to Gay Town”, and asks Shawn to tell her that she kisses better than a guy. Finally, after he has taken her to a party attended by his ex-boyfriend and several other bisexuals, she simply walks out, reflecting in voice-over that “they could do whatever they wanted but deep down, I was too old to play this game.”    

Male bisexuality is apparently a foreign enough phenomenon to throw even an experienced sex columnist like Carrie. In and of itself, it is enough reason to dump a man (and to dump him quite unceremoniously, in Carrie's case). What makes this particularly striking is that the leading ladies of both Ally McBeal and Sex and the City would eventually be shown having same-sex flings. Ally had already kissed Ling Woo in episode 3:2, ‘Buried Pleasures'). Samantha in Sex and the City went on to have a three-episode arc (4:3 - 4:5) where she explored a relationship with a woman, played by Sonia Braga.

Nobody suggested that this would make Ally or Samantha undesirable date-material in the future, or that their experiences must just be “a layover on the way to Gay Town”. Female bisexuality is no big deal; male bisexuality is, according to these shows, a deal-breaker.    

Two shows that have been much more matter-of-fact in dealing with the notion that men could be sexually fluid are Oz (1997-2003) and Six Feet Under (2001-2005). In both cases, the issue was dealt with through many characters and over a period of time, rather than in a one-off episode. David's boyfriend on Six Feet Under, Keith, identified as gay, but he nevertheless cheerfully stated in 3:6, ‘Making Love Work', that he had “loved” sleeping with women. In the fourth season he was a bodyguard for a pop singer, Celeste, who bedded him once and then fired him.    

The third season introduced us to Claire's art teacher, Olivier Castro-Staal, who seduced her boyfriend Russell Corwin and then went on to have an affair with Brenda's mother. Russell tried unsuccessfully to get Claire back; dated her female friend Anita; and by the end of the series was obsessed with her male friend Jimmy. In a casual aside, it was revealed that Brenda's otherwise-heterosexual brother Billy had also slept with Olivier.    

In a reversal of the usual pattern on television, none of the men necessarily seemed to feel the need to label either themselves or their behavior. Billy says that his affair with Olivier was “a sex thing. Not a gay thing.” Russell tells Claire “I think I might be bi, but I'm not sure”. Olivier just blithely does what he wants, as a matter of course, whereas rigid sexual categories were actually more important for the female characters. In the fourth season, Claire experimented briefly with a lesbian friend, Edie, but very quickly decided that she was straight and that it wasn't for her.    

Oz, set in a North American maximum security prison, also had four major male characters who were bisexual in behavior. Two of them (the lawyer-turned-convict Beecher, and the Neo-Nazi leader Schillinger) could have been described as situationally bisexual. But there were hints that for the other two (charismatic killers Chris Keller and Simon Adebisi) the dual attraction was innate.

Keller had been married four times, and pursued both men and women while in Oz, but in the fourth season, it was revealed that he had also had homosexual liaisons while outside prison. Initially he was dismissive, telling an FBI Agent that the fact that he had visited a gay bar “doesn't make me [...] a fag”, and describing his sexuality in practical terms “I do what I have to”. But a fifth season conversation with nun Sister Pete suggested that he did have a sense of his identity as queer:  

Keller: You think Jesus was a fag? It's a legitimate question.
Sister Pete : Are you trying to provoke me, mock my religion?
Keller: No, just looking for a role model.    

Perhaps more than any other show on television, Oz presented male sexuality as a spectrum: from characters who were exclusively heterosexual even in prison (Ryan O'Reily, Kareem Said), to those who were situationally bisexual, innately bisexual, or exclusively gay.

It had a gay character (Richie Hanlon) who developed a flirtatious relationship with a female prisoner (Shirley Bellinger), and a pair of older male prisoners (Bob Rebadow and Agamemnon Busmalis) who had what amounted to a companionate, platonic marriage. This presentation is in striking contrast to the rigid gay/straight axis of a show like Sex and the City, that struggled to accommodate the notion of even one bisexual male character.

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