Page 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 - Next

The portrayals of bisexuality on Oz and Six Feet Under did have their flaws. SFU arguably stretched plausibility by going too far in the other direction and presenting male sexual fluidity almost as the norm. The revelation that Billy as well as Russell had slept with Olivier felt like a step too far.    

The characters on Oz were in a very extreme and unusual environment, where behavior was significantly different than it might have been in the outside world. There was also the problem that none of its bisexual men could exactly have been described as role models. Since nearly all of the characters on the show were criminals, you could not say that the writers were singling out the queer ones as dysfunctional. But in the absence of many other queer men on TV, the concentration of gay and bi men on Oz may have reinforced the association of queerness with criminality.    

It has been noted before that gayness, or characteristics stereotypically associated with gayness, have often been used to heighten audience unease about a screen villain. Like gay men, bisexual men can provoke unease simply through being different (and, in the eyes of some of the audience, ‘deviant'). But they are also associated with a particular set of fears and prejudices that monosexual people, whether straight or gay, often have about them. They are seen as untrustworthy, unstable, difficult to pin down. The vagueness that has surrounded Andrew's sexual orientation in Desperate Housewives only heightens the sense of him as a threatening, unknown quantity.

In the second season of Nip/Tuck, aired in 2004, viewers were first introduced to Dr. Quentin Costa, a bisexual plastic surgeon who joined the Troy/McNamara practice around which the show is based. They were also introduced to the show's new and anonymous villain, The Carver: a serial mutilator, a rapist of both sexes, and a murderer.

The eventual revelation that Quentin was The Carver - along with revelations that he had been born without a penis, and that he had a possibly incestuous relationship with his sister - did not depend on him being bi. But it did both play off and reinforce the idea of bisexual men as having a dual, strange and dangerous identity.  

Fears about bisexual people are often specifically focused on the issue of sexual fidelity - with the assumption being that they are incapable of it. In the current season of Footballers' Wives, Conrad Gates is a bisexual football captain with an open marriage, a burgeoning adulterous affair with a woman and a burgeoning adulterous affair with a man.

The 2002 one-off BBC drama No Night Is Too Long tied together ideas of bisexual men both as criminals and as beings incapable of steady monogamous relationships. Handsome student Tim Cornish is involved with a girl when he meets Dr. Ivo Steadman, a paleontologist, and is instantly smitten. The two men begin an affair - but once Ivo has admitted that he is in love, Tim begins to lose interest, especially once he meets an attractive woman named Isabel. With Ivo becoming increasingly possessive, Tim starts looking for a way to get rid of him.    

Despite his attempt to murder his former lover, Tim is not a wholly unsympathetic character. But he is presented as dangerous to those he loves, destined to leave them unsatisfied. So much so that, when after many twists and turns Isabel comes to knock on his front door at the end, he sits still and does not open it. It is as if he has realized that he brings bad luck to those he gets involved with. As a critic at the time wrote, the moral of the story seemed to be “Never trust a bisexual”.    

At the same time, British television has been a source of some interesting portrayals of non-murderous bisexual men. The teen drama As If, focused around a group of six friends living in London, delved into what it means to be a bisexual man dealing with the sort of stereotypes propagated by No Night Is Too Long. Mark (introduced in 2002) had broken up with his girlfriend in order to be with regular gay character Alex. But Alex was uncomfortable with Mark's bisexuality, and in reaction began to drift back to his ex-boyfriend, Dan.

Page 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 - Next