The year of the bisexual man

Yesterday, Queerty ran a piece declaring 2023 to be “the year of the bisexual man,”mostly basing that argument on the fact that Heartstopper and Red, White, and Royal Blue exist and that a handful of male celebrities have come out as bi or pan.

I… am unconvinced.

I mean, yes, I know we’re all doing clickbait and just saying things because it’ll get people like me to write about it. And I do think it’s true that bisexual men are having something of a mini moment, at least in the sense that there are several shows that depict bi men as desirable love objects rather than simply A Problem™️ (as has been the case in many shows released shockingly recently!). But —

Well, I feel like the piece tips its hand with this one line:

Though we’ve largely gotten past stigmatization around female bisexuality in media (thank you Katy Perry, Kissing Jessica Stein, and Broad City), we haven’t always afforded carte blanche to boys.

I mean… what is with that list? A song from 2008 that kinda fetishizes female bisexuality, a movie from 2001 that’s allegedly pretty good (I haven’t seen it so I can’t weigh in), and then… Broad City? I don’t know that I would pick this list as the canon of works that destigmatized female bisexuality in media; I also don’t even know that I would completely say that female bisexuality is destigmatized in media, even as the landscape is vastly improved from where it once was. So if this is the writer’s perspective on stigma and bisexuality and media, I mean… no wonder he thinks we’re in “the year of the bisexual man.”

I think what’s frustrating to me, particularly, is this conviction that all bisexuals need is to be shown on TV in a positive light and then, boom, problems solved. There’s so much fixation on media representation driving social change that people often forget that media representation is not the only problem faced by marginalized groups — and that, at times, media representation can even fuel a backlash. The alleged “trans tipping point” of a few years ago gave way to harsh anti-trans laws and discrimination. A previous era of “bisexual chic” gave way to its own anti-bi panic — by which I mean the 1970s and the conviction that bi men were fueling the HIV epidemic, respectively. 

I don’t doubt that there are people for whom Heartstopper, et al, will be eye opening and help them think differently about bisexuals; and it’s certainly better to have bi men shown as… people… rather than A Problem™️ to mull over. But there is so much more to bi liberation beyond just “some characters on TV are bi now and it’s chill,” and it would be nice to have writers, and especially writers at queer pubs, recognize that. 

But perhaps I am asking too much.

PS Fittingly, the first two comments on that Queerty piece are someone claiming that the stats that show a rise in bi identified youth can’t be trusted because kids just claim to be bi so as to seem edgy and someone saying gay men shouldn’t date bi men because they’ll just leave them for women. Year of the Bi Man indeed!