The Bisexual Experience of Erasure in Queer Media
Bisexual people are everywhere in queer communities, yet our stories often disappear when media decides what queerness is supposed to look like. A character may kiss someone of the same gender, adopt a queer identity, and still be described as gay or lesbian. Another may have relationships with different genders, only to be framed as confused, unfaithful, adventurous, or temporarily passing through.
This erasure affects more than fictional labels. Representation shapes how people understand themselves, how families respond to them, and whether services recognise their needs. For bisexual Australians, the gap between public visibility and lived experience can feel particularly sharp: a person might attend Mardi Gras in Sydney, read queer journalism from Melbourne, and still struggle to find stories that reflect the ordinary complexity of bisexual life.
When Bisexuality Becomes A Plot Device
Queer media has often treated bisexuality as a source of drama rather than a complete identity. The bisexual character arrives to complicate a love triangle, disrupt a friendship, or provide a brief lesson about sexual fluidity before the narrative settles into a more familiar gay or straight pairing. Their identity becomes a twist, a phase, or a reason for other characters to feel threatened.
This pattern is visible in television, film, publishing, and music coverage. A woman dating another woman may be assumed to be lesbian, while a man dating a woman may be read as straight. The audience is encouraged to focus on the current relationship instead of the person’s enduring capacity for attraction. Even when a character uses the word bisexual, the script may quietly contradict them by presenting one gender of partner as their “real” preference.
Bisexuality also gets flattened into a performance of equal attraction, as if every person must desire different genders in precisely the same way and at the same time. In reality, attraction can be uneven, shifting, romantic, sexual, emotional, or shaped by context. Some bisexual people are monogamous; some are polyamorous; some have never dated more than one gender. None of these experiences cancels the identity.
The Cost Of Being Read Incorrectly
Erasure can make bisexual people feel unwelcome in both heterosexual and queer spaces. In straight settings, a current same-gender relationship may lead relatives or colleagues to treat bisexuality as proof of being secretly gay. In queer settings, a current different-gender relationship can produce accusations of straight privilege, indecision, or opportunism. These assumptions force people to repeatedly defend an identity that should not require courtroom evidence.
The harm is connected to material conditions. Research and community reporting have repeatedly linked bisexual populations with elevated experiences of anxiety, depression, sexual violence, and barriers to healthcare. A person who expects disbelief may avoid disclosing their identity to a doctor, counsellor, partner, or support worker. If a service only asks whether someone is “gay or straight”, important information about relationships, safety, and wellbeing vanishes from the record.
Australian law offers formal protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation, including through the Sex Discrimination Act 1984. Marriage equality became law in 2017, and those changes mattered deeply. Yet legal recognition does not automatically remove stereotypes from workplaces, schools, families, or media. A bisexual person can have the right to marry and still be told that their identity is a temporary label or a cover for another sexuality.
Personal storytelling can interrupt that pattern by making complexity ordinary. Candid writing about identity, recovery, anxiety, and belonging—such as the wider collection of facts about bisexuality—can give readers language for experiences that mainstream entertainment often leaves unnamed.
What Authentic Representation Looks Like
Authentic representation begins when bisexual characters are allowed to exist outside a lesson for someone else. Their sexuality can be relevant without becoming the entire plot. They might be dealing with rent, grief, work, family expectations, illness, or creative ambition while also navigating attraction. A bisexual character deserves the same full interior life granted to other protagonists.
Good representation also acknowledges that bisexual people are not a single demographic. A cisgender bisexual woman in Brisbane may have a different relationship to visibility than a trans bisexual man in Adelaide, a non-binary person in Naarm, or an older bisexual person in regional New South Wales. Culture, race, disability, class, religion, age, and gender expression change how a person is perceived and how safe disclosure feels.
| Common media shortcut |
More truthful approach |
| Bisexuality is a phase before a fixed identity |
Let the character name bisexuality without requiring a final destination |
| A bisexual person is automatically non-monogamous |
Show a range of relationship structures, including monogamy |
| Bisexuality exists to create jealousy |
Give the character motivations beyond romantic conflict |
| Attraction must be equally split between genders |
Represent changing, uneven, or context-dependent attraction |
| A different-gender partner makes someone straight |
Treat identity as belonging to the person, not the relationship |
| Bisexual characters are defined by sexual availability |
Show boundaries, consent, tenderness, and ordinary daily life |
The Australian media market can reinforce these shortcuts because imported American and British productions dominate many streaming platforms, while local queer stories compete for limited funding and attention. ABC, SBS, community radio, independent publishers, and Australian film festivals have helped broaden the field, but visibility can still be concentrated around major cities. A bisexual person outside Sydney or Melbourne may encounter queer content online yet see very little of their local life reflected back.
Authenticity does not require every story to explain terminology or represent every possible experience. It requires creators to resist making one bisexual character carry the burden of an entire community. It also requires bisexual writers, actors, editors, consultants, and producers to have genuine influence over how stories are developed.
Visibility Beyond The Rainbow Brand
Rainbow branding can create the appearance of inclusion without challenging bisexual erasure. During Pride season, businesses may use rainbow logos, offer themed products, or sponsor events while presenting sexuality through a narrow gay-and-lesbian lens. Bisexual people may be included in a broad acronym but absent from the imagery, funding decisions, staff training, and stories that accompany it.
This matters in Australia’s public culture, where Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras has enormous international visibility and Melbourne’s queer arts scene supports a wide range of performers and writers. Large events can be affirming, but they can also make bisexuality feel most welcome when it is colourful, celebratory, and easy to market. Everyday bisexual life—coming out to a parent, finding a respectful GP, navigating a workplace, or deciding whether to correct a stranger—receives less attention.
Even language about “the community” can conceal who is being centred. A campaign may speak about queer liberation while assuming that everyone has the same history of coming out, the same access to safety, or the same relationship to labels. Bisexual people in rural and regional areas may face extra isolation, especially when local support groups are scarce and online spaces become their main connection to queer life.
Media consumers also have power as interpreters. When a story refuses to name a character’s bisexuality, audiences can still discuss what has been left out, though that should not replace explicit representation. Reviews, podcasts, newsletters, and social media conversations can challenge the idea that only one partner or one scene proves a character’s sexuality. A reflective humanity-centred perspective can help shift attention from consuming identities to recognising people.
Reclaiming A More Complete Story
Bisexual people are often expected to prove consistency in a world that does not demand it from anyone else. A heterosexual person’s attraction is not questioned because they once dated someone of another gender, and a lesbian person is not required to produce a complete dating history before being believed. Bisexuality deserves the same presumption of sincerity.
That change can begin in small narrative decisions. A television script can let a character say “I’m bisexual” without adding a corrective joke. A journalist can avoid describing a bisexual public figure through their partner’s gender alone. A school resource can explain that bisexuality is not a measure of equal attraction. A healthcare form can ask about sexual orientation and relationships without treating the answers as interchangeable.
It also helps to remember that visibility is not a demand for constant disclosure. Some bisexual people are out to everyone; others are out to selected friends, partners, or no one. Privacy can be a safety practice, especially for people facing family rejection, housing insecurity, workplace discrimination, or violence. Better media should make bisexuality easier to understand without turning bisexual people into public property.
For readers and creators in Australia, an ordinary morning can be a useful reminder that identity is lived through repeated choices rather than dramatic announcements. Personal routines, including a coffee-fuelled morning ritual, can create space to notice which stories feel familiar, which assumptions need challenging, and whose voice is missing. The work of representation happens in those daily acts of attention as much as on a screen.
The bisexual experience of erasure in queer media is not proof that bisexual stories are too complicated to tell. It shows that many institutions have relied on narrow ideas of certainty, visibility, and belonging. A fuller media culture would let bisexual people be contradictory, settled, questioning, private, joyful, ordinary, and political without demanding that one version stand in for everyone. A practical starting point is to name bisexuality when it is part of the story, trust people’s own words, and judge representation by the life it gives a character beyond who they are dating.
