TV

Karen Walker and the Bisexual Straight Woman

Good Lord, Jack. If I gave in to every persuasive argument, I’d be in some crazy three-way marriage with Maury Povich and Connie Chung!” — Karen (Megan Mullaly) on Will & Grace

Now about to enter its sixth season on NBC this fall, the hit sitcom Will & Grace has won numerous awards over the last five seasons and is consistently among the top-rated shows on network television. But when it premiered in 1998, few believed Will & Grace would even survive, let alone flourish, because it revolves around the friendship between a gay man (played by Eric McCormack) and his straight female friend (played by Debra Messing), with Will’s gay friend Jack (played by Sean Hayes) and Grace’s secretary/friend Karen Walker (played by Megan Mullaly) rounding out the cast.

Although Will & Grace are the characters around which the series officially revolves, the two secondary characters have become so popular over the years that they have developed a cult following of their own, with many Will & Grace fans referring to the show as The Jack and Karen Show instead.

Karen is a wealthy, spoiled socialite with a shopping fetish and a very distinctive high-pitched voice, the kind of woman “who thinks an act of kindness is letting her step-kid have the fruit out of her whiskey sour,” as her housekeeper described her (Season 2, Episode 15). Sometimes annoying, often frustrating, and usually hilarious, Karen is a character most fans either love or hate.

Karen is also not exactly heterosexual ? or as Mullaly describes her, she “goes both ways” (the actress, who recently became engaged to a man, has also described herself this way). Although for the first few seasons Karen was married to a wealthy older man (Stanley Walker), Karen’s attraction to women was hinted at early on in the series through comments like this one (Season 2, Episode 20):

JACK: Yeah. Oh, look! There he is. There’s Bill. Isn’t he dreamy?

KAREN: Yeah, he’s a slice of ice-cream cake. Now when do I get to French-kiss a girl? Come on, when? When?

Karen’s unambiguous sexual comments about women became more frequent in later seasons, as in this exchange (Season 5, Episode 16):

KAREN (to Grace): You should let me help you more, honey. I know a few things, and I care about you. Hmm? Now let’s get back in there. C’mon, we got a room full of lovely ladies. Let’s put on some music and get those tops off.

GRACE: You do know that it’s not that kind of girls’ night?

KAREN: We’ll see.

Karen continuously makes half-joking attempts to seduce Grace, and finds reasons for the two women to kiss at least once every season, as she did in Episode 3 of the fifth season when she convinced Grace to show her how Grace’s boyfriend Leo kisses:

KAREN: Honey, what is the problem? It was just a kiss.

GRACE: Oh, no, no, no. You don’t understand. It was a really good kiss.

KAREN: [SCOFFS] Sh-yeah! Show me.

GRACE: No.

KAREN: Show me.

GRACE: No.

KAREN: Come on. We’re both stoned.

GRACE: Forget it.

KAREN: Shut up and show me.

[GRACE GRABS KAREN AND KISSES HER LIKE LEO DID EARLIER]

KAREN: Yeah, you’re screwed.

At fourteen seconds long, this kiss still holds the title of the longest kiss between two women on network television. The show even made a rare reference to bisexuality in Season 5, when Madonna made a guest appearance as Karen’s new roommate and accused Karen of having a “weird bisexual vibe.”

But despite plenty of opportunities to explore Karen’s bisexuality as more than just a running gag, the writers have so far insisted on keeping it to one-liners and innuendo. This may be in part because her comments about dating and relationships, like this one in Episode 19 of Season 5, also betray a decidedly heterosexual world-view:

KAREN: Well, deal me in. I’ve got a lifetime membership to the losers club. I’ve been dumped by one-ton billionaires, heads of state, and every member of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, but I’m not naming names. What’s so great about another person, huh? All they do is manhandle your boobs and eat all the ham.

Although she avoids gender-specific pronouns in this statement, the “person” she is referring to in the question “What’s so great about another person?” is clearly male, as indicated by the qualifier “all they do is manhandle your boobs and eat all the hams” (which would never be generally understood to be describing a woman).

Karen’s heterosexual identification is also apparent in explicit discussions about lesbianism or bisexuality, such as this one in Season 3 (Episode 3), when Karen is jealous of Grace’s new boyfriend and Grace tries to cheer her up:

GRACE: Listen, I was sitting across the room, and I saw you, and you took my breath away.

KAREN: What?

GRACE: Yeah. I mean, you are such a sexy, beautiful, vibrant woman. Anyone would be so lucky to have you.

KAREN: [GASPS] Are you hitting on me?

GRACE: Wh ? What? No! Where do you g ?

KAREN: You are! Oh, my god. You’re a big lez.

GRACE: Karen ?

KAREN: You know, people have always said you were, but I said, “No. That’s just the way she walks.”

GRACE: [DEFENSIVE] I have a sturdy gait.

KAREN: Honey, come on. Finally, an explanation for the chunky shoes and all the keys.

GRACE: No. No, no, no, no, no. See ?

[GRACE TOUCHES KAREN’S SHOULDER. KAREN SHOOTS HER A LOOK AND PULLS AWAY SLIGHTLY]

GRACE: Look. Look. Um, Karen… I just sensed that you were feeling a little down, and I just wanted to make sure that you know how attractive you are.

KAREN: Hey, back off, Lezzy Borden. No means no.

Karen automatically concludes that Grace is a lesbian, rather than bisexual (probably because the writers couldn’t come up with any funny stereotypes of bisexuals to play on), despite the fact that Karen is supposedly bisexual and the fact that Grace is clearly attracted to men. This is not a conclusion to which a bisexual woman would automatically jump.

Karen also clearly rejects Grace’s advances here, contradicting Karen’s frequent comments in other episodes indicating she would be interested in such a development, like this exchange with Grace in Season 5 (Episode 3):

GRACE: But it didn’t feel right. I’ve got tell Will the truth ? the whole truth.

KAREN: [SIGHS] Well, maybe it’s for the best. Then you and I can move on with our lives. Out in the open to love freely.

GRACE: Karen, we’re not a couple.

KAREN: Aren’t we?

GRACE: No.

KAREN: Well, all I know is when I woke up this morning, there was red hair on my pillow and lesbian porn in the VCR.

[KAREN RUNS HER HAND THROUGH GRACE’S HAIR, AND SMACKS HER OWN BOTTOM. GRACE TAKES A STEP BACK.]

This kind of schizophrenic, contradictory behavior is characteristic of Karen’s sexuality (and her personality overall): Karen might joke with her friends about hooking up with Grace or another woman, but when it comes to actually following through with it ? especially if it’s more than a one-night stand ? she pulls back.

It was revealed in the third season, however, that Karen was once in a relationship with Martina Navratilova, through a flashback to a conversation between Karen and Martina in a bar the 1980’s (Episode 8):

KAREN: Oh, Martina.

MARTINA: Karen, where have you been? I’ve missed you.

KAREN: Oh, honey, listen. I’ve got some bad news. I can’t marry you. I’m in love with someone else.

MARTINA: But, Karen, I was straight before I met you.

KAREN: Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, Marti.

MARTINA: Well, then who? And can she give you what I give you?

KAREN: You mean companionship, vitality, a sneaky drop shot? No, no. No, he’s a doughy thing with squat little legs and a bad case of recurring psoriasis, but… I love him, and with my help… Oh! Who am I kidding? I just love him. Who knows why? I love Stanley Walker!

But this thirty-second flashback to a past event is the only time we see Karen actually in a relationship with another woman, and of the many lovers in her past, only one other that we know of (a high-school girlfriend) was female.

This tenuous balance between risk and caution has defined Will & Grace from the start, and the series’ uneasy compromise between the two is reflected in most of the characters, especially Will. Although NBC defied convention by featuring a show about a gay man, it consistently refuses to allow Will to have a boyfriend (or even let him kiss another man, except in jest).

Many will argue that this compromise is required to allow the series to remain successful, to enable NBC to attract the hip, liberal viewer by featuring unusual characters with sexualities that push the envelope, but also keep the slightly more conservative American viewer from being scared off by not allowing these “alternative” sexualities to go much beyond theoretical. While it may not be true that this compromise is necessary to keep Will & Grace on the air, it probably is one of the reasons the show has kept its high ratings.

Karen’s ambiguous sexuality is a by-product of this environment. Her jokes and behavior challenge network television convention, but stop just short of openly defying it. So while she might have been truly bisexual if the series were running on cable television, or on network television several years from now, on NBC today Karen is confined to the role of what I like to call the Bisexual Straight Woman.

This is a woman who frequently makes direct or thinly-veiled comments about being attracted to other woman, occasionally kisses or sleeps with them, but rarely or never actually dates women. She sees herself primarily as heterosexual, and while she is attracted to women, it’s purely on a sexual level; she has no interest in a romantic relationship with another woman beyond sex, aside from the occasional odd relationship in her past.

In short, she is the heterosexual idea of a bisexual woman: attracted to women, but ultimately needing a man.

Fictional manifestations of the Bisexual Straight Women have cropped up all over TV (Bird on Soul Food and Samantha on Sex and the City) and film (Laure in Femme Fatale, Laura in The Hours, Lauren in A Girl Thing, and Gaby in 8 Women) in the last few years.

Several real-life women would seem to fit this description, too, such as Lisa Marie Pressly, Alanis Morisette, and Madonna, not to mention a myriad of women on reality TV shows, like Brynn on MTV’s The Real World: Las Vegas.

There are several ways to define bisexual, of course, and no one definition is the right one, but most include at least the possibility of a relationship with another woman beyond sex in the future. So while Karen’s not-exactly-hetero sexuality is still a challenge to heterosexism, it’s not really bisexuality, either. She shouldn’t be considered representative of the average bisexual women, who values relationships with women for more than just sex, at least once in a while.

But then, there are few things about Karen Walker that can be said to be representative of the average woman of any sexual orientation, which is one of the reasons we keep tuning in to watch her every week.

None of this is meant to imply that Karen hasn’t contributed to bisexual visibility on television. Five years of innuendo and implied bisexuality on Will & Grace has helped familiarize the American public with the idea that women can be attracted to men and women, and the frequent (and lengthy) kisses between Karen and Grace have contributed to desensitizing viewers to lesbian kisses.

Karen is also just plain funny, interesting, and unconventional, and a refreshing departure from most female sitcom characters.

Wanting Karen to be bisexual doesn’t mean she is, and unless the Will & Grace writers decide to finally give Karen a girlfriend, we’ll have to look elsewhere for that. But we can still enjoy Karen’s witty and eccentric attempt to make the world not quite so straight on Will & Grace.

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