When she told The Advocate in 1999, “I consider myself bisexual, and my philosophy is, everyone innately is,” actress Megan Mullally (Karen on Will & Grace) was one of only a few celebrities to ever publicly identify as bisexual.
Since then, however, there has been a stampede of well-known women admitting their attraction to women, with only a few actually embracing the word “bisexual” as Drew Barrymore did in her July 2003 interview with New Woman magazine when she said “I have always considered myself bisexual” because “I think a woman and a woman together are beautiful, just as a man and a woman together are beautiful.”
Most who are open about their bisexuality, however, are leery of being labeled. Angelina Jolie has always been very upfront about her attraction to women, making frequent references to it in the press all along, like in a 2000 interview with Elle magazine in which she responded to a question about what who she was attracted to by saying “Honestly, I like everything. Boyish girls, girlish boys, the heavy and the skinny. Which is a problem when I’m walking down the street.”
But in her July 2003 interview with Barbara Walters on 20/20, Jolie responded to Walters’ question of whether Jolie considered herself “bisexual” with a response that was both characteristically forthright and deliberately undefined: “I consider myself a very sexual person who loves who she loves, whatever sex they may be.”
Tian Kitchen from the CBS reality series The Amazing Race 4 gave a similarly ambiguous response when asked how she defined her sexuality in an interview with AfterEllen.com, saying “The way I feel about my sexuality is that I am open to finding my soul mate from whomever it may come from.”
In another interview, with The Dallas Voice, Kitchen indicated even more discomfort with the label when pressed as to whether she considered herself bisexual: “I guess so. I don’t do labels on stuff. I don’t know what my sexuality would be called-but it wouldn’t be called heterosexual either.”
Many of these women have never actually had a relationship with a woman. “I have never had a girlfriend but I’ve dated,” Kitchen told the Dallas Voice. “I don’t know what form the love of my life is going to come in. I’m open to that.”
Mullally made a similar statement to The Advocate in 1999, saying “I’ve never had a full-on relationship with a woman, just a couple of what I’d term half-assed dalliances, so I haven’t explored it to the degree that I’d like to, but I’ll tell you, I’m open to it. And I don’t have any problem saying that.” Since she met her now-fiance Nick Offerman shortly afterwards, however, it is unlikely she will have an opportunity to explore it further in the near future.
Others, like Alanis Morrisette, Lisa Marie Presley, and former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell have acknowledged previous relationships with women, but are quick to place these firmly in the past. Presley even went so far as to say on The Howard Stern Show in April 2003 that although she could have a relationship with a woman again, she tries to keep that impulse in check.
Barrymore told New Woman “when I was younger I used to go out with a lot of women,” but then she added “I don’t think I could ever just solely be with a woman…It’s just not enough for me.”
In fact, of all of these celebrities acknowledging their attraction to both genders, only Angelina Jolie has both had a relationship with a woman in the past (actress/model Jenny Shimizu in 1996) and expressed an interest in dating women in the future. “If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I, you know, feel that it’s OK and it’s right to want to kiss her and touch her if I fell in love with her in that way?” she said on 20/20. “Yeah.”
Even five years ago, this many openly bisexual women in entertainment was unthinkable; few women in Hollywood were willing to risk the career backlash that was likely to result from such an admission. Which begs the question, is this recent flood of bisexual disclosures a reflection of the changing times, or just another attention-getting trend that allows many of these women to score cool points with the younger, more open-minded generation that has increasing power at the box office?
Certainly an environment which allows female celebrities to talk about their attraction to women and not have it negatively impact their careers is an improvement over the past, when any such disclosure was likely to be a career-killer.
This new openness about female bisexuality is not just reflected in celebrity disclosures, but across-the-board in entertainment, where same-sex kisses between women now regularly crop up on television and in movies. Same-sex kisses between non-lesbian women are almost always exploited for male titillation, as in movies like American Pie 2 and Anger Management and on reality shows like MTV’s The Real World, but even five years ago, these images were non-existent in mainstream entertainment.
In this context, a surge of celebrities coming-out as bisexual is probably due at least in part to more liberal attitudes towards female bisexuality, even if it’s also a marketing ploy for some.
But is this increased attention to bisexual women a positive development, or is it doing more harm than good? The fact that no female celebrity has ever come out as bisexual and then actually dated a woman (at least, not publicly) means that while this trend is helping to break down some of the silence that has existed around bisexuality, it’s also strengthening some of the stereotypes that make it so difficult to be a bisexual woman today.
Not all of these celebrities have admitted their preference for men as explicitly as Drew Barrymore has, but except for Angelina Jolie, the message appears to be that bisexual women don’t really want to be in a relationship with another woman, they just want to have sex with them occasionally–not exactly the kind of message we want to send to a public who already confuses promiscuity with bisexuality. (There isn’t anything wrong with heterosexual women who occasionally want to sleep with other women–but they’re Bisexual Straight Women, not bisexual.)
Complicating this issue is that fact that even for bisexual women who aren’t famous, it is almost always easier to meet eligible men than women, since straight men are everywhere and obvious, but lesbian or bisexual women are fewer and generally assumed to be heterosexual unless they clarify otherwise–often not an easy or desirable thing to do to strangers or acquaintances. For women who are well-known, generally insulated from the public, and unable to drop in at a local women’s bar without it being splashed all over the tabloids, it becomes even harder to meet women who might be potential lovers.
Given this, it is understandable why high-profile bisexual women may tend to date men disproportionately, in a way that is not exactly representative of the dating patterns of most bisexual woman.
Many bisexual women have a preference for one gender over the other, of course, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that, but when almost all the high-profile bisexual women only ever appear to date men, it creates a distorted public image of bisexuality.
In particular, it reinforces the idea that heterosexual relationships are always preferable to same-sex ones, and that given a choice, of course women would choose a relationship with a man over a relationship with a woman.
But perhaps this trend is just the first step in the process of conditioning the American public to be more comfortable with the idea of bisexuality, a necessary precursor to laying the foundation that will allow bisexuality to be truly accepted sometime in the near future. Maybe in the near future, female celebrities will be able to talk about their attraction to women and actually date them, too.
And although the jury’s still out on what kind of long-term effects this trend will have on the public’s image of bisexuality, at least we’re talking about the issue. For bisexual women who still feel largely invisible within both gay and heterosexual communities, that may be enough to offset a few reinforced stereotypes–at least for now.
