“At its best, [TheLWord] was watchable, its characters sometimes likable in their chaos. At its worst, though, it was cruel to the communities it tried to represent, notably trans and bisexual people,” writes marianne_eloise
Photo: Paul Sarkis/SHOWTIME Loving The L Word as a bisexual woman betrays a certain kind of masochism and optimism. For its flaws, Ilene Chaiken’s soapy, melodramatic series about the loves and lives of lesbians in Los Angeles was groundbreaking, one of the first places women who loved women could see parts of their lives represented onscreen. At its best, it was watchable, its characters sometimes likable in their chaos.
Elsewhere, bisexual women seemed only to exist onscreen to stir up drama, their sensuality leveraged only to titillate teen boys. I longed for something that understood the nuances of my identity. The L Word fell short, but many shows since have not. It’s a long list: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Broad City, Schitt’s Creek, and many more have managed to portray bisexuality in a way that is neither dismissive nor sensational — it just is.
When we meet Alice again in Generation Q, she is a successful talk-show host with a long-term girlfriend, a perfect blonde bob, and a series of alternating pastel suits. So far, so good: Her crimes against fashion in the first outing needed a redemption arc all their own. As the revival went on, it seemed that Alice had tossed aside the label that had caused her so much ostracization: that, with a committed relationship to Natalie, she had done as bi women on TV often do and “picked a side.
This conversation might have felt better had it been the other way around — the ignorant straight man expecting her to cheat, Alice educating him on the meaning of bisexuality. Instead, it just feels painful to see her still being so ignorant about her own identity. It’s as if she resents it, which maybe holds some truth. Maybe some of us, never feeling as if we fit into a community, wish that we could just pick a side, fit neatly into a box without having to justify ourselves.
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