The bisexual episode of Sex and the City
if you're not across it, this one episode is like a boogeyman for bi people
I’m going to say a sentence that could easily explain why I am single lately: I’ve been doing a Sex and the City improv show recently. It’s really fun and I love it, so I’m not gonna stop, and really, I’d only date people who think it’s fun anyway, so it’s not really an issue. But still.
ANYWAY. The show is called Sex and the CBD, and the basic conceit is that we do a SATC episode set in Melbourne, which essentially means every show Samantha bangs someone while riding on the sadly defunct Melbourne Star. The format involves four (bad) wigs on stage, with the cast of 6 choosing the wigs randomly, and playing each character.
I’ve been Samantha twice, and she’s a delight to play: her entire role is being fabulously and hedonistically self-sufficient, which means that any scene she joins, she gets to be a flourish, a garnish, an innuendo-rich sauce that just propels the story along without derailing it. It’s a fun job in an improv show, not a lot of structural tasks. I’ve also been Charlotte once, and you just have to be uptight about stuff. But the last show I did, I was Carrie.
I didn’t want to be Carrie, because Carrie is the worst. She’s not just the worst character, she’s also the hardest to play on stage in a 45 minute improv show.
In her defence, she is a load-bearing protagonist in the show (Samantha voice: honey, i don’t mind being load bearing every once in a while), in the sense that we literally see everyone’s stories through her perspective, AND she can’t just be a passive observer, but must also make her own extremely messy storylines. She is pushed into never sitting still, never stopping making bad choices for the sake of narrative. She can never rest - and she can never stop being the filter through which we are served the other character’s stories, meaning we get full access to all her judgements, phobias and bias, along with her poor decision-making skills. Doesn’t make for a likeable person. Doesn’t make for an easily condensed comedic parody either.
There’s even a theory, which I prescribe to, that each of the girls (including the eponymous City) function as a hyperbolised facet of her personality: Charlotte is her romantic and optimistic side, Miranda all her cynical and career-oriented thoughts, and Samantha the avatar of sex and independence and hedonism. At any point, Carrie is going to side with one or two of those girls, and thus create the format for whatever episode we’re watching, a dialogue between different aspects of herself. It’s very rare for all her personalities to ever align on one issue.
I think I played Carrie fine - I just amped up her utter self-obsession, and made a joke about how everything had to be about her - but I had an epiphany halfway through the show when I made a joke about being a biphobic bigot. I couldn’t help but realised that I kinda hated Carrie.
And that’s mostly because of the infamous bisexual episode, annoying titled ‘Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl...’.
For those who don’t know, it’s a baffling episode. Carrie dates the incredibly cute Sean, a great kisser, who on their cute ice-skating date, drops that he used to date a guy named Mike.
Carrie then proceeds to have an utter freakout, for no discernible reason. It’s pure bi-panic, that seems to lack any of Carrie’s signature self-obsessed introspection. If I didn’t already have a very dim view of both Carrie and the standard of her sex and relationships column, I would be shocked at how close-minded she is in this moment. Actually, even by Carrie’s standards, it’s pretty wild how knee-jerk and unfounded it is.
It’s illuminated by the traditional meal meeting with the girls, where the various relationship monsters of the week are discussed over brunch. In this, the only person who sticks up for poor bisexual Sean is obviously Samantha, calling him “evolved” and “sexy”, which is true - but even she approaches this from a fetishistic way. It’s the hard-no’s from Miranda and Charlotte that truly define this scene however, exhibiting blatant and unrepentant disgust at the idea of dating a bisexual man. Charlotte finds it icky, Miranda repugnant.
Carrie’s confusion swings around wildly, but the defining quote is when she says “i don’t even believe in bisexuality, isn’t just a stop on the way to gaytown?”
Later on, Carrie goes to a party with Sean, and in the only real glimmer of Carrie Bradshaw spirit, ends up reluctantly making out with Alanis Morisette for a brief second in a game of spin the bottle, before deciding none of this is for her, and flouncing into the night, washing her hands on a concept somehow too confusing for her: bisexual men.
I don’t know if this is true, but I have a strong suspicion that this was the first piece of media I ever consumed depicting bisexuality. I’d come across the concept in the weird corners of the internet that raised me (elf roleplaying forums), stunted and strange as a teenager, but I’d never seen what a bisexual was meant to look like in the wild. At that point in my life, a stiff breeze could have flung me back into the closet, but not to be dramatic, this episode was a howling gale, sending me scurrying back for shelter every time I thought about it. Letting the tv show Sex and the City have ANY impact on your life is incredibly silly, but I actually reckon the reason it has such an impact is because it captures not only a personal fear that I’ve carried around for years, but a very real attitude from other people.
When I first went to university, I went to a meeting at the Queer Collective, my very first attempt at sticking my little head out of my shell, and had a bunch of aggressive gays tell me witheringly that I had to “choose a side” in order to join. Many years later, I was on a date with a woman who after finding out I was bisexual said that she was “looking for something serious”. In that same era, another woman unmatched me on a dating app saying that she was “concerned for her health”. The point of these anecdotes are to show that while the bisexual episode of Sex and the City is wild, it’s not crazy. It reflects a prejudice, that was definitely around at the time, and persists to this day. I was going to say “linger”, but that makes it seem like its losing strength - I’ve watched biphobia simply mutate, transform into fun new forms in recent years.
I used to think this episode was bad no just because of the biphobia, but because it was a wildly inaccurate position for a new york sex columnist to take - but actually I think it’s worse than that, in that it accurately captures a predominant attitude that I wish didn’t exist.
In retrospect, this is the most Carrie attitude I can think of. This is deeply Carrie. Ur-Carrie.
This episode is representative of a very typical unease. A lot of the focus is on the “generational” aspect of bisexuality at this time, with Carrie deciding she’s “too old” for this newfangled concept. The party is shown as a bunch of cool young people “dabbling” with bisexuality, perhaps for clout or attention. I wonder how much of the writer’s own anxieties manifested through these lines? But it’s no throwaway concept - one of the simplest ways to diminish something like a sexuality or a cause or a lived experience is to strip it of dignity by infantilising it. You definitely saw it with bisexuality twenty years ago, with both straight people and older mono gays or lesbians trying to pass it off as a trend, and therefore not worthy of consideration. Yet we persist. There’s more bisexual people than ever, with numbers rising astronomically with each generation. You see the same attempts to diminish now, with anything to do with gender. Hell, I even saw a liberal columnist use the same tactic to try to weaken the Palestinian liberation movements around the world.
I’m pretty fine with how the “annoying bisexual” has turned into a meme, I think most of the time it’s hyperbolising a joke with little malice - but I do sometimes wonder if it isn’t used as a fun little front for people to cement this hostility towards the concept of bisexuality a little further into the popular culture. Just another inch every time. Another tiny infantilising nail.
Arguably you could pair this episode with the arc of episodes that feature the gang’s treatment of Samantha and her girlfriend - an era which the label “bisexual” doesn’t even get bandied around, such is the added invisibility of female bisexuality - straight to lesbian (in both senses of the phrase). Male bisexuality, in this show is disgusting and infantile, female bisexuality just doesn’t even exist - both are unstable states on the way to something else (nice solid gayness).
Watching this episode again recently, as preparation for my show, I realised that as much as I’ve moved beyond the panics of my youth, the fear of being bisexual, and comfortably into a stable zone of confident annoyance to everyone around me, this episode just makes me kinda sad.
When I’m feeling strong, i’m sad that Carrie fumbled the handsomest and nicest man in the show due to weird societal bigotry, and feel the same way about the people who have had the same reaction to dating me, or have suddenly shown weird gender essentialist behaviour after years of dating. It’s also self-selecting - why would I want to date anyone who has an issue with it? But when I’m feeling less confident, I’m sad that there’s a part of myself that is treated with such malice and disgust by so much of the world. Thank god Sex and the City never did an episode about how much they hate improv, i’d never recover.
Thank you for reading! This newsletter is funded entirely by the generosity of our paid subscribers, allowing us to commission amazing queer writers and boost marginalised voices. If you like this article and believe in independent journalism, please consider subscribing.
Like smoking while ice skating too 😅
Fookin hell, I was big into SatC back in the day, I've not watched it for years. It's shocking how dated it is in so many ways now. It seemed so modern at the time- it's weird getting old, when you get far along enough that stuff you watched as an adult has dated so badly😑