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alt title(s): Everyone Is Bisexual "You people and your quaint little categories."
"In my experience the difference between a straight and a bisexual is about four pints"
— Graham Norton
On many mainstream American and British TV shows, there are No Bisexuals. Not just in the casts, anywhere; once a person has realized his or her attraction to the same sex, the opposite sex is expected to be discarded utterly. A bisexual, at best, is either a kinky guest star or the one who did it.
This, needless to say, is hardly a case of Truth In Television. In the real world, many people can be attracted to either gender (or neither), and if someone's previously expressed an attraction to their opposite gender, bisexuality is generally the safer naďve assumption. Many shows seem to be moving toward that paradigm, but the base assumption in TV land is still generally that you're either/or, and Joe Average's assumption is still that " bisexual" means Anything That Moves.
Of course, then there's the other extreme: Everyone Is Bi. Gender, aside from a few token comments, is hardly a factor in the characters' relationships; the gender barrier seems an alien concept.
What this trope is not is, for example, the webcomic Umlaut House. While about half the cast is bisexual, the other half is explicitly not - and even if the ratio were different, the fact that neither half will shut up about it makes it the antithesis of this trope, in which it's rarely, if ever, mentioned at all. One might say that Umlaut House is more realistic, but hey, Reality Is Unrealistic.
Perhaps not, though - in Real Life, the Kinsey scale has a 0-6 (7 is right out) measurement of sexuality, with 0 being entirely heterosexual, and 6 being entirely homosexual. Kinsey's theory was that most folks fall somewhere in between.
And sometimes, even when everyone is straight, the fans don't seem to think so.
If one were to turn this trope upside-down, then Everyone Is Asexual. Invert it, and you get, well, the opposite. Compare Cast Full Of Gay.
Everyone Is Bi is only played straight half the time.
(Correction- It is played straight, from statistics, exactly 52.4339272761775434553% of the time. Get your research straight.)
Examples
Anime ad Manga
- Revolutionary Girl Utena: Funny story. On a wave of notoriety from Haruka and Michiru in Sailor Moon, the author was forced by his artist to make a work free of homosexuality. He then threw in suggestive scenes and dialogue between nearly every pair of major characters, including siblings, while giving the artist just enough information to keep her in the dark. He kept pushing the envelope until not even the most diehard of Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today fans could call it "just Ho Yay" - the artist herself caught on near the end of the series. And then he just took all the brakes off for the anime version. And crashed the car for The Movie.
- Name a work by CLAMP, any work by CLAMP...except for Chobits.
- The second half of Gravitation.
- Seems to have been the general assumption in Kyou Kara Maou, as it is 'not uncommon' for two men to marry, and the maids who have a betting pool on the main character's relationships don't even take gender into consideration despite his having explicitly stated his heterosexuality several times. Or perhaps they just know better.
- It seems like absolutely everyone in Axis Powers Hetalia is at least bi.
Comic Books
- In Strangers In Paradise, most of the female characters have slept with each other, and even if they don't seem to like men, they've also slept with David.
- Wendy and Richard Pini, creators of Elf Quest, have explicitly stated on several occasions that every single elf in the series is at least potentially bisexual. Although most of the characters seem to express a preference for one sex or the other there are several examples of elves in heterosexual relationships taking time out to have same-sex flings as well, perhaps the most notorious being Leetah and Nightfall's nude dance
 ◊ in Volume 5 of the collected series.
- Similar to the 51th century in Doctor Who, the eponymous superhero of Midnighter once tried to explain to a woman from the 95th century that he's gay. She didn't understand the word, and revealed that in the 95th century Everyone Is Bi (apparently that's enough of "everyone" that they no longer even have words for monosexuality).
- In Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen the character of Orlando is definitely bisexual, but this makes sense because Orlando is an immortal who changes sex randomly and without warning. However, pretty much all of the female characters (be they historical or mythological) that Orlando spends any amount of time with are bi for Orlando. This includes Mina Murray, the heroine of the series, Fanny Hill, Venus (of course), Marguerite Blakeney and others. And when Orlando is a male, it's at least hinted at and also sometimes explicitly stated that many of his male companions are bi for him also.
- In Century: 1910, Mina, angry with both Orlando (who's male at this point) and her partner Alan, announces that she'll be in self-Exile To The Couch, and they'll have the bed to themselves. She also comments that she likes Orlando better when (s)he's female.
- In Artesia, all the Daradjan women seem to be bi, and the men at least have no problem double, triple, or even quadruple-teaming a willing woman. No male characters have yet been shown to be explicitly bi or even homosexual, though.
- In Jaime Hernandez's "Locas" stories in Love And Rockets, practically every female character is bi, even the lesbian-identifying ones. Except for Vicki, who's a homophobe.
Film
Literature
- In Jacqueline Carey's Kushiels Legacy and Kushiel's Scion series, every single d'Angeline character is bisexual.
Absolutely without exception No exceptions.
- In Diane Duane's Tale Of The Five fantasy series, bisexuality is culturally universal in the world it takes place on.
- To the extent that they have laws dictating that everyone must have at least enough heterosex to produce a couple of children. After that they can go back to their real loves.
- In Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept series, the serf class on Photon can be inferred to be mostly bisexual - mostly out of having to cater to the whims of the Citizen class (lead character Stile mentions "consensual heterosexual encounters", implying there's been homosexual ones and possibly voluntary). There are however, only two verified bi characters (Tania and Tsetse - naturally both female and hot.)
- Note that this only became the case in the last book. Prior to that, homosexuality was barely even sidebarred.
- In Merry Gentry, pretty much all of the Fey are supposed to be openly bisexual. Merry herself is all about the heterosex, of course, so that she can reflect the author's own feelings about sex with another woman, which seem to be "ewww gross but that's actually kind of interesting".
- In S.M. Stirling's Draka novels, the old 20th-Century genetically-unmodified-human Draka are straight, gay, or bi as the case may be (and with no shame or self-consciousness about their orientation ever); but the genetically-engineered New Race or Homo drakensis Draka, portrayed in Drakon, are all bisexual (and their sexual appetites always ravenous).
- Anne Rice 's vampires are functionally asexual, but there's a lot of erotic subtext to their interactions nonetheless.
- In Armand's book, she finally had the main character have sex with persons of both gender before he was turned.
- Taken to the extreme in Steven Saylor's book series about a man solving crime in the Roman Republic. Every single male character that protagonist Gordianus encounters is bisexual, if not homosexual. Every Roman aristocrat as well as every man with a semi-high status in whatever field he's in is accompanied by a young, hot man who seems to adore him, and the two can't keep themselves from casting longing and knowing glances at each other. What's notable is that the only exceptions to this rule is Gordianus himself, and his two sons.
- Larry Niven's Known Space. According to one interpretation, which is in line with the way the Puppeteers themselves generally explain it to non-Puppeteers, Pierson's Puppeteers can be regarded as an entire race of bisexuals. Males are sapient and produce gametes, while females are non-sapient and provide gestation space. There are males who produce sperm and males who produce eggs, while females contribute no gametes but carry and bear the offspring. The female dies after childbirth, and the gay couple raises the kids, no sex except reproduction though. Would be Everyone Is Gay if the couple didn't have sex with a female at one point. An alternate interpretation, one that a human character stumbles upon and considers more accurate, is that the non-sapient "females" are in fact a different species that the Puppeteers are parasitic upon - similar to the Ichneumon wasps that lay their eggs in live insects so that the wasp larvae can eat the host alive. The "sperm-producing-male" is the Puppeteer male, while the "egg-producing male" is the Puppeteer female.
- Practically everything Poppy Z. Brite has ever written.
- Then again, the major relationships in her stories tend to be same-sex.
- An astonishing number of the female characters in the Claudine stories are bi. This is shrugged off with the ignorant contemporary views of sexuality- as Claudine's husband says, "What you little animals do is charming and doesn't mean anything." It's another matter entirely if a man should be interested in both sexes.
- Not so much ignorant, as that Colette and her first husband wrote and edited these books with one eye on the dirty old man market.
- In the novels by Gregory Maguire (especially Wicked), everyone is bisexual until they state they don't care for one or both genders. (Especially if you're descended from the Thropp line.)
- In Fiona Patton's Tales of the Branion Realm, pretty much everyone is bi, and this goes completely unremarked. There is even a Guild of Companions (a cross between bodyguard, courtesan, same-sex sexual partner, and spy) who are contracted to the nobility. The first book revolves around the Crown Prince's relationship with his mother — she wants him to get married and have an heir, he would prefer to shack up with his Companion. He starts a civil war over this. His mother, BTW, has four Companions of her own.
- In Robert A Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, Ishtar and Galahad agree to "Seven Hours of Pleasure," even though they have so far seen each other only in all-concealing biohazard-protection suits and, thus, neither knows the other's sex. It is strongly implied that in their society (the Howard Families colony-world of Secundus), it is considered in bad taste even to care.
- An Informed Ability in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe. In All-Consuming Fire Benny says that bisexuality is the norm in the 25th century (although she personally isn't). Subsequent books set in Benny's home era have offered no evidence of this.
- In The Neanderthal Parallax, litterally everyone in Neanderthal society is Bi, being expected to take a "man-mate" and a "woman-mate".
- Word Of God about the Liaden Universe novels is that Liadens should be assumed to all be bi. We see several homosexual encounters but all the permanent arrangements we see on screen are heterosexual- unsurprising for a culture that puts huge weight on providing an heir.
Live Action TV
- Torchwood. Perhaps a little too much attention paid to this fact in the second episode, but after that, gender as an obstacle is never mentioned again.
- The Doctor Who episode that introduces Jack Harkness implies that his omnisexuality is the norm for the century (51st) that he grew up in, in which the Captain Kirk approach to first contact has been the norm for so long that species and gender lines have become muddled. So it's a future where the whole human race is pansexual. God bless Russell T Davies.
- Ianto, Owen, and Tosh also go both ways. Of the two kisses Gwen's had with other women, neither was really her idea, so she seems straight for now.
- Star Trek. In the later Mirror Universe episodes, all women are apparently hypersexual and bisexual and, indeed, define themselves mostly by their sexual attractiveness and the power it gives them over others (whereas the men are all macho, violent and, apparently, straight).
- Mirror Garak would disagree with the latter.
- The Daily Show. Everybody on the show has either shown bisexual tendencies on screen, or simply mentioned having had sex with both genders.
- More often than not, the bisexuality is played as either comedic misunderstanding themed (Jason Jones once mentions that he married a gay man, after misinterpreting a recent ruling allowing gay marriage) or the correspondent is gay for pay (as seen with Rob Riggle, who had sex with men for money in order to earn the cash to buy an iPhone.)
- J Michael Straczynski's philosophy for Babylon 5 was that in 2258, sexual orientation is a non-issue — not that everyone is bi, people just don't make a point of it. He suggested early on that one of the main characters was bisexual. This turned out to be Ivanova, but it only came up a couple of times.
- Partly because her girlfriend was Put On A Bus To Hell, which left half of Talia's storylines unresolved and the rest taken up by Lyta Alexander.
- Talia Winters is the Jonas Quinn, Lyta Alexander the original who was Jonas Quinned by Talia and then proceeded to take up her original role when Talia's actor wanted out and her character's "escape hatch" (the Psi Corps mole thing) was activated. Every character had a reserved subplot that could be used if a particular actor wanted to leave.
- In a subtler incidence, Marcus and Franklin pose as a newlywed gay couple when undercover on Mars. Nobody considers this unusual, though people aware that it's a cover do consider it funny.
- Word Of God for Battlestar Galactica is that all Cylons are Bi. This is actually seen in the Three and Six models.
Tabletop Games
- Exalted - Unless the source material specifically says than an NPC is gay or straight, it's a safe bet that they swing both ways. There are maybe three examples of a 0 or a 6 on the Kinsey scale in the entire setting.
- Maid RPG includes seduction rules that are specifically mentioned as "not in any way governed by gender."
Videogames
- The Sims - For simplicity's sake, every Sim can romance any other Sim, at least as far gender goes. There are some obstacles, but none of these are gender.
- The Expansion Pack The Sims 2: Nightlife complicates things: positive romantic interactions increase a Sim's invisible attraction score to that gender, allowing better chemistry. Gender preference can also decay, so if your Romance Sim flirts with male Sims all the time, they can suddenly stop being attracted to female Sims. Pretty weird, even for a game like The Sims.
- Second Life I'll leave it at that
- Tony Hawks Underground has this as a by product of Purely Aesthetic Gender, if you play as a girl you have to impress other girls to get them to come to a party (which will be held by exclusively by men, besides yourself).
- World Of Warcraft - One of the succubus's abilities, Seduce, can affect males and females equally.
- During the Valentine's day event, PCs can exchange pledges of adoration with NPCs for love tokens. Gender is only a factor in that female NPCs will romance PCs wearing cologne and male NPCs will romance PCs wearing perfume. Either gender can wear either cologne or perfume.
- Worth mentioning that to get the Largest prize you need at least twenty pledges from each city, Darnassus is all female and Ironforge is all male.
- And Horde-side, Silvermoon is all male.
- And Undercity is all... Uh, Eww.
- And then there's Thunder Bluff.
- In City Of Villains, Succubi have a power called "Come Hither" that prevents players from being able to attack them directly. Interestingly, it works on both genders just as easily. The spell is broken immediately if the Succubus attacks the player.
- Quite possibly the men of Metal Gear Solid, where there are three canon bisexual characters — Colonel Volgin, Vamp, and Dolph himself. There's also subtext between Solid Snake and Otacon despite their own things for the ladies, and while Big Boss has no canonical partner he benefits from Everyone Being Gay For Big Boss with EVA/Big Mama and especially when Ocelot goes so far as to sacrifice his own personality/self by using nanomachines and hypnotherapy to make himself think that he was Liquid Snake — hence "Liquid Ocelot" — throughout the events of Metal Gear Solid 4... all for the cause, all for Big Boss.
- In Metal Gear Online, both male and female characters can learn the Charm ability which causes them to do a sexy dance, stopping other characters in their tracks. The sexy dance does not discriminate based on gender.
- In the main Pokémon games, "Attract" only works on Pokémon of the opposite gender, but in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Red and Blue, where only the player character has a definite gender, Attract works on (virtually) everyone.
- While "Attract" affect only the opposite gender in the main series, the same cannot be said to "Charm" and "Sweet Kiss", though the earlier might apply to the Pokémon's cuteness.
- In Vampire The Masquerade all women, and only the women, are bisexual. Well, there's one token bi guy just at the beginning of the game, and possibly one straight girl. But almost.
- The second game takes it further: all of the women are bisexual, except the obvious vamp-bait ones in clubs. These are gay.
- In the computer game, there are a few straight women (the crazy family towards the end is highly homophobic).
- In Cupid, you can match up anyone with anyone.
- Liberal Crime Squad allows you to seduce people of any gender (and you often don't know their gender before you try to seduce them). The chance of success depends solely on your skills.
Webcomics
- Michiko Monogatari
- By this time, pretty much everyone in Shortpacked has had both a gay and straight experience with the exceptions of the boss Galasso and Ronald Reagan.
- Though Mike's less bisexual and more "equal opportunity hatefucker".
- Faz even refers to the Kinsey scale, although he gets how it works wrong. ("Now, if I have sex with a woman, I will be a 3!")
- On the other hand, when Ethan tells him he's gay, Galasso needs the concept of homosexuality explained to him... which requires an explanation of gender. Who knows what (what, not who - this is the same man who tried to mate his daughter with a horse) he had sex with beyond Conquest's mother.
- Most of the cast in Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki have shown or talked about attraction to both genders. The rest aren't confirmed as either bisexuals or monosexuals as of yet.
- While only two characters in Ghastly's Ghastly Comic have ever been called "bisexual", almost every cast member has slept with, kissed, or had a Stupid Sexy Flanders moment with members of both sexes at one point or another.
- Concession: not everyone is bi, but a large proportion of the cast are. Joel, Matt, Roland, Angie, Emily, and Chelsie are all described as bisexual on their cast pages.Matt and Emily have only actually been seen interacting romantically with their respective same-gendered partners Joel and Kelly, but the others have all demonstrated at least some bisexual tendencies onscreen. Nicole (who is actually a male named Aaron), Cecil, and Kelly are gay. The other ten characters named on the cast page are heterosexual counting Kate, who is a practicing pedophile whose personal harem is made up of male preteens, though she also slept with the adult Artie and her own twin brother - so, not everyone, but a much higher proportion than real life. A remarkably high proportion of gay and bi characters show up in the randomly generated background character population as well.
- Word Of God for The Challenges Of Zona is that the Erogenians practice "situational bisexuality" as a matter of course and that Zona and Tula have had lovers of both sexes.
- Menage A 3 starts out with a varied cast of gay and straight guys/girls with one Bi girl. By now, every single named character (and plenty of one-off extras) has had at least two or three instances where they've shown more than a little attraction for both genders, with the exception of the landlady and the guy who stays indoors and thinks it's still the 80's.
Western Animation
- Drawn Together - Every cast member seems to have slept with or kissed at least one other character of the same sex.
- The Simpsons - Often male cast members will show attraction to other men. Especially if it's funny. ("It feels like I'm wearing nothing at all. Nothing at all. Nothing at all!")
- Superjail. Maybe? It's not even entirely clear about the gender of the collective main cast. In any case, no one seems to be deterred in their crushes by little things like transsexuality or gender-switched counterparts from another planet/dimension or people who can apparently spontaneously give birth through their anuses. Or death.
Real Life
- Scientist Alfred Kinsey's theories postulated that the great majority of the human race was bisexual in some shape or form.
- More specifically, he came to believe that sexuality was a sliding scale rather than something with cleanly cut categories, and that nearly nobody is completely to one end of the scale. One might prefer one gender, but they'll still find the other gender attractive to some degree.
- Considering the massive Troper Tales page for Stupid Sexy Flanders and the sheer number of examples in Perverse Sexual Lust including both genders, either Kinsey was more correct than most people think or he was One Of Us.
- Literally true in some animal species, for instance the Bonobos.
- True in some high schools. According to an article, many high-schoolers claim to be Bi because it apparently gives them some kind social boost, more common among girls. Of course were you to ask them what experiences they'd had with the same sex you'd get blank looks. Not to mention how the actual bisexuals find it annoying in the least.
- Not that it can actually be proven, but /b/'s existence and culture is largely inexplicable without a large number of /b/tards being bisexual on some level.
- Furry Fandom. Hoo boy. Although there are certainly monosexual furries, there's also quite a few who take things to extremes.
- The ancient Romans defined sexuality less on your partners gender so much as whether or not they were actually Roman.
Fanfiction
- Everyone in the That Damned M Preg universe is bi unless specifically stated otherwise, exclusively straight and gay characters are few and far between.
- My Immortal.
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