Bisexual planet

Jumping freely from coast to coast, Bi the Way (2008) examines the apparent trend in bisexuality in the new millennium. “When did bisexuality become such a mainstream affair?” asks filmmakers Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, pointing to the girl-girl kissing on TV’s The O.C., Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Madonna and Britney Spears’s infamous MTV lip lock (see above photo).

That well-publicized smooch, according to Dan Savage, “was done because young people were already doing it…MTV was holding a mirror up to the audience.” A syndicated sex columnist, he’s among several writers and analysts interviewed in Bi the Way to focus on what we’re told is a new awareness of bisexuality.

Blockman and Decker travel the country to talk with people wafting between homo- and heterosexual relationships. There’s the teenage girl who was expelled from a Catholic high school for kissing a female classmate, and later thrown out of her house once her father got wind of it. A dancer from Brooklyn describes the downside to his situation: “Being gay in the African community is not cool—being gay is the opposite of being black.” And then there’s scene-stealing Josh, an 11-year-old whose self-styled moral and ethical code suggests a genius trapped inside a child’s body. He’s not sure whether he’s straight or gay or bi, but he’s certainly looking forward to losing his virginity.

Bi the Way asks the experts some intriguing questions—is there a difference between male and female bisexuality?; can bisexuals be monogamous?; is bisexuality determined by attraction or love or both?—but the filmmakers limit their personal profiles to members of one generation. The commenting writers, clinicians and analysts vary in age, but the ‘test case’ participants are all under 30—as are Blockman and Decker. While their individual stories are involving, they’re still the words of people groping in the formative years of growth, conflict and self-awareness. At times, it almost—and I stress the word ‘almost’—feels as if the film were handling bisexuality as an adolescent or transitory fad rather than a natural human condition.

In a chance meeting in Arizona, Blockman and Decker find their coda from a roadside philosopher drinking beer and smoking cigarettes: “Tears for Fears says it best: ‘nobody talks about the beauty of the gay.’ And you know what? There is something beautiful about the gay. Because if you take the sexual organs away, what it’s all about is what’s in the heart.” Words to live by.


(Bi the Way will be showing at the SXSW Film Festival on March 8, 11 and 13.)