In the darkest days of the pandemic, while huddled in our homes, we indulged in a succession of streaming obsessions. As a society, we sat down alone in our living rooms and binged like our lives depended on it, which arguably they did. So go, team!
Whether it was Tiger King (2020-2021), the final season of Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020), or the incredible newcomer Love Is Blind (2020-), we could not look away.
As we sat in our living rooms, 30 young hot singles in Atlanta sat alone in their “pods”, meeting other young hot singles through a wall. The goal? To get married. These men and women spoke without ever seeing each other in an attempt to find true love and to test if “love really is blind”. If they feel a sufficient spark, they will become engaged. Once engaged, they meet each other, spend a few days in tropical paradise, spend a few more weeks living together, and finally, there’s a giant wedding ceremony where they say yes or no.
But before we continue, consider this your SPOILER alert as we’re about to discuss important details of Season 8. And if this is your first time on a Unicorn Scale, check out the original article to learn how we grade. You can also browse our Bi Media Entry for the show if you’re looking for a quick summary!
In later seasons, cast members were also given the option to leave the show before the wedding if it became evident that love was in fact not blind.
Season 8 of this hit show recently wrapped, and it seemed like the right time to look back at the sparse selection of bi cast members that have sat in the pods. If you are not up to date, there will be spoilers for seasons one and eight.
What I Liked:
Not a lot. The most obvious thing you can say about bi representation for this show is that there is almost none. The smattering of openly bi and bi-ish characters is not great and is very sparse.
I suppose the nicest thing you can say about the bi representation in this show is that they gave Brittany Dodson a pretty great edit in season 8. Her storyline could have been completely edited out, but instead, they showed how the awesome and stylish Brittany, who played and coached Division I college basketball, stood up for herself.
While in the pods, a relationship began to blossom between her and Devin Buckley, who coaches high school basketball. As Devin struggled to choose between Brittany and Virginia Miller, the conversations in the pods started to get deeper. Brittany told Devin that while she is interested in marrying a man, she had been in relationships with women before. Brittany seemed nervous to tell this to Devin, but was not embarrassed by or ashamed of her previous relationships. Devin didn’t immediately freak out, but he kind of freaked out. It was clear that he was not comfortable with this information and that this was probably the end of the relationship.
At their next meeting, Devin was prepared to break up with Brittany, but she beat him to it with a kind and firm rejection. She said that she deserves someone excited about who she is, including the part of her that has had relationships with women. She was not interested in being in a relationship with someone who had to think about and deal with her sexual past.
That was pretty cool.
In a later interview with Entertainment Weekly, when she was asked to clarify her sexuality, Brittany said she’d been thinking about her sexuality more since the show:
Especially in regards to, can I see myself marrying a woman? […] I kind of love being in this really feminine energy, but I also love all sexes. I love everyone. That’s a hard question to answer. I guess I’m still a work in progress, to say the least.
What I Didn’t Like:
In the original US version of Love Is Blind, there have been two canonically bi(ish) cast members, and that just doesn’t seem like enough. The other one was nowhere near as lovely as Brittany.
Let’s go back to Season one. Whenever I’m thinking about reality television, I often think of the participants as characters. Between casting choices and editing, the production team has quite a bit of control over the narrative. That being said, even a producer who is looking for the most potential drama possible could not have foretold the magnitude of season one’s bi dramatics. Carlton Morton is arguably the only Love Is Blind cast member that the audience knows is bi from the beginning. He tells the cameras that he is bi and how hard it can be for a man being bi from the get-go. He says that he’s often rejected by women when they find out that he is bi, and he struggles with knowing when to let someone know that he is bi. Fair enough.
As Zachary Zane pointed out in an article at the time, Carlton’s concerns were not unfounded. Many bi people feel rejected by both the bi and straight communities. It can be tempting to let someone get to know you before letting them know that you are bi. Zachary also pointed out, correctly, that the time to tell someone is probably before you are engaged to them. Carlton decided to wait until he was engaged to Diamond Jack and on a tropical vacation to let her know that he was bi.
Although Carlton thought otherwise, Diamond seemed to roll with this revelation fairly well. She asked for clarification and said that she needed some time to think. Considering her fiance was just telling her that he’d been lying about her sexuality, this seems fair. Things quickly deteriorated with Carlton berating Diamond, and the engagement ended in an explosive and expletive-filled fight. The two did eventually make nice for the cameras, although Diamond had no interest in trying again.
Although it may have been hard to predict the amount of drama that Carlton would give them, the producers surely could have cast a happily out bi person who was not interested in lying to their partner. Instead, they chose to cast someone who was still feeling deeply insecure about their sexuality. It’s unfortunate that for seven seasons, this was the only openly bi cast member that audiences saw.
The radio silence ended with Season eight, sort of. Brittany didn’t repeat Carlton’s mistake; in fact, she was quite impressive. Unlike Carlton, she avoided using the term “bi”, as it seemed she was still exploring her own identity while striving to be as honest as possible with Devin.
For a while, that was all the bisexuality we knew about. Then, in the aftermath of season 8, we heard from Madison Errichiello, who definitely got a bit of a villain cut. Even though she did not make it out of the pods engaged, she was in the middle of some very messy love triangles. She also appeared at various events after everyone left the pods and was heavily featured in the reunion. It turns out that Madison was openly bi that whole time.
In interviews after the show, she said that she told multiple men in the pods about her sexuality. Supposedly, Madison had even matched with an unnamed female castmate on Hinge before the show, suggesting there is likely at least one more bi woman in Season 8. She also bonded with Brittany after Devin’s less-than-stellar reaction. Why didn’t we see it? Perhaps because, according to Madison, no one actually cared that she was bi. In fact, her sexuality was not seen as a big deal, and so it was left on the cutting-room floor. It seems that Love Is Blind only wants to talk about bi people when it is preventing healthy, happy heterosexual relationships.
The Rating:
Brittany is great, and I’m so glad that she didn’t put up with Devin’s nonsense. Many of the women of Season 8 stood behind their progressive ideals and ended relationships with men who seemed to support homophobic agendas. Unfortunately, Love Is Blind only seems interested in depicting bisexuality if it is disrupting heterosexual romance and so it only gets one Unicorn.
