Introducing The Drive-Bis: Blink-And-You’ll-Miss-It Queer Representation

Anyone who knows me in person that I can be a real soft touch. First of all, I’m a (self-admitted) recovering nostalgia addict. I’m also an actress, so I’m very in touch with my emotions because I sometimes need to be able to cry at the drop of a hat

Why am I bringing this up? Because recently I came across a Twitter thread talking about the shift in public consensus about queer identity in the past twenty years. Recalling the painful details of lack of resources, political persecution, and slivers of representation brought up painful teenage memories that made me wonder if someone was cutting onions.

Bi representation has grown in leaps and bounds in the last decade — and the last five years, in particular. It’s not enough or full, but damn if it ain’t better than what we had going for us at the start of the millennium. That being said, the queer community did get some smatterings from time to time — and I do mean smatterings — of representation. And while I think it’s good to do deep dives into nuanced, modern representations, it’s also important to take a look at those cameos of bisexuality in TV and cinema and give them some analysis.

So this is a little bit different from my additions to The Unicorn Scale. Since they’re SO brief, I’m gonna start a series here called the Drive-Bis — the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mentions or characters hanging just off the edges of the silver screen frame that were supposed to suffice for repping the largest demographic of our alphabet mafia.

I should note that to discuss these characters, I will be discussing SPOILERS for the stories they come from, so you’ve been warned. Good? Faboo. So let’s get down to it!

1. Gillian Quinn, You’ve Got Mail (1998)

At first, Gillian (played by Cara Seymour) seems like a typical stereotype of a gold-digger often found in comedies. You’ve Got Mail was made in the era of people still riffing on the May/December marriage of Anna Nicole Smith, so commentary about younger women marrying much older men presumably for their wealth ran rampant throughout a slew of films in this decade.

Gillian doesn’t have enough depth or bite to become a true villain in the plot (though she does limply try to come on to Tom Hanks’ character during one scene) and is what seems to be yet another in a line of bankrupting wives the elder Mr. Fox (Dabney Coleman) will have to counter in divorce court.

What’s key with Gillian is her departure — 1) it’s offscreen, and 2) she leaves the elder Mr. Fox for his female nanny.

More than anything, this seems like an easy out, script-wise, for the character but it doesn’t read as organic. Any and all scenes with Gillian and the nanny show absolutely no tension or attraction. Instead it seems like this sudden bisexuality Gillian displays off-camera serves more as a punchline — to whit, there’s nothing to even blink-and-miss in the first place.

Is Gillian as offensive as, say, a Catherine Trammel character? Nah. But she is part of the narrative just long enough to push a few well-worn bi character stereotypes (manipulative, cheating, etc.), to leave a bad taste in one’s mouth, and depart before the third act.

2. Susan, Let Them All Talk (2020)

I know I’m skipping ahead about twenty years, so I hope I’m not giving anyone any cultural whiplash. But I’m trying to prove a point - and that is that while we often think of this cursory representation as a thing of the past, we can and often see this happening even in recent years.

Susan (played by Dianne Wiest) is one of two college friends who agrees to take a trip on the Queen Mary to accompany Alice (Meryl Streep) to accept a prize for her literary work in England. Midway through the film, Susan gasps because she thinks she sees a professor whom she had a threesome with (him and his wife, that is). Susan and Roberta (Candice Bergen) giggle about it for a moment, with Susan explaining it wasn’t a big group sex thing — and then it’s never mentioned again.

Why? Why go to all the trouble to do this casual queer bomb? It doesn’t relate to anything else in the plot other than reiterating that the three women went to college together. It certainly doesn’t come up when Susan finds herself attracted to and helping out a male mystery novelist she finds on the ocean liner. Why tuck this in at all?

3. Tim, Single All the Way (2021)

Wait, what now?! We’re still seeing this pattern last year?! Yes, dear reader, and it pains me to share that with you. While I’m delighted to see more queer-focused holiday fare hitting the streaming platforms — and particularly to see this one come out where, ahem, coming out to the family isn’t the crux of the crisis — I still rolled my eyes at one sketchy excuse of a character.

Tim (played by Steve Lund), boyfriend to our protagonist, Peter (Michael Urie), seems perfect and perfectly accommodating when we first meet him, agreeing last-minute to go meet Peter’s family over the Christmas holiday... only to be discovered by best friend/roommate/inevitable-love-interest Nick (Philemon Chambers) to be a two-timer with a wife at home.

Look, I love the ridiculous formula of Christmas movies. I know Tim was little more than a jumping-off point to get the second act ruse of Peter needing to take a different date home. But to have Tim be a cheating and deceiving bi? Do we really need to drag this hurtful trope into a genre that has been off-limits to the LGBT community for so damn long? I assert that we do not. I also wish that this pattern of by-the-way-I’m-fluid, now-let’s-never-see-this-character/talk-about-it again would just go die in a fire. Or in this case, burn atop the yule log.

One of the beautiful things about people knowing that I write Unicorn Scale articles is that I get lots of suggestions for characters or shows to cover. And don’t get me wrong; I’m grateful for all of them! But when I discover that, more often than not, older suggestions are these drive-bis, I have a mixed reaction. I often pity the characters or get angry at the screenwriters, but I also sympathize with the folks who suggested the films. For more than a century of cinema, other than queer-coded villains, this is pretty much all we got.

I just don’t want the Drive-Bis to continue to be a pattern — especially when we, as a society, are finally becoming more accepting and getting more fully realized, queer characters who have so much more to offer than a bitchy line or a betrayal.

That said, I am interested to know if there are some particular Drive-Bi characters you’d like me to cover, dear reader. Did one stick out in your youth? See one recently out in the wild that deserves some attention (or possibly a wordy skewering?) Feel free to contact me on Twitter - my handle is the same as my name.

Until then — happy trails.