The Media Doesn’t Know How to Talk About Bisexuality
In the United States, bisexual people comprise over half of the LGBT community, according to estimates from the Williams Institute. Gallup data shows that bisexual people, especially bisexual women, are coming out in droves.
But even a cursory glance can tell you that bisexual people aren’t getting anywhere close to half of the mainstream media coverage.
In 2017, The New York Times tweeted the word “bisexual” seven times and the word “gay” well over a hundred times. And a Google search on The New York Times domain found only a few instances of the words “bi” or “bisexual” in headlines from last year, not counting the acronym LGBT: an article about a fan petition asking for Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman to be bisexual in the sequel, a self-help article about coming out, and a fashion slideshow.
The other two papers with the highest circulation, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, didn’t fare much better on these simple benchmarks.
USA Today’s Twitter account never used the word “bisexual” in 2017 and, in fact, has only tweeted the term 10 times this decade. A Google search shows that singer Aaron Carter’s coming out got the word into USA Today headlines in 2017, as did a Palm Springs city councilor who came out as bisexual, but these bi-specific stories were far outnumbered by other LGBT coverage.
The Wall Street Journal’s Twitter account has apparently used the term “bisexual” twice: once in 2013 and again in 2014. Good luck finding a 2017 Wall Street Journal headline with the word “bisexual” in it: A Google search returned no such results, while “LGBT,” “gay,” and “transgender” all produced hits.
It’s not as if 2017 was an uneventful year for the bisexual community. Apart from the moment when Twitter briefly filtered out search results for the hashtag #bisexual—the story which seemed to draw the most mainstream news coverage—it was a year when a large number of celebrities and musicians came out as bisexual, including Carter, hip-hop artist Lil Peep, TV star Keiynan Lonsdale, pop singer Lights, YouTuber Elle Mills, Riverdale actress and Stranger Things favorite Shannon Purser, Arrested Development and Search Party star Alia Shawkat, and more.