A Space Has Been Made: Bisexual+ Stories in Musical Theatre

A Spotify playlist has been created to accompany this essay: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7IA49YhEEpqc7M4iJ0ZTST.

It is 2018 and I am sitting in the Neptune Theatre, Halifax, Canada. I'm watching the Canadian premiere of the musical theatre adaptation of The Color Purple directed by Kimberley Rampersad—the first time the show has been directed by a black woman. It is also the first-ever positive representation of my own sexuality that I have been able to witness in the form that I have spent almost two decades studying, researching, and writing about: musical theatre. As I watch the character of Shrug Avery (Karen Burthwright) delight in the fluidity of her own sexual desire, a desire above and beyond gender, it feels like a space has been made. I'm crying but it's complicated. Joy? Sadness? Recognition?

I am writing from the perspective of a bisexual+ cis-gendered white British woman, so it is important to note the many kinds of privilege that shape the experiences I am talking about, especially when addressing this musical. The Color Purple (2005) is especially important in the space it makes for PoC, and women of color. This has been written about both in reference to the musical (Edney; Lovelock) and the novel (Bealer), and by Alice Walker herself. For me, it is the first time I have seen what it is to be bisexual on a stage, while I recognize this musical does many more important things than that in connection to race and sexuality. Its powerful story makes ripples.

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In June 2000, about a month after I finished my secondary education in a small school in mid-Wales, the infamous "Section 28" (a British law that banned the "promotion" of homosexuality, introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1988) was repealed, first in Scotland and three years later in the rest of the UK. I would like to say I remember this event, but I don't. If I even knew about it at the time, it would have been because my parents' copy of the Daily Mail was "Cross and Appalled." It was almost always cross and/or appalled, though, so it doesn't stick out in my memory. I don't even remember when I first heard the word bisexuality. It certainly wouldn't have been at school, because Section 28 had made it illegal for schools to discuss LGBTQ+ lifestyles, as it would risk promoting them. The teaching of the "acceptability of homosexuality" was explicitly forbidden by Section 28 from 1988 to 2000, while bisexuality was not even mentioned (UK Local Government Act 1988).

Even in my early twenties, when I joined a dating site and ticked the box "interested in men and women," I still didn't really identify as bisexual because I don't think I even understood that was ever an option for me. Bisexuals were the people who hadn't made up their minds … right? And then to cap it all off, I fell in love with a man who I married within a year of meeting, so I had to hand in my badge of not quite knowing how I fitted in. Some fifteen years later I am still married to him, and my relationship has given me huge amounts of privilege (we could get married; when and if I'd have fallen in love with a woman at the same time we would have to have waited until [End Page E-5] 2014 to do the same; if I'd have fallen in love with a nonbinary person, we still could not in a way that recognized both of our gender identities). But despite these many privileges that I have clearly benefited from, my innate queerness did not simply go away.

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Late June 2016. I am at the Circle in the Square Theatre, New York City, watching Beth Malone and Michael Cerveris in Fun Home play the characters of Alison Bechdel and her father in a car. The mass murder at Pulse Nightclub, an LGBTQ+ hate crime targeted at the Latinx community, had taken place on June...