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Not much to this post, I just had a blast reading this 1997 article which offers a set of lenses and themes for reading a series of depictions of bisexuality in media that are what we would now likely call instances of the "evil bisexual" trope. I appreciate it because I find a lot of these characters thematically compelling in terms of what social anxieties and tensions they present around bisexuality, even if they are also typically unsympathetic and othering depictions.

"[The Hunger] emphasizes the physical disgust of vampirism, with Sarah's first sight of Miriam at prey represented in a jarring succession of close-ups, which show her elegant face smeared with blood, her hair disordered, her mouth snarling. What then makes possible the transformation into vampire is the suspension of this disgust -the same suspension which supposedly brings about bisexuality: popularly figured as undiscriminating, it is the desire for 'anything that moves'. Roger Clarke proposes that 'What people have always found baffling about the concept of bisexuality' - and we should note the casual universalizing gestures of 'people' and 'always' - 'is that there appears to be no disgust in it'. There seems to be some qualitative difference between the desires of the bisexual, and the desires of everyone else. The passions of both vampires and bisexuals are not containable within acceptable social structures. Between the two of them, they mark out the marginality of hunger which, in spite of an attempt... to define its apparent safety, remains risky.

Troy Bolton, based on my own reading, is kind of an example of the sort of conservative approach of bi representation the author discusses. While Troy's ambivalent and multi-directional desires create problems for himself and those around him, he is essentially able to "solve himself" in the end, always, coming to a conclusion that lands on a moderate, synthesized compromise between the battling desires.

However, just as many representations of bisexuals place them alongside other desires that are framed as immoderate and unacceptable. The argument of this paper is that characters with other unnatural or excessive desires are often made bisexual because it conveniently others them, allowing them to be later "put back in their place" for an, if not happy, "just" ending, rather than making these issues central and personal for just about everyone at various times.

I love evil bisexuals of all stripes, from the androgynous Miltonic Satan (done especially well in Devilman) who cuts across barriers of supposedly fundamental difference like gender or orientation to tempt and mislead anyone, to those who are simply flaky, chaotic, hard to deal with in their strange drivenness and their sexuality is inevitably an element of the drama and hassle they bring into "normal" lives. They mess with the "acceptable" and "natural" in terms of gender presentation and role, relationship formations, desires... in essence they're often dreamboats of utopian possibility that are righteously hammered down by a world that naturalizes denial, conformity and restraint. How can they not be extremely likeable, in a way?

Finally arriving at and accepting my own bisexuality was an enormous positive influence in my understanding and sense of self. It's wonderful to be able to embrace so many (even unnatural or undiscriminating) delights. I don't mean this in the most literal sense; like the "good bisexual" I haven't had the specific inclination to rack up a high score of sexual partners in my life, but in my subjective ability to appreciate, in every other context, I definitely enjoy exercising it fully. Even the loathed Freudian concept of bisexuality as lingering "polymorphous perversity," the lack of defining oneself in relation to a specifically gendered sexual object, is not that offensive or nonsensical to me in itself. Before I could make sense of my "orientation" and even now, it mostly feels like a lack of one. The moral component, of this relationship to desire being inherently under developed or immature compared to the other paths is the point worth teasing at, what moral, aesthetic and economic scruples around a directionless, boundless desire do we have? Where do they come from? How are they intertwined? and are they even really doing us any good? haha.