When Pop Music Makes Bisexuality Disappear
Popular music has long borrowed the imagery of bisexuality while resisting the identities attached to it. A woman kissing another woman may appear in a video as a provocative visual, while lyrics, interviews, marketing, and fan commentary push her toward a presumed heterosexual identity. Queer desire becomes decoration, experimentation, or fantasy rather than a meaningful way of understanding a person.
This pattern affects bisexual, pansexual, queer, and fluidly identified artists in different ways. Some are pressured to choose a legible label. Others are treated as secretly straight or secretly gay, depending on which interpretation best suits the market. Their public images are often reorganized around certainty, even when their work embraces ambiguity.
A feminist media analysis asks who benefits from that uncertainty and who is made invisible by it. Publications such as SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS create space for examining how gender, sexuality, race, and power shape the stories popular culture tells.
Desire Becomes A Marketing Device
The music industry has repeatedly used same-gender desire to generate attention without granting it the seriousness of identity. A kiss between women can be framed as rebellious, sexy, or playful when it appears in a video designed for the presumed heterosexual male viewer. The scene is consumed as spectacle, detached from the emotional or political meaning it might carry for queer audiences.
“ I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry became a major example of this tension. Its premise presented same-gender attraction as an exciting experiment, while its marketing placed that experience within a flirtatious, heterosexual pop framework. The song’s popularity did not necessarily create room for bisexual listeners to see themselves represented; it could just as easily turn their experiences into a temporary fantasy for someone else.
This distinction matters because visibility alone does not guarantee recognition. When bisexuality is used to sell provocation, the identity becomes a product feature rather than a lived reality.
The Pressure To Pick A Side
Public culture often treats sexuality as a binary choice. An artist who dates people of different genders may be asked which relationship reflects their “real” self. A woman who identifies as bisexual may be told she is seeking attention, while a man with a similar identity may be presumed gay or dismissed as performing.
That pressure comes from several directions: tabloids, interviewers, fan communities, record labels, and social media algorithms that reward simplified narratives. A complicated personal history is converted into a clean storyline. Artists can become trapped between being too queer for conservative audiences and insufficiently queer for audiences demanding proof.
Bisexual erasure also appears when an artist’s identity is acknowledged briefly and then ignored. Their same-gender relationships may be described as phases, while different-gender relationships are treated as evidence that the queer identity has vanished. This makes bisexuality appear unstable when the instability actually lies in the culture’s refusal to understand attraction beyond a single category.
Music Videos And The Male Gaze
Music videos intensify these patterns because they translate sexuality into visual shorthand. Two women touching may signal danger, luxury, or erotic spectacle without developing either character as a person. The camera can invite viewers to consume their intimacy while avoiding any suggestion that the women might desire one another outside the viewer’s presence.
This is a familiar feature of the male gaze: women’s bodies and relationships are arranged for visual pleasure, often through a presumed heterosexual masculine perspective. The result is a version of queer representation that looks daring but remains commercially safe. Same-gender desire is visible, yet the women involved may have no interiority, agency, or lasting connection.
The reverse problem also exists. Men in popular music are often discouraged from expressing bisexuality because masculinity is expected to appear decisive and heterosexual. A man can perform sensuality with other men in a video, especially within fashion or avant-garde aesthetics, while the work avoids naming desire. The image can be celebrated as stylish precisely because it is kept emotionally ambiguous.
Ambiguity Can Be Liberating
Ambiguity is not inherently a failure. For many queer viewers, a suggestive lyric or unresolved music video can offer a rare space for identification. Artists may use coded language because they are protecting themselves, exploring identity, or resisting the demand to explain every aspect of their private lives.
David Bowie’s shifting presentation, for example, challenged fixed ideas about gender and sexuality, even though his statements and public persona changed over time. Freddie Mercury’s relationship to bisexuality has also been debated through selective readings of interviews, biography, and performance. These histories show why audiences should avoid turning artists into symbols while still recognizing how their work unsettled sexual norms.
The problem begins when ambiguity is imposed from outside. An artist who names a bisexual or pansexual identity should not have that language erased because audiences prefer a more familiar story. Fluidity can mean change, but it can also mean a consistent capacity for attraction that does not fit heterosexual or homosexual categories.
| Pattern in popular music | How erasure operates | A more expansive reading |
|---|---|---|
| Same-gender kissing in a video | Queerness becomes spectacle for presumed straight viewers | Desire can be represented with agency and emotional depth |
| A bisexual artist dates someone of another gender | The artist is assumed to be straight | A relationship does not cancel an identity |
| Gender-fluid styling without explicit sexuality | Queer expression is treated as fashion alone | Gender presentation and sexual orientation can intersect without being identical |
| A song uses suggestive queer imagery | Marketing gains controversy while avoiding accountability | Artists and labels can name context, influence, and lived experience |
| Fans demand proof of an artist’s identity | Private life becomes a test of authenticity | Self-identification should carry more weight than surveillance |
Race, Gender, And Commercial Safety
Bisexual representation is also shaped by race and gender. White, thin, conventionally feminine women are more likely to have same-gender desire packaged as glamorous experimentation. Black, Indigenous, trans, disabled, and fat artists often face harsher scrutiny when they claim sexual fluidity, particularly when their work challenges respectability politics.
Commercial systems may welcome a carefully styled version of queer sexuality while penalizing artists whose identities are connected to anger, vulnerability, community, or political critique. A music video can include queer aesthetics and still reproduce racism, misogyny, transphobia, or class inequality. Representation must therefore be evaluated by who gets to speak, who controls the image, and which audiences are considered profitable.
Janelle Monáe’s public identification as pansexual, for instance, expanded mainstream conversations about attraction and self-definition while connecting sexuality to a broader artistic world of gender nonconformity and Black futurism. The significance lies in the artist’s own language and creative agency, rather than in treating pansexuality as a trend or visual theme.
Building Better Ways To Read Pop
Audiences can resist erasure by paying attention to language, authorship, and context. Instead of asking whether an artist is “really” queer, critics can ask how a work frames desire, whose perspective dominates, and whether queer people are given complexity. That approach leaves room for uncertainty without turning uncertainty into denial.
Useful habits include:
- Take an artist’s stated identity seriously without demanding intimate evidence.
- Distinguish queer aesthetics, gender expression, and sexual orientation rather than treating them as interchangeable.
- Examine whether a music video gives queer characters agency, interiority, and narrative importance.
- Notice when marketing borrows queer imagery while avoiding queer artists, communities, or politics.
- Read lyrics and visuals alongside interviews, creative credits, and the artist’s broader body of work.
Critical viewing also means recognizing the difference between representation and access. A bisexual character in a video may be visible, yet bisexual listeners may still lack stories about commitment, jealousy, family, aging, spirituality, or ordinary domestic life. The industry often presents bisexuality at the moment of seduction and removes it when the narrative reaches emotional consequence.
Popular music can do better when it treats bisexual and pansexual identities as more than a source of mystery. Artists deserve the freedom to define themselves, revise their language, remain private, or embrace fluidity without being forced into a binary. Audiences, critics, and music platforms can support that shift by sharing work that gives queer desire depth and by challenging the assumptions hidden inside familiar pop images.
Listen more closely, read beyond the visual hook, and make room for artists whose identities refuse the categories the industry finds easiest to sell. When bisexuality is recognized as a complete and valid experience, pop culture becomes capable of telling richer stories about desire, power, and belonging.