In 2015, Desiree Akhavan took her proposed sitcom The Bisexual to television networks in Los Angeles, intending to write, direct, and star in a series about the misconceptions surrounding bisexuality. According to Akhavan, the project was rejected everywhere she pitched it. She publicly attributed the response to what she called American fear of female sexuality, arguing that television executives were more comfortable with queer stories when they were narrowly categorized or filtered through familiar expectations than when they dealt directly with bisexual desire and female sexual agency. The eventual series was commissioned by Britain's Channel 4 and premiered in the United Kingdom in October 2018 before reaching American audiences that November. The episode illustrated the gatekeeping faced by queer women: a project could be critically serious, commercially viable, and created by an established filmmaker, yet still be treated as too risky when its subject was bisexuality rather than a more easily marketed identity narrative.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 2010s
The 2015 Network Rejection of The Bisexual
Desiree Akhavan and The Bisexual / 2010s
In 2015, Desiree Akhavan took her proposed sitcom The Bisexual to television networks in Los Angeles, intending to write, direct, and star in a series about the misconceptions surrounding bisexuality. According to Akhavan, the project was rejected everywhere she pitched it. She publicly attributed the response to what she called American fear of female sexuality, arguing that television executives were more comfortable with queer stories when they were narrowly categorized or filtered through familiar expectations than when they dealt directly with bisexual desire and female sexual agency. The eventual series was commissioned by Britain's Channel 4 and premiered in the United Kingdom in October 2018 before reaching American audiences that November. The episode illustrated the gatekeeping faced by queer women: a project could be critically serious, commercially viable, and created by an established filmmaker, yet still be treated as too risky when its subject was bisexuality rather than a more easily marketed identity narrative.
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