When Freddie Mercury opens up to his girlfriend and tells her that she thinks she’s bisexual, the girl unequivocally replies, “Freddie, you’re gay.” The scene from the successful Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) shows the invisibility of this sexual reality that continues to have in today’s society and has been transferred to the big screen. “It’s interesting that it’s one of the few cases where the word is used in a movie and immediately de-legitimized. Bisexuality is not accepted as its own identity, there is no awareness that it exists in society.” underlines Estrela Rivas, who analyzed her representation in a thousand top-grossing Hollywood films for twenty years, fifty a year.
quickly reveals that Of the 8,408 characters that brought the most successful games to life between 2000 and 2019, 97.7% were heterosexual.. Gays represented only 1.6%, lesbians 0.4% and bisexuals 0.3%, totaling 30 characters.
“We have the image that things are getting better, but nothing has really changed to date. Most of these thirty are not protagonists and yet they appear in a single scene or have a single sentence. The same thing happens with gay and lesbian characters, but bisexuality is almost nonexistent,” comments Rivas, a Foreign Languages graduate.
Of the 202 non-heterosexual characters, only 10 have played lead roles in two decades.. The other 59 were secondary and the vast majority, 133, had minor fragments. “Everything in Hollywood cinema is superficial and the characters aren’t three-dimensional, especially when they’re gay or bisexual. Focusing her qualitative analysis on three titles, Forbidden Beauty (2004), Disobedience (2017) and eight Oscar-winning Moonlight (2016), Rivas states that such stories are never discovered.
So the trend the sexuality be the main feature that defines the character and maintaining stereotypes: “They’ve had a bit more weight in stories in recent years, but they’re still not leading roles. And he appears in many comedies. [81 de las 113 películas analizadas] as a typical comic character, feminine gay or masculine lesbian. They are used as a comic tool to make the public laugh”.
In addition to Mercury, several bisexual heroes include Jack Twist (Brokeback Mountain; 2005), Nina Sayers (Black Swan; 2010) or Lisbeth Salander (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; 2011). Rivas draws attention to how the lack of recognition of this sexual identity in society affects its invisibility in cinema.
“When a bisexual character emerges, the public interprets him as a lesbian or gay. The best known case is Brokeback Mountain. Everyone describes them as gay cowboys. Other times it’s a woman who says she slept with a girl in the past, but that’s a line in a two-hour movie and no one would interpret her as bisexual. If the public does not have the chip that there are other sexualities beyond heterosexuality and homosexuality, they will not perceive it, ”she emphasizes.
His thesis also looks at the race or ethnicity of non-heterosexual characters, and nearly 73% are white.: “While making the group visible it shows that it was done through white and middle or upper class people. In other words, other identities within this representation are rendered invisible.”
Rivas focuses on American cinema, which has the most global influence, but believes it would be interesting to examine Spanish and European cinema as well. “Maybe the results were different because the Hollywood industry was trying to make money and studio owners greatly control and limit the content that can be produced. But here there can be more freedom to explore more diverse themes and more intricately,” he comments.
He has the thesis international word and currently led by UVigo professors Belén Martín Lucas and Andrea Ruthven at the University of the Balearic Islands. Rivas has already focused her final degree and postgraduate projects on the analysis of films and serials from the perspective of gender theories and feminism. And in both she had control of Martín Lucas, whom she saw as “a real reference”.
“It took me 23 years to reveal I’m bisexual”
The development of the thesis also coincides with a crucial period when Rivas realized his bisexuality: “It took me 23 years to realize this and get out of the closet. Like I like guys so you would think of something else. Bisexuality is identified with sexual behavior, that is, with experience, with a stage… But not as a real identity like homosexuality.. It’s not even considered real. This work was also a way to find answers and it helped me. It was a little discouraging as the results were pretty negative, but finding a lot of people working on these issues helps too.”
In his thesis, he emphasizes society as a “must”. abandon your “dual” understanding of the world the diversity existing in society is also transferred to the cinema. To reflect this and also to provide references. “Often, the audiovisual world is the only place where people have to learn about other realities and see them reflected. So it’s important to look at the kind of images we create and what we produce for the public to see,” he concludes.