Why the Bisexual Man Is Hollywood’s Breakout Star
Male heartthrobs are increasingly fluid, mirroring a new demographic reality
These days there’s no keeping Hollywood’s gay icons and hetero heartthrobs apart. Appreciated by both men and women, the new male lead is either boldly or just barely bisexual—and he’s suddenly everywhere.
He is Connor Storrie’s hot hockey center Ilya Rozanov on HBO’s “Heated Rivalry,” a practiced seducer of both sexes. “It’s true I’ve been with many women,” Rozanov practically purrs when pressed on the matter by his boyfriend’s parents. “But I have only been in love with one person.”
Or he’s a subtler, mostly straight type who nonetheless flirts (or more) with other men: Tom Hiddleston in the second season of “The Night Manager,” Leo Woodall in “The White Lotus,” Luke Thompson in “Bridgerton.”
In “DTF St. Louis,” David Harbour’s Floyd is ostensibly straight, yet also, possibly, a little bit gay, pleased by the attention of a gay man on an accidental date. Later, dancing in his underwear with his best friend, Clark, the two grin helplessly at each other with barely sublimated desire.
These two are clearly having a moment. And they are not alone.
However it manifests, this sexual fluidity marks something of a “Bi Renaissance,” as Gay Times magazine recently called it. Whereas previous on-screen incarnations often cast bisexuals as slippery, villainous (Loki in “Loki”) or troubled (Caleb in “Shameless”), the new bisexual man is intended to reassure, titillate or both. The intimation for audiences is that people who are bisexual are by nature sexual beings, so sexual that they will have sex with anybody. And that’s a new kind of male ideal, at least among a certain cohort.
Bisexuality is especially prominent in content aimed at Gen Z. Streaming series such as “Heartstopper,” “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” “Sex Education,” “Heartbreak High,” “What We Do in the Shadows” and “Interview with the Vampire” are rife with bisexual story lines. (Per Gen Z, vampires are definitionally bi.)
This is a distinctly new aura for bisexuality, which for decades some sex researchers and laypeople insisted didn’t exist. (To quote Carrie Bradshaw in what is now viewed as a benighted “Sex and the City” episode circa 2000: “I’m not even sure bisexuality exists. I think it’s just a layover on the way to Gaytown.”) Many gay people viewed bisexuals as either deceitful or in denial, and heterosexuals often saw bisexuals as eagerly social bandwagoning on the trend for alternative identities—one conveniently requiring neither commitment nor behavioral change.
And while female bisexuality has long been idealized, particularly by heterosexual men, the idea that an outwardly heterosexual man may not be entirely straight has traditionally been viewed as a risk to the heterosexual status quo.
To get a sense of how dramatic the shift is, consider “Challengers,” a 2024 take on the Hollywood staple of two guys vying for the same girl who, during one pivotal scene, kiss passionately at the girl’s behest. Ten years ago, this would have played as nightmare or tragedy, but here it’s hot romance, complete with feverish symbolic winks (a banana, a churro) at the competitors’ scantily suppressed mutual desire.
So why all the bi now? It’s possible that bisexuality’s allure offers straight women some kind of fantasy corrective to the manosphere in the same way Sharon Stone’s Sapphic turn in 1992’s “Basic Instinct” reassured straight men threatened by the women’s movement.
It may also be that a bisexuality that is more suggestive than real is a way for straight Hollywood to make itself hip to young audiences. Whereas the straight actor once risked his reputation by playing gay, playing bi may now be a way to enhance it, making their hetero maleness somehow sexier.
Then again, on-screen bisexuals may just reflect demographic reality.
Bisexuality is now the fastest-growing sexual orientation, with the number of American adults identifying as bisexual tripling since the ‘90s and the rate increasing faster among men than among women. Young people’s rates of LGBTQ identification has skyrocketed (22.3% of Gen Z adults compared with 2.3% of Boomers), and most of that growth is due to more people identifying as bisexual. Among adults who identify as LGBTQ, the majority (57.3%) now say they are bi.
Compared with earlier generations, millennials and Gen Z are far more likely to identify as bisexual than as gay. Nearly 7% of Gen Z men say they are bisexual, more than twice as many as those who say they are gay—and that’s not counting those who prefer more flamboyant monikers like “pansexual” or “sexually fluid.” More young men also think of themselves as “mostly straight” rather than exclusively so.
Bisexuality is nothing new, as any scholar of ancient Greece knows. “Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual,” noted Alfred Kinsey, author of the Kinsey Report and himself bisexual, in 1948. “Not all things are black nor all things white.”
But bisexuality is still deeply misunderstood, according to Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor emeritus of developmental psychology at Cornell University who has studied sexuality for decades and is himself “totally gay” and married to a bisexual man.
“Not only is male sexuality more on a spectrum than people suppose, but bisexuality itself is also a spectrum,” Savin-Williams says. “It’s very rarely about equal attraction to both sexes. More often, it leans heavily in one direction, or splits between romantic attraction toward one sex and sexual attraction toward the other.”
Bisexual behavior also doesn’t always match bisexual identity. According to Pew, 88% of partnered bisexuals are in heterosexual relationships.
Further complicating matters are men who don’t consider themselves bisexual but still experience same-sex romantic or sexual attraction.
For his book, “Mostly Straight: Sexual Fluidity Among Men,” Savin-Williams conducted research with hundreds of self-identified heterosexual men who respond to some degree to same-sex imagery. (This was determined in a lab through experiments measuring pupil dilation.)
Other research confirms that “male sexual orientation is expressed on a continuum rather than dichotomously,” as one 2020 study put it. Another online survey from 2025 broke bisexuality down into eight different categories including “sometimes same-sex attracted” and “wants some future same-gender sex encounter.”
Gen Z seems especially inclined toward a view of sexual attraction as less categorical and more of a scale or a spectrum. They are also more comfortable separating identity from behavior, says Jean Twenge, author of “Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future.”
“For Gen Z, what began as acceptance of differences and then progressed to embracing specific identities has become a shedding of labels altogether,” Twenge explains. “Their attitude is, ‘I might easily change tomorrow.’ And they’re completely casual about it.”
As for the fan base of bisexuality on-screen? It seems anything but casual, includes both sexes and all sexual orientations and is only expanding.