Maureen Ryan pointed out this Q&A with Michelle Lovretta, the creator of Canadian fantasy show Lost Girl (currently airing on SyFy) about a succubus trying to make her way among warring faerie communities. I was particularly struck by her explanation of the efforts she’s made to keep the show sex-positive, and to avoid falling into stereotype and error:

So, I came up with a few internal rules and I moved to Canada that first year to co-showrun the show (with the fab Mr. Peter Mohan) partly just to help institute them:

1. sexual orientation is not discussed, and never an issue;

2. no slut shaming – Bo is allowed to have sex outside of relationships

3. Bo’s male and female partners are equally viable;

4. Bo is capable of monogamy, when desired;

5. both genders are to be (adoringly!) objectified — equal opportunity eye candy FTW…

Bo has lots of sex, with men, women, humans, Fae, threesomes… and she’s still our hero, still a good person worthy (and capable) of love, and that’s a rare portrayal of female sexuality. Also, a show built around a bisexual lead doesn’t have to BE about her bisexuality — orientation can just be an interesting element of a story, and not the story itself, and that’s the central spirit of our show. I consider that “I’m here, I’m queer, and it’s no big deal” approach to a main character still fairly rare and wonderful, at least in North America. It’s also rare to have a female lead who is so honestly sexual, without judgment…I think the single element I will remain proudest of is just that we’ve been able to create and put out into the world a sex positive universe where a person’s sexual orientation is unapologetically present and yet neither defines them as a character, nor the show as a whole.

I would really like to see this sort of thing tacked up in a lot of writers’ rooms. And the fact that a show that starts with the intention of doing something better needs these as reminders is an illustration of how pervasive our default assumptions about women and non-straight people and sexuality are. Getting your head right is a constant struggle.

I was hatewatching Smash this morning, and I realized the show is managing to be the second example for two mini-trends that have been bouncing around episodes in recent weeks—the sneaky bisexual, and the blonde being abused by her creator.

The fairly clear implication of last night’s episode was that assistant-turned-wannabe-producer Ellis was willing to sleep with a star’s agent to get her to consider playing Marilyn more seriously than she had previously, even though we know he has what appears to be a serious, live-in girlfriend. Much like Revenge‘s bisexual, loner tech billionaire Nolan, Ellis’s sexuality is presented less as a means of personal expression and more of a strategic tool. Ellis is one of the most irritating characters on television, a relentless climber without an iota of personal attachment, whether it’s to another human being, to ideas of merit and talent, or to the work and the subject matter itself. If Smash has been successful at anything, it’s managed to communicate the other characters’ investment in musical theater. Ellis just seems to want power because it’s there. And perhaps its best scene was a fight between Tom and Derek that turned into a sophisticated debate between how gay men and straight men see Marilyn Monroe and the theater. So it’s particularly disappointing that the show defaulted back to the old stereotype of the Evil Bisexual.

Nolan’s portrayal on Revenge has been more nuanced: he’s clearly very personally invested in helping Amanda/Emily at minimum in memory of her father (thought it would be nice if the show spent some time articulating how Nolan and David Clark got so close in the first place). He’s got an actual attachment to the cause at hand. And when he seduces Tyler, the unstable imposter who’s insinuated himself in wealthy scion Daniel Grayson’s life, Nolan appears to feel at least some sense of sympathy with the other man—there’s an actual frisson of attraction there, not merely convenience. But it’s true that Nolan doesn’t appear to have much of a life of his own, at least in the slice of time we’re seeing him. He’s not allowed genuine romantic attachment, or even business moves that don’t serve Emily/Amanda’s interests. His whole life, not just his sexuality, are at her disposal, though the show has clearly demonstrated the limited scope in which that arrangement can remain comfortable.

Smash is also in company with Mad Men in taking out some nastier emotions on its signature blondes. As much as I think that what Mad Men is doing to Betty Draper, turning her fat and even more miserable than usual, has some basis in Matt Weiner’s distate for the character, I also think it makes sense as an arc. The woman who had, as the only tool at her disposal, beauty, finds it can’t bring her happiness, and then loses her power. There’s an un-vindictive plot available in there if this means that Betty ends up forced to address some deeper issues. Only time will tell if the show avails itself of that option.

By contrast, Smash is being just nasty to Ivy, and that nastiness comes from a profoundly illogical place. Prednisone does have side effects, but the show seemed to take a real leap in turning its most professional and disciplined character into a pill-popping, drunk, show-flubbing hot mess. More to the point, turning Ivy into a joke minimizes her disappointment in a way I think is unfortunate: she’s legitimately heartbroken at the loss of her first big chance. If the show wants this to be an even fight between Karen and Ivy, which is the sense I’ve gotten from the show’s renewal and the dismissal of its showrunner, it’s got to make Karen more legitimately compelling, not undermine Ivy in a way that denies her character consistency.

Lost Girl, the Canadian fantasy series about Bo, a succubus, and the rest of the faerie world she operates in, which is headed into production on its third season and finished airing its first season on SyFy last night, has attracted comparisons to Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its progressive attitude towards sexuality and sexual orientation and its detailed magical world. It’s not quite Buffy—a story about a hot bisexual succubus who seduces people for good will never be as subversive, or as funny as a high school built over a portal to Hell and a cheerleader who battles the forces of evil. But the differences between the two shows aren’t entirely a bad thing: Buffy laid a foundation on which Lost Girl‘s building a somewhat more sexually progressive and more diverse universe.

Lost Girl represents, in television terms, a generation of forward progress from Buffy when it comes to sex. Sex is literally life-giving to Bo, rather than conflicted in the many ways it is in Buffy. While initially she operates a lot like X-Men‘s Rogue, sucking her victims dry of chi to the point of their deaths, as she becomes more confident in and knowledgeable about her status as a succubus, Bo stops draining her partners while still drawing sustenance—and joy—from sex.

Unlike Buffy, whose on-screen partners have, alternately, lost their souls, ignored her afterwards (college boys can be jerks, too), turned to vampire hookers out of a sense of inadequacy, and tried to rape her, Bo doesn’t get punished for sleeping around. When she sleeps with Dyson (Kristen Holden-Ried), the wolf-shifting fae and cop who’s her entree into the faerie world, the scenes are choreographed to be enticing, rather than a form of self-punishment, like Buffy’s first house-destroying night with Spike, her second vampire lover. Dyson may be convenient to Bo, the same thing Buffy accuses Spike of being to her, but their encounters don’t make anyone involved hate each other.

And unlike how Buffy handled Willow’s coming-out as bisexual, having her transition from attractions only to men to (on-screen, at least) attractions only to women, Lost Girl is confident enough to have Bo’s sex life reflect her stated sexual orientation. She’s capable of loving and desiring both Dyson and Lauren, the human doctor in service to the fae who Bo falls for—and of being hurt by both of them. The heterosexual and same-gender sex scenes are filmed differently, to be sure—when Bo sleeps with Dyson, it’s all dramatic lighting and multiple sexual positions, while the night she spends with Lauren is silk sheets and sweet nothings. But even if the show doesn’t quite have the courage to treat the scenes as if they’re similar, it’s progress to have a bisexual character dating people of multiple genders calmly and without comment, instead of functionally confining them to heterosexuality or homosexuality.

It’s not the only way Lost Girl is more representative than Buffy. Bo and her roommate Kenzi (a human con artist played with delightful spunk by Ksenia Solo) hang out a bar owned by “Trick” McCorrigan, a powerful fae who also happens to be played by Rick Howland, an actor with dwarfism, in what may be the only performance featuring a person of short stature on television where their dwarfism isn’t a regular and explicit plot point. The most powerful official in the fae universe, the Ash, is played by Clé Bennett, a Canadian actor of Jamaican descent. And Dyson’s partner in his day job as a cop, Hale, is also black, a nice improvement on the all-white Scooby Gang.

It’s too bad Lost Girl doesn’t quite have a mythology or psychology is rich as Buffy, but then, almost nothing on television these days does. But it’s laying down a marker for fantasy, reminding us in a world where we have diversity in our monsters and myths, it’s not so strange to have a true diversity of people.

I’ve been pretty vocal about the fact that I consider Whitney to be one of the failures of last fall’s boom in television comedies created by women and centered on female characters—it’s been a prime example of the weird spike in deeply irritating supporting sitcom characters, it’s got more men writing its episodes than women, and Whitney Cummings is less appealing as a fictional avatar of herself than she must have been in person to network executives. But the show’s become more likable as it’s gone on. And it’s achieved something rather remarkable in its latest long arc: Whitney may be the only show on television that’s figured out how to handle a bisexual character with clarity and dignity.

I was nervous when Maulik Pancholy left 30 Rock for Whitney. It’s not that Pancholy isn’t a good actor who deserves to play something other than Jack Donaghy’s beleaguered, worshipful assistant. It was that I didn’t think he’d get the opportunity to do much that was interesting on Whitney, where he was part of the grating-friend ensemble, an accountant named Neal locked in a lovey-dovey relationship with a woman named Lily (an increasingly good Zoe Lister Jones). But the show has handed him an enormous slab of red meat: over a series of episodes, Neal and Lily broke off their engagement after it turned out Lily had been lying to Neal about some substantial things. And after their breakup, Neal began seeing a man named Steven he met through work.

In a terrific episode, Whitney handled Neal’s feelings about acknowledging his attractions to men with sensitivity and some of the better humor it’s shown. “There was never an opportunity to explore anything sexual. I mean, we couldn’t even explore cable,” Neal tells Whitney of his conservative family. When he confesses to Alex, Whitney’s long-time boyfriend that “Last night, when you came over, I was kind of on a date,” Alex’s response is entirely nonchalant. “Cool, can I get you a beer?…What, did you want me to offer him an appletini? Don’t be a homophobe, Whit.” And their other friends treat the situation with more investment. “I’m not attracted to all men,” Neal tells crude cop Mark in an effort to reassure him that he won’t get hit on. “You don’t have to be hurtful,” Mark tells him. And when Neal finally confessed to Lily that he’d been avoiding her because “I thought maybe if I waited, I’d have more answers for you…to how this could happen…to what I am,” she reacts with sensitivity—and a surprising level of insight. “You don’t have to be gay or straight, you’re just Neal,” Lily says. “Your sexuality’s fluid. Sometimes, people fall in love with people, not genders.” It might be the first time a sitcom has insisted that our sexual orientation categories aren’t sufficient to describe everyone’s experience, and that makes it rather extraordinary.

And the show hasn’t left it at that. It’s made an ongoing point of showing how Lily and Neal have navigated their post-revelation relationship, going out together, dealing with misperceptions about which one of them men are cruising. The show respects them enough not to make the question of who Neal loves and is attracted do disappear as if it was just an excuse for a Very Special episode. And the plot gave all the characters an opportunity to show off who they are without resorting to unfortunate tics. Neal, and everyone else, got to be fully developed human in a situation with stakes that ranged from re-assesing a friendship to reexamining what you thought your marriage would look like. And that’s worthy of some respect in turn. Whitney may not be my favorite sitcom on the air. But it’s given me a substantial reason to care about where it’s going.

It seems that Cynthia Nixon has found a way to follow up on last week’s flub with a statement that clarifies sexual orientation is not a choice without discounting choices she has made in her life. She told the Advocate today:

My recent comments in The New York Times were about me and my personal story of being gay. I believe we all have different ways we came to the gay community and we can’t and shouldn’t be pigeon-holed into one cultural narrative which can be uninclusive and disempowering. However, to the extent that anyone wishes to interpret my words in a strictly legal context I would like to clarify:

While I don’t often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual. I believe bisexuality is not a choice, it is a fact. What I have ‘chosen’ is to be in a gay relationship.

As I said in the Times and will say again here, I do, however, believe that most members of our community — as well as the majority of heterosexuals — cannot and do not choose the gender of the persons with whom they seek to have intimate relationships because, unlike me, they are only attracted to one sex.

Our community is not a monolith, thank goodness, any more than America itself is. I look forward to and will continue to work toward the day when America recognizes all of us as full and equal citizens.

As I suspected last week, she distinguishes between sexual orientation and sexual identity. For Nixon, it makes more sense to identify with the population of people with whom she is more likely to pursue relationships than the broader pool of people she might be attracted to, which seems perfectly reasonable. Unfortunately, her statement does not address the biphobia inherent in both her own identity choices as well as in the backlash she has faced over the past week. By conforming her identity to the gay-straight binary, she is reinforcing the very monolith it seems she wishes to challenge.

Nevertheless, Nixon’s point supports the ideal of a world where everybody can live their lives how they will without having to justify their identities, and for that, she should be applauded.

The LGBT blogosphere has been wrestling with comments made by actress Cynthia Nixon (immortally Sex in the City‘s ”Miranda”) to the New York Times that she chose to be a lesbian:

I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.

She doubled down in an interview with the Daily Beast, but in a way that helped clarify where she’s really coming:

I don’t pull out the “bisexual” word because nobody likes the bisexuals. Everybody likes to dump on the bisexuals… but I do completely feel that when I was in relationships with men, I was in love and in lust with those men. And then I met Christine and I fell in love and lust with her. I am completely the same person and I was not walking around in some kind of fog. I just responded to the people in front of me the way I truly felt.

The negative reaction from gay blogs seems understandable, but perhaps unwarranted. Undoubtedly, as the gay community argues in courts across the country that homosexuality is immutable and ex-gay therapy is harmful and ineffective, having a prominent celebrity and activist say she “chose” to be gay is a little off-message. But I think it’s pretty clear that’s not what she meant, and so the real problem is that even within the gay community, we still have a very shallow understanding of sexual identity.

The bottom line is that there is a big difference between sexual orientation and sexual identity, even if it usually goes unnoticed. In other words, the language a person uses to describe how they identify does not have to perfectly align with what their natural attractions actually are. The Williams Institute estimates that about 3.5 percent of the population identify as LGBT, but as many as 11 percent of Americans report having same-sex attractions. I think Nixon’s comments make it pretty clear that she did not choose her attractions to women — nor her attractions to men — she merely chose to identify primarily as a lesbian.

Of course, the other factor is persistent biphobia (and inherent at its root, sexism) in both the straight and gay communities. Cathy Renna has highlighted that women’s sexuality is much more fluid than men’s, which makes E.J. Graff’s observation that most of the comments against Nixon have come from gay men fairly unsurprising. The impulse is still to fit people into neat little boxes, and some — again, often men — refuse to believe bisexuality even exists. By the way, science says it does. As Tyler Lewis has pointed out here before, this problem extends into the media, allowing for very few authentic portrayals of bi men. Nixon’s comment that “nobody likes the bisexuals” speaks for itself.

If the LGBT movement is fighting for the right of all people to own their identities free from discrimination, we should be better role models for celebrating that ethic.