Identity can be a lot more complex than dictionary definitions, and language norms don’t help. Consider that people still say “gay marriage” when they mean “same-sex marriage” and “gay couple” when “same-sex couple" or just “couple" would work much better. (Because how can we know for sure how people identify when we talk or write about them?)
Heterosexuality is so much the norm that we seem instinctively to want special words to specify when we are not being heteronormative.
As a writer who specializes in gender and sexuality, I take great care to avoid bisexual erasure and other identity-erasing faux pas, but I still screw up sometimes because our language norms don’t play well together yet with newly emerging consensus. (Consider that as recently as the early 90s, many people used “gay" as an umbrella term similar to today’s “queer.” The definition has been in flux for years.)
Throw fiction into the mix and things get uber-complex super quick. I’ve never seen the series you’re writing about, so I’m way out on a limb here, but the self-identified gay character may describe himself as gay even if he experiences some attraction to women. If so, he would be far from unique among men who have sex with men, many of whom in real life actually do identity as gay even though their personal identities may feel to many of us to qualify as “bisexual.”
Language is in flux, and so are ideas about identity. The show runners might be reflecting that problem through a character similar to many men who identify as gay but aren’t perfectly monosexual.
For example, what can we say about Larry Best, the LGBT advocate and lawyer who just finished serializing his memoirs on Prism & Pen? He was married to a woman for twenty years and reports having had satisfactory sex with her and with other women he dated before he married her.
He has enough sexual attraction to women to have relationships with women, unlike strictly polarized men like me, for whom sex with women is almost biologically out of the question.
Yet Larry identifies as gay, not bisexual. He’s been in a monogam-ish, loving relationship with a man ever since he split up with his wife. As far as he’s concerned, that’s the end of the story.
I can look at a man like Larry and think to myself, “Dude, you’re bisexual and I’m not,” only (and here’s the rub) that’s not how identity works. Identity is a complex intersection of personal attraction with private and public perceptions of those attractions. The only person who can claim an identity is the person living inside those intersections.
All that said, I hear you about media needing to do a better job. Just because our vocabularies don’t work very well right now is no reason not to work to do better.
