Brittany Pierce and Bi Representation In Glee
Yes, a Glee take in 2020. It’s happening.
Lockdown allowed many of us time to finally watch those tv shows and films that had been taking up space on our watch lists for months or maybe even years. For me, I finally got around to the magic of Succession and The Night Of. We also got given the gift of new shows that took us by storm such as Little Fires Everywhere, Normal People and I May Destroy You. But the comfort of rewatching an old show was something that certainly kept many of us going in an uncertain time. So revisiting the corridors and the choir room of McKinley High School became a form of escapism, reliving the good, the bad and the absurd musical numbers, storylines, plot holes and characters of Ryan Murphy’s Glee.
With Bi Visibility Day coming up I wanted to write about one of the unsung heroes of Glee, Brittany Pierce. The dumb blonde cheerleader stereotype who ended up becoming one half of one of the greatest on screen Queer relationships of the 2010’s.
When Glee was on air, the representation of queer youth was one of the most celebrated parts of the show. Naya Rivera’s breathtaking performance of angry Santana Lopez struggling with her sexual identity broke barriers on the show and the homophobic bullying that Kurt Hummel suffered and later Dave Karofsky not only won the show a Golden Globe, but also opened the door for conversations about how schools treated bullying of that nature. But one thing that many people often complained was “Where is the bisexual representation?” Well, it was Brittany.
Throughout the first season of the show it is mentioned how Brittany has “made out” with everyone in the school. “Girls, boys, Mr Kinney the janitor” As we learn more about the relationship between Brittany and Santana, it is clear that the girls are not part of a poor stereotype created by the show of ‘the two hot girls who get drunk and make out with each other’ there is something deeper there, which the show only scratches the surface of until the middle of the second season.
In the second season episode Sexy, we have a groundbreaking moment for the character of Santana. But we also gain an insight into Brittany’s bisexual identity also, which at the time was heavily overlooked by the outrage that the characters didn’t end up together then and there. Brittany tells Santana that she loves her back, but that she also loves Artie and won’t break up with him as that wouldn’t be fair. This moment of Brittany admitting that she loves both a man and a woman was an opportunity for the writers to explore a bisexual journey, alas they did not.
Alas and spoilers, Brittany and Santana do get together. In an episode in the third season Brittany even refers to herself as a ‘bi-corn’ while wearing a unicorn hat. (It’s hard to explain these things out of context) as a throw away comment it’s not groundbreaking, but with Glee you kinda had to take what you were given.
Brittany and Sam in season four.
However, when they do break up in season four...Brittany then dates Sam, another man. There are no conversations on this and her sexuality isn’t mentioned, whether this is the show accepting bisexuality as already recognised or they just couldn’t be bothered to flesh out a decent storyline, we don’t know. But it was refreshing to see a female character navigate between a relationship with a man, then a woman, then a man without offensive comments such as ‘back to being straight’ or like the Biphobic comments made in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (1997) ‘Another one bites the dust’ when Amy shares with her gay friends that she is now in a relationship with a man.
When it comes to bisexual representation it’s rarely the focal point of youth TV shows or the lead characters that carry them. Marissa Cooper’s relationship with Alex in season two of The O.C was soon forgotten once she was back with Ryan Atwood and Orange Is The New Black seemed to be allergic to using the word Bisexual when it came to Piper Chapman. So in some ways Glee can’t be blamed for following suit by not making Brittany’s sexuality a main storyline.
Brittany and Santana’s wedding in season six
However the show wasn’t innocent, a quote from Kurt Hummel in season two was stereotypically biphobic “Bisexual is a term that gay guys use in high school when they want to hold hands with girls and feel like a normal person for a change.” This was not something a bisexual teenager would have wanted to hear from a show that uplifted itself so much on how diverse and accepting it was. Bisexual representation of men in TV shows is a lot smaller than that of woman, you can’t help but feel that comments like the above could be why? Thankfully Dan Levy gave us David Rose and Schitt’s Creek years later. (Although, he refers to himself as pansexual.)
Brittany Pierce was one of the first bisexual teenager characters in a mainstream show that many of us saw and for that she should be celebrated. Writers and show runners should look at the areas of improvement Glee could have made and bare in mind the opportunities they have for further representation in the LGBTQ community. As Callie Torres once said in Grey's Anatomy “There’s a B in there and it doesn’t mean badass. Okay, it kinda does, but it also means bi.”
