Overwhelmingly, Australian cinema, like most national cinemas, has tended to elide, or else only tentatively engage with, bisexuality. In her 2008 article ‘Representations of Bisexuality in Australian Film’, Janet Watson notes that ‘with only a few exceptions, bisexual themes and characters are relatively muted in Australian films’.1 Despite this general lack, Watson’s analysis of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Stephan Elliott, 1994), Sirens (John Duigan, 1993) and Dallas Doll (Ann Turner, 1994) highlights some interesting examples of bisexual desire in our national cinema. She contends that the bieroticism in these films works to unsettle binary conceptions of gender and sexuality. Even without an explicit invocation of the b-word, the presence of bisexual desire in these films destabilises traditional notions of an ‘either/or’ sexual binary.
Given that six…
