Today’s trope for your consideration is “Everyone is Bisexual”, and what better place for it to exist than the wonderful world of audio dramas. Viewers can find a cornucopia of LGBT representation simply by migrating to the vast universe of audio storytelling. Fiction Podcasts are particularly well suited to housing this trope, but more on that later.

Take, for example, The Magnus Archives: a diverse horror podcast telling the story of an archivist tasked with compiling supernatural statements who ends up facing 14 eldritch fear entities. The stories are vast as they are terrifying and always accompanied by a tragic end. I’d be tempted to say it falls into the Bury Your Gays trope, except that it can’t be Bury Your Gays if everyone’s gay. Out of the ten main recurring characters in this show, eight of them are bisexual (the other two are gay). The one thing you can count on is that everyone is bisexual.

This trend goes beyond The Magnus Archives. Welcome to night vale is one of the earliest fiction podcasts and can be noted for its popularity and endurance, it was published in 2012 and it’s still releasing new episodes. It’s centred around a gay couple in the fictional town of Night Vale and for many 20-something LGBT viewers, it was the first show they saw themselves represented so openly—especially around 2012. Night Vale Presents has spurned much more queer media including the mystery podcast Alice isn’t dead, which is also worth a listen. The change in representation from television to fiction podcasts can be so extreme that The Penumbra Podcast only has one confirmed straight character.

In fact, as any regular listener of The Penumbra Podcast could tell you “there’s no gender on Mars”. Corruption? Yeah. Interplanetary conflicts? They’re practically an everyday occurrence. Juno Steel is a non-binary detective who’s also a disaster bisexual, what of it. None of the other supporting characters for this show are heterosexual, save for Mick Mercury, the only straight man on Mars. Besides that, it’s queer characters all around. In this niche corner of genre storytelling on the internet, it’s bisexual until proven otherwise.

Milo O’Connor

Milo O’Connor is a 2nd-year student in the Professional Writing Program at Algonquin College. They have an affinity for collecting weird knowledge and sharing it with anyone who will listen.

Connect with them on Instagram or Linkedin