Hello from my COVID haze, friends. I’m five days into testing positive, and extremely bored of lying on my couch watching TV. But we do the things we must do for public and personal health, right?
I was initially taking this time to make some headway on my Star Trek: Deep Space 9 rewatch, but then I got to “Profit and Lace,” an episode that I refuse to watch, and after that episode is “Time’s Orphan,” an episode I simply did not have the emotional stamina to endure (it’s really sad, guys) and so I decided to take a break and switched over to Harley Quinn (you can maybe see where this essay is going).
If you haven’t watched Harley Quinn — well, I’m not going to say that you definitely should, as it’s a show for a very particular audience (read: people who like ultraviolent, ribald animated comedies about an unhinged antihero living in the Batman universe). But I will say that it’s an interesting depiction of female queerness; and the way that people interpret it speaks volumes about their own understanding of what it means to be female and queer.
[NB that, yeah, there are going to be some spoilers here, but no, I don’t think they’ll ruin the show for you.]
When Harley Quinn first begins, our title character is paired off with The Joker and best friends with Poison Ivy. Over the course of the first ep, she realizes that her paramour is abusive and that she needs to strike out on her own; over the course of a couple of seasons, she realizes that she doesn’t just love Ivy as a friend, she loves Ivy (who eventually becomes her wife). Ivy, too, has her own arc: she goes from being a nearly friendless loner to dating the utterly embarrassing Kite Man to leaving Kite Man for Harley.
When I first watched the show, I felt deep connection to both Harley and Ivy, whose stories seemed so familiar to me. Harley felt like a version of me in my early 20s: fresh out of an abusive relationship, violently chaotic, eager to prove herself. (I feel I should note here that I joined roller derby right after I parted ways with my abuser, and there have been story arcs involving the more modern iteration of Harley Quinn doing roller derby, and, well, similarities abound.) Ivy, on the other hand, was reminiscent of me in my thirties: trying to be an adult, trying to make a committed domestic relationship work with the first person who seemed like they wanted to be with me, and incapable of asking myself whether I actually wanted what they wanted, or if it was just easier to bask in the glow of being wanted, the relief of simply knowing that I would not have to be alone.
In my mind, it was obvious that both of these women were bi, because, you know, I’m bi. I’m bi and I saw myself in them, and therefore they must be bisexual too. And because the show itself doesn’t really use any labels (not that I remember, anyway) and no one has an existential freakout when Harley and Ivy pair off (at least, not beyond the freakout of “my best friend is… my girlfriend??”), it was easy to just see what I wanted to see.
So it’s been interesting, then, after watching the show and reading other people’s takes it, to be greeted with the revelation that my interpretation of said characters and storyline is not a universal one. I mean, I think it is fairly accepted that Harley is bisexual — abuse aside, her attraction to The Joker and other men seems pretty sincere, as does her very intense relationship with Ivy — but Ivy? Apparently not.
To at least some people who are not me, Ivy feels less like a bi girl who winds up dating a dud for her own complicated reasons and more like — dare I say it? — a late-blooming lesbian who fumbles through an underwhelming relationship with a man because of comphet, only to realize her true self through her relationship with Harley. (There are other people who will tell you that Harley Quinn is a fake queer show created by straight people who don’t know what they’re talking about, an assertion that, uhhhh, sits weird for me, a queer woman who sees herself in this show.)
On this latest rewatch, I’ve been trying to understand Ivy through that alternate lens; to see her, not as an analogue for me in my thirties, but as another kind of person entirely. Does she seem like a closeted lesbian who simply dates Kite Man because she thinks she’s supposed to? Does her obvious hesitancy around committing to him seem like it’s about gender or about the fact that, uhhh, he totally sucks as a person? One point in favor of this read is that Ivy’s obvious crush on Catwoman does sort of seem like the crush of woman not entirely in touch with her sapphic desires — though that could simply mean that she’s closeted about being bi, not that she’s a lesbian, right?
I mean ultimately I don’t think there’s a real answer here. Even if the showrunners issued a proclamation decisively declaring that Ivy is this or that (and maybe they have, I have not cared to look), I think it would still be in the eye of the beholder. Which is, quite frankly, the way I feel generally about the very question of whether anyone is a late-blooming homosexual or a bisexual.
Because — I mean so much of this is context and framing, right? It was context and framing that led Cynthia Nixon — a woman who’d been attracted to and had lengthy relationships with men before falling for and marrying her wife — to identify as a lesbian, and then context and framing that later led her to own the bisexual label (one she’d initially rejected because “nobody likes the bisexuals,” a quote I really should get printed on a t-shirt one of these days). If you found the straight relationships you were in pleasant enough, but not as exciting as the queer relationships you were in after the fact, does that mean you’ve been gay the whole time — or could you potentially be a bisexual who just dated a lot of boring assholes?
It’s just a question I personally find compelling because, I mean: I wouldn’t say I have the best track record when it comes to dating men. But I also wouldn’t say that I have the best track record when it comes to dating women, either. Barring some big grand romance that decisively calls it for me — a HarlIvy for the ages — it feels easier to simply say that I’m a bisexual who is not that great at relationships. But I could also see how someone with my own history could also rewrite themselves as straight or gay, depending on the lens they wanted to look at life through.
And, I mean, does it actually matter? On some level these labels are just about what brings us comfort — and if you find greater comfort in being monosexual or in being bisexual, that is your own personal choice. Poison Ivy can be a lesbian and a bisexual at the exact same time* — the ultimate label is about something endemic to her, but about how we choose to tell her, or anyone’s, story.
* Very Schrodinger’s cat of her
The phrase I keep trying to popularize is "Labels should be descriptive, not prescriptive." Whether someone feels more "bisexual" or more "lesbian" or anything else is going to be a matter of their society and how they want to represent themselves.
I call myself straight in a lot of queer spaces because I want to cede the floor on discussions of having your sexuality be ridiculed/ignored by the world around you. But sometimes it makes sense to describe myself as bisexual, or heteroflexible, or whatever.
My basic preference is to give fictional characters as much vagueness as possible. Fictional characters are a representation, they're a lens to look at the world, they are not real humans with rich inner lives of their own. They are a combination of the words of their writers, the skills of their artists, their actors, and the reactions of the audience. Let Poison Ivy be bisexual and lesbian and anything else her audience needs her to be.