TRAVON FREE
The American actor discusses living at the intersection of both his queerness and his blackness, and his plans to push the conversation surrounding bisexuality further into the mainstream.
Biphobia runs rampant not only in straight circles, but also from within the queer community. Travon Free is raising the profile of bisexuality with his new show Him or Her, and here breaks down the misconceptions surrounding bi people, and his plans to bring the conversation into the mainstream.
Despite his moniker, Travon hasn’t always necessarily been ‘Free.’ “I would say that when I truly, truly felt free,” he muses, “was a couple years out of college, when I started telling people [I was bisexual], I told my family, but the true freedom came from not caring who knew anymore... because it’s like I don’t have to give a shit what anyone in the world thinks.“He continues. “I experienced a new level of freedom once the show was announced. “
The show Travon Free, the Emmy award winning, ex-Daily Show writer of course refers to, is his upcoming and highly anticipated HBO series Him or Her; a serial chronicling the life, loves and the unique corollary complexities of being a black bisexual man today – which he is developing in blessed collaboration with none of other than Issa Rae, star and force du jour behind the critically acclaimed Insecure .
His already bright star further buoyed by his increased profile following the show’s announcement, has now eliminated the need for Travon to come out to prospective dating partners - but it wasn’t always this way. “Everybody Googles everybody,” he laughs. “Now people come to me with that knowledge already, I don’t have to do it. And that has been a burden lifted.”
Mainstream representation of bisexuality, and indeed the cultural reckoning and understanding of bisexual identity still leaves so much to be desired. Accurate representation doesn’t just feel good. It saves lives. Representation can be a force for good used to give young people access to powerful role models that highlight our potential, and our ability to self-fashion, and confirm that there is indeed a place for us in this world, and a future for ourselves worth sticking around for. Misguided, stereotypical gestures at representation are devastating to watch and have serious impacts. People internalise the representation that is thrust upon them. It functions beyond mere escapism, and for many queer young people it acts an avenue, lifejacket, a bridge through the overwhelming noise and darkness we experience in those early, stifled closet years.
Noah’s Arc, the short lived 2005 cult show revolving around the lives of black gay men in LA, was one such bridge for Travon. “Noah’s Arc came out when I was [in the middle of college]. I went and bought [all of it on DVD] and I hid them and watched it, because it was like here’s these queer black guys on TV, and this is me, this is a version of me, a part of me, and at the time being young and closeted I wished that I could have been Noah. I think that’s why I liked that character so much. He was so him; he was so unapologetic.”
Travon’s upcoming Him and Her in many ways is a piece of work seeking to redress that gap in representation. So much queer art, and in particular queer black art, springs from a lack of mainstream representation. I ask Travon, how much of Him or Her, and indeed of all of his work, is about making images and telling stories that that he wants to and wished he could have seen.
“I feel like this show was born almost entirely of my desire to see stories told not just about [queer life], but like a very specific part of it, dealing with bi and pansexuality, because everything I had ever seen [doesn’t do that].” He pauses. “I was happy to see queer stories being told, anytime they’re being told, because I identify with [them] but,” he caveats, “there was always a part of it that was missing, and whenever I would see anything related to bisexuality or pansexuality in TV, especially in like comedies and things like that, it was always a joke, like it was always a thing about it not being real, or like all the stereotypes you hear about being bi: whether it’s like ‘It’s a stepping stone to being gay’- all those things you hear.”
The silver screen has never really taken bisexuality seriously, much less understood it. The now infamous episode of Sex and The City where protagonist Carrie Bradshaw tells the girls she’s dating a bisexual man spring to mind. In true early noughties sitcom fashion, they then cycle through just about every bigoted trope about bisexuality from him “being greedy”, to questioning its existence altogether and suesting it’s really “just a layover on the way to Gay Town.” Carrie ultimately decides that she can’t date a man who dates men and women.
“It’s crazy right!” he exclaims. “When I saw that it was really disappointing, especially knowing that story was being told by [gay writer and producer] Michael Patrick King.” Bisexual people face a
double bind of misrepresentation and invalidation. Not only is their sexuality questioned by straight people outside the LGBTQ community, but they find their identity and experience of sexuality called into question, belittled and ultimately dislocated from within LGBTQ circles as well. They find themselves seemingly with a foot in both homonormative and heteronormative experiences, but no real welcomeness in either.
“For me [Him or Her] is trying to paint a more complete picture of what that was like, or what it’s like to be [a man] who dates both men and women, and how complex that is and how a lot of the issues that bi people go through are born of the fact that they get shunned by two communities and they can’t really exist in one or the other. And the side that’s supposed to be embracing difference and queerness is also like treating you like shit, which I find completely ironic. So you exist in this space where some people either hide the fact that they’re bisexual or pansexual, and just either date straight or gay, and some people do the difficult thing and try to like embrace it.”
“Are you a non-practicing bisexual?” are the viral words uttered by a clueless Larry King in his 2014 TV interview with True Blood actress Anna Paquin, emblematic of the myriad ways in which bisexuality, and bisexual identity is misconstrued and invalidated. Whereas the world has had a long, torturous reckoning with gay and lesbian identity has led to a place in public consciousness (albeit an imperfect one) of something resembling sensitivity and some understanding, bisexuality retains a hazy, unspoken about quality, and what little representation there is always falls into rampant stereotype.
King was of course referring to the fact that Anna Paquin had entered a monogamous marriage a cis man, and he referred to her bisexuality in past-tense. The phrase, ‘non-practicing bisexual’ of course necessarily implying that one must be dating or sleeping with multiple genders at any given point in time to validate your bisexuality. This is part of a pervasive culture of biphobia – as a consequence of which bisexuality is often constructed as a phase, as something inherently unstable, and as occupying a shifting and liminal space, rather than a distinct, stable and legitimate category of sexuality all on its own.
This ignorance creates complications in his dating life, Travon says, both hilarious and bizarre, and something he feels has not yet been portrayed on the screen with fullness, correctness and authenticity. The comedian tells me bemusedly that people he’s come across while dating have conflated (as King does above) his bisexuality with polyamory, called him unsurprisingly, “greedy,” and each episode of coming out has led to a variety of uncomfortable situations as a result of that ignorance.
“I’ve heard so many times, I’m afraid you might leave me for a man, or cheat on me with a man and I go first of all, it doesn’t matter who I’m cheating on you with, if I’m cheating on you, I’m cheating on you!” he laughs. “And the fact that you’d be more ashamed, or more embarrassed that it was a man means there’s something you need to work on within yourself, because you don’t understand the complexity of [my] sexuality.” There seems to be a strange calculus that monosexual people do, where they think because bisexual people date more than one gender and have a theoretically larger dating pool, they’re more likely to cheat.
“You think that when I’m with you, I’m craving the other thing – that’s one of the biest misconceptions. They think of it like food. Like steak and hamburgers – if you’re [eating] a hamburger you’re gonna eventually want steak, but it’s like no, I can enjoy a wide variety of food, but if I’m committing to the steak, I’m committing to the steak! I’m not with you craving a man, and I’m not with a man craving a woman. If we’re in a relationship I love you like a person, and I’m with you and I’m committed to you like a person, not your [genitals or your gender.]”
When Him or Her hits our screens, viewers can expect the show to venture into relatively uncharted territory. “I think there’s a lot of common themes in our lives as bi people,” he starts. “It’ll be relatable on so many spectrums in terms of blackness, and being a man, and being queer, and being bi. I’m pretty sure [some of] the things I’ve thought and gone through and felt have been felt by almost every other bi person on some level. I think that they’ll immediately identify with seeing those complexities played out in front of them, in the same way people watch shows like Insecure and Girls and go ‘oh my god that happened to me’ – like all those experiences.” He hopes we’ll be having a conversation both about bisexuality in a broad sense, but also Travon’s own experience more specifically, as a black man who happens to be bisexual – nuanced representations that have hitherto been missing from pop culture.
Just as Baldwin and Giovanni’s Room begets Essex Hemphill, which begets Looking For Langston, and all the complex culture exchange and interplay that is the creative tradition of queer black art, Him or Her seems like an inevitable leap forward in a post-Moonlight world. But as Travon tells me they were actually working on this show before Moonlight, the genre-defining queer black bildungsroman that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2017, hit theatres.
“I think we were just tapped into the zeitgeist of where the direction of black, queer, entertainment was going”, he explains. “I wanted to tell this story and I wanted to do this because I wanted to [create] like that same Will & Grace effect [of] moving people along, moving the culture along, by making them a little bit uncomfortable for a while, and then getting to the place where we can now have a conversation, or people can feel comfortable [in their bisexuality,] because they can now see themselves represented in entertainment. But also not as a prop [or as] a tool, nor a story being made purely about just what you’re sexuality is. [Sexuality is a part of the story within the show,] but it’s really just about life“, he states emphatically. “It’s about my life as a person, who happens to be bi [but not] everything about the show is about [that facet of identity].”
Him or Her, and indeed the success of Travon himself, signals the bold horizons of a brave new world. Freedom is its motto, its language, its creed. “I think bisexual pride to me means,” he waxes lyrically, “the freedom to love. I consider myself a Kinsey 3; I use the term gender blind all the time because I truly don’t have a preference. It really is the person for me, so on some level I feel a level of freedom that I think most people don’t experience, just because not only do I understand my sexuality I’m like fully embracing it. For me, bi pride is the ability to move throughout the world and be an example for, especially black men who rarely, rarely have permission to express themselves fully in terms of their sexuality. Whether that sexuality is hetero [normative] or queer, there’s so much hang up in what it means to be a black man that we get constricted by what our identity is supposed to be.
“So for me it’s the freedom to live out loud. The freedom to wear rainbow-coloured socks and not give a fuck if you think I’m gay, or to wear my sweatshirt that says ‘Queer as fuck on it’ and not care what that means. [The freedom] to move through the world in a way where labels don’t matter, and happiness and love are the two things that move me.”
“You think that when I’m with you, I’m craving the other thing – that’s one of the bi est misconceptions. ”