The more adult, more sexual and more Barrowman spinoff of nerd favourite, Doctor Who, we were gifted Torchwood in 2006. It was love at first sight for me. Not simply because John Barrowman’s Captain Jack Harkness was the bad boy, side smiling, renegade cop type, but because it was one of the first instances of unjudged bisexuality that I saw on the small screen.
Much has been made of the pansexual Captain Jack, who was described by fellow Torchwood agent Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori) as willing to “shag anything if it’s gorgeous enough”, and that very often meant the host of aliens that the team came into contact with. Jack is one of the most extreme examples of the sexual bisexual. His penchant for flirtation meant that he would strike up a conversation with anyone he thought might want to have “fun” with him.
Such is the big, bold shadow of Barrowman that it’s easy to miss the other instances of bisexuality in Torchwood. Variant forms of the bi identify are shown through the other original members of the Torchwood team: Toshiko, Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles), Owen Harper (Burn Gorman) and, of course, Ianto Jones (Gareth David Lloyd), and it makes for intriguing watching.
Toshiko Sato
Toshiko Sato is a personal hero. She managed to save the day in Torchwood from beyond the grave, installing systems that protected Gwen and Ianto during a particularly thrilling crossover. Never the most confident person, she harbored unrequited feeling for Owen throughout the first two seasons of the show. Yet, that didn’t stop her from pursuing other relationships.
Assumption is not a reliable tact in Torchwood, and the writers played into this. As with Jack’s sexuality, which the characters speculate about early on, none of the characters fall into the heterosexual camp, at least not verbally. Granted, they also don’t ever use the word bisexual, but this was the mid-2000s, the representation alone was miraculous.
Toshiko’s sexuality was shown through one of her biggest drives, the need for connection. There is certainly something to be considered in the psychology in her choice of partners, who always seemed to be unattainable or unreliable in one way or another.
For me, seeing Toshiko, she seemed to be drawn in a very biromantic way to other people, potentially even closer to asexual too. She was open to relationships with people of more than one gender, and it seemed to exist regardless of if there was a sexual element, though there often was.
We saw her explore her attraction for men with Owen and the tragic figure of Tommy. With Tommy, you could see her light up for the one day a year they could spend together. It was his companionship she enjoyed.
Part way through the series, Toshiko was thrown a curveball, as she reconsidered whether anything could ever develop between her and Owen, and she explores her sexuality on screen with the alien Mary (not her alien name btw).
Characterisations of Toshiko and Mary’s relationship don’t quite do justice to what it could have been. Sex and manipulation were problematic elements that can easily be read into their storyline, but I think that the crux of what made them come together was in seeking a sense of closeness, one-to-one.
I think from these scenarios we can see that Toshiko has the ability to easily identify as bisexuall but also biromantic. If only we’d gotten more time to explore this with her.
Owen Harper
Dr. Owen Harper is one character whose exploration of his potential bisexuality is least shown. Owen follows a more traditional mindset, when considering how other people see sexuality. At the start of the series he presents as quite a masculine, closed off straight man. He’s dismissing, though not entirely unkind, and thinks Jack is gay. Other words haven’t really filtered into his vocabulary it seems.
Yet, Owen has delved into bisexuality with his actions. In a way he couldn’t be more different from Toshiko, who seems to want a romantic connection more than she demands sex, Owen goes in search of sex (using a pheromone spray) and quickly draws in a woman at a bar. But before he can get her home, her boyfriend shows up to question what he is going to do with his girlfriend. Instead of ditching the guy or both him and the woman, he uses the spray and kisses the man too. We’re led to believe that this threesome then happens. [Edit following comment: there are clear issues with consent here]
Now, Owen doesn’t really ever seem to show any sort of sexual attraction to any other men in the series, he’s not biromantic, but he does seem to have sexual attraction for men, as well as women, at least enough to sleep with both.
Gwen Cooper
Similar to Owen, Gwen doesn’t really do more that flirt with the idea of bisexuality. Certainly, she has no judgements about how the other members of the team conduct themselves, but throughout the series Gwen is in a monogamous(ish) relationship with boyfriend, then husband, Rhys Williams (Kai Owen).
Gwen’s only foray into anything remotely bisexual is through a woman who is used as an alien’s host and then lures her into kissing her. Again, potentially problematic if we delve.
Ianto Jones
As a bisexual man in my teenage years, exploring my sexuality, no-one had so much of an impact of who I thought I could be as Ianto. Unlike other characters in TV shows that I was watching at the time, and since really, Ianto was the only one who explored his bisexuality in depth and with such a clear emotional narrative driving his development of sexual identity.
Ianto starts the series with a previous romance, with a woman, having ended. He’s broken by this loss but soldiering on. For much of the first series, he lets himself be the background player in Torchwood, holding the, literal, fort while they are away on missions.
But it isn’t long before the joking flirtation between Ianto and Jack starts to develop into something more. I get goosebumps thinking about how their romance began and my eyes are quick to water thinking about Ianto confessing his relationship to his sister.
In one of the most impactful scenes, for me, within the series, Ianto goes to visit his sister. He has been sleeping with Jack for some time, and loves him completely. He’s been swept off his feet. His sister asks him about his life, mentioning that “you’ve been seen” at dinner with a man, Jack, in town. She’s questioning but not interrogating. He goes on to admit that he’s not even sure how it ended up happening and that “it isn’t men. It’s him”.
For a number of people, understanding their own sexuality can take years. Sometimes it takes one person to open the door, for you to realise a truth. What Ianto validated for me was the sense that I didn’t have to be attracted to all men or all women in order to be bisexual. Something that preconceived ideas about bi people and sluttiness seem to assume.
Ianto taught me that I could love people, whoever those people were or identified, and that would be enough. At a time when people wanted to sweep terms like bisexual under the gay rug, it was liberating to think that grown-ups were able to be more honest about their feelings, and could be accepted for it.
Torchwood was not a perfect show when it comes to representing all that bisexuality is, or could be. It takes a very sexual look at bisexuality that is very much not the entirety of bi+ people’s lives. It didn’t have trans or non-binary characters, all the women who were shown to have same sex attraction with the main cast were aliens. More than that, they were majority white, apart from Toshiko and that lends itself to a very narrow lens.
Nonetheless, as one of the few programmes ever to take bisexual characters seriously, and to give them a range of voices and even showing how heterosexual identifying persons can explore their own sexuality without repercussions on their identify (for better or worse), it was unique and novel. That and it’s a really entertaining show.
