Immortality Bisexuality

"There IS no straight when you're 400 years old."

— Derek Landy, author of the Skulduggery Pleasant series

Whereas characters with normal lifespans are usually depicted as being attracted to one gender exclusively, immortal characters can be much less picky about gender. This could be attributed to the fact that we can't know for sure how human sexuality acts over a lifespan of centuries or a strong belief in the Kinsey Scale from the author. Mostly, this is rationalized with a belief that someone who has lived long enough can look outside the box of sexual norms, or that in that amount of time someone of an unexpected gender is bound to attract the character. Or maybe they've just been around for so long that they're running out of new things to try. Of course, whether an immortal character's sexual preference goes both ways or is exclusively attracted to one sex/gender is ultimately dependent on individual authors.

For the specific sub-trope of vampire women who like other women, see Lesbian Vampire. See also Immortality Promiscuity for when the number, if not necessarily the variety, of sexual partners adds up over the centuries.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Dio Brando from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. While not a full immortal, he shrugs off mortal wounds, survives over 100 years due to vampirism, and has been noted via Word of Gay to not let something like gender get in the way between him and someone he's become interested in.
• Rin from Mnemosyne. All immortals in that series are either bi or lesbian, presumably to avoid Mayfly–December Romance (since only women can become immortal).

• In a flashback in UQ Holder!, Evangeline's classmates ask her how many partners she's had in her centuries of life. She puts up an obvious lie that she's dated hundreds of men and women, but in truth she's only truly loved a handful of men. While she's very much into certain men, it's unclear if she feels the same way about women as she doesn't return the affections of a woman in the series who is in love with her, but at the same time is okay with kissing her.

Comic Books

• ElfQuest: Possibly explains why all the elves (some immortal, some just very long-lived) are bisexual.
• The Sandman (1989): Hob Gadling, though it's mentioned only in passing in the final issue.
• X-Men: Chris Claremont originally intended to write Wolverine as bisexual, and although he may or may not be technically immortal, his Healing Factor definitely grants extended longevity and makes him hard to kill. Of course, at the time, fans of comic books were probably less likely to be able to grasp the idea of "a manly dude that swings both ways" and so that angle was dropped. We know better now, though.
  • His son Daken seems to be less choosy about whom he seduces though.
  • This was semi-canonized in the universe-hopping series X-Treme X-Men, where one Alternate Universe's Wolverine, here known by his birth name of James Howlett, is bisexual and in a relationship with Hercules, which some fans interpreted as a subtle nod to Claremont's original intention.
  • As Claremont eventually revealed, Mystique is over a hundred years old; she has had relationships with several men, but her most enduring one was that with Irene Adler aka Destiny. Mystique is also bisexual in another way, having spent years in male shape(s). This was even how the character Nightcrawler was originally supposed to be born (with Mystique impregnating Destiny while in her male form). Marvel ultimately named the idea too controversial, so Kurt is Azazel and Mystique's son instead, but the story that revealed this is so reviled that more than one subsequent writer has considered a retcon to make Claremont's version canon. In 2023, this was finally performed in X-Men Blue Origins.

Fan Works

• Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfic Gankona, Unnachgiebig, Unità: Both Germany and Italy are bi, and are Immortal as well. Although Japan is also immortal, he is not bi; he is gay.
• On Earth-27, with so many immortal or ageless characters, like Amazons, sorcerers, and Kherans, it's not surprising that many of them no longer care about the gender of their partners.
• Justified in The Infinite Loops. Whatever caused the Loops caused most Loopers' sexuality to be tossed out the window. In fact, a Looper with a set-in-stone sexuality is a miracle in of itself.
• In The Royal Sketchbook, the 1000+-year-old Princess Celestia has had both male and female lovers throughout her lifetime.

Film

• The Hunger: Miriam. This becomes particularly clear in the climactic scene when several coffins in Miriam's house prove to contain ancient-looking undead, some of which are dressed in women's dresses and at least one of which (besides John) is dressed in a man's suit.
• The Velvet Vampire: Diane is a sexy vampire who seduces both halves of a married couple, Lee and Susan. She hemo-erotically slices an X on Susan's chest and drinks Susan's blood, but she also is obsessed with the memory of her mortal husband, dead nearly a century. In one scene she curls up, naked, next to his embalmed corpse.
• With a Kiss I Die: Juliet is now a centuries-old nigh-immortal vampire who's found love with a woman. Though unspecified, it's possible she had romances and or sex with other woman over the centuries as well, since the number of her past lovers is implied to be quite high.

Literature

• The immortal Changeling of Joe Haldeman's Camouflage has no biological sex of its own, so it isn't terribly choosey about who it chooses to mate with. In its first identity as Jim Berry, it was intimate exclusively with women, but following the events of World War II, it became Matt Baker and romanced a gay college student - the first time it exhibited genuine consideration to one of its lovers, incidentally. Following this, it took numerous wives, husbands, and lovers over the decades in a wide variety of personas and genders.
• Henry Fitzroy from the Blood Books, although he was apparently bisexual during his human lifetime anyway. Vaguely implied with another, female vampire that Vicki encounters in a short story.
• In Robert Silverberg's The Book of Skulls, a character contemplating possible immortality and enlightened enough to be cool about a friend's being gay (c. 1970CE) decides that he'd probably try it for a century or two.
• Most of the Greek Gods in The Camp Half-Blood Series, but especially Apollo. As Apollo himself put it in The Tyrant's Tomb, "I had spoken of love to women before. And men. And gods. And nymphs. And the occasional attractive statue before I realized it was a statue."
• A way of life in Dirge for Prester John. Not to mention taking lovers from a number of different species.
• A Dowry of Blood:
  • Dracula is an immortal vampire and isn't picky about his victims regardless of their gender. He feeds off both male and female victims who catch his eye in great abundance. His Vampire's Harem include two women and a young man as his lovers to showcase this.
  • Dracula's immortal harem, which consist of two women named Constanta and Magdalena and a young man named Alexei, are lovers not just with him but with each other.
• Averted at least twice in The Dresden Files: In Blood Rites it's revealed that Lord Raith, the King of the White Court Vampires (who are essentially incubi and succubi and feed on lust rather than blood) keeps House Raith in order by sexually dominating his offspring in order to enforce psychic subservience. However, as Lord Raith is one of the few White Court vampires who isn't bisexual, he instead attempts to kill his male offspring in non-direct ways (since the White Court as a whole frowns on a lack of subtlety in one's evil plots).
• The premise of Incarnate by Jodi Meadows sort of leans on this. Everyone is reincarnated into different bodies over and over, and there's no guarantee that you'll be the same gender every time. So sexuality isn't really an issue.
• The Mortal Instruments: Magnus Bane is an immortal warlock who has taken many male and female lovers over the centuries.
• One of the Light Others from Night Watch (Series) named Ignat is a master of seduction, and doesn't care about the gender of his targets. He's not quite immortal, but he and all other Others can maintain youth for up to centuries, and it's implied that his bisexuality is at least in part because he's bored. He's possibly the only bisexual Other shown, but a lot of them tend toward being The Hedonist.
  • He also doesn't mind having a threesome with two sorceresses, one of whom has a boyfriend in the next room.
  • It's pretty much stated that the Others don't abide by human rules of courtship and fidelity. Just before discovering Svetlana in Ignat's arms, Anton finds two Others sleeping after a night of passion, both of whom have human spouses. He notes that two field operatives sleeping together is no different from a female Combat Medic providing "comfort" to a soldier in a trench. His treatment of Svetlana sleeping with Ignat is likewise detached... which infuriates Svetlana to no end.
• October Daye: Nearly all fae are bi to some extent.
  Faerie isn't hung up on sexual orientation — experimentation is natural when you have forever.
• Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf has an immortal man switch genders after a long period of slumber. Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen turned the character into a full-fledged immortal bisexual. Although, given the character is based on Woolf's own bisexual lover Vita Sackville-West, it's hinted in the book as explicitly as it can be for 1930 that the character is bisexual.
  For the probity of breeches she exchanged the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.
• Young adult vampire novelist Amelia Atwater-Rhodes has stated that many of the vampires in her canon are bisexual, having grown tired over the centuries of being romantically involved with a single gender.
• The page quote comes from the author of the Skulduggery Pleasant series. Being a children's series (albeit an unusually gory one, at least to start with), nothing is very explicit, but a few characters are heavily implied to be queer in some way or another, and Landy himself has stated that bisexuality is more or less the norm for most of the immortal characters. In Series 2, which had largely out-grown the children's series aspect, this becomes very much explicit, with bisexuality being confirmed as the norm among sorcerers and the main character, Valkyrie, getting a girlfriend.
• Stated outright to be the case for vampires in Straight Outta Fangton in The United States of Monsters universe. Blood substitutes for sex among them (though they still have lots of that), so they don't have any issue having male and female lovers both. The protagonist, Peter Stone, is young enough that's not entirely comfortable with it yet.
• The Vampires — yes, all of them — in The Vampire Chronicles. A partial aversion though in that Rice's vampires are incapable of regular sex. Also, Lestat himself was already bisexual when he was still human, as were at least some of the other vampires. Strangely, when he temporarily becomes human again, the only two people with whom he has sex are women.
• In The Witcher books, one of the witches mentions that when you live that long you will try everything eventually. Although there are several (at least vaguely) bisexual magic-users, there is never any mention of this applying to other long-lived creatures such as monsters, elves, or witchers.

Live-Action TV

• Spike once said of Angel in Angel: "Angel and I were never intimate. Well, except that one time..."
• Pretty much every vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a Depraved Bisexual, as evidenced by their tendencies to "play" and tease their victims before killing and draining them in a sometimes highly sexualised manner. Vampires have no gender preferences when it comes to meals, and there are strong implications that they like "dancing" with their meals before having them (as displayed by Spike, Drusilla, Darla, and vampire Willow). A common way of luring their meals to their deaths is by seducing them first, regardless of their sex. A lot of vampires are portrayed as Extreme Omnisexuals.
• The Doctor from Doctor Who, although they are also an alien. The fact that Time Lords don't always stay the same sex when they regenerate (such as with the typically male Doctor's own regeneration into a woman at the conclusion of the show's 36th season) probably helps broaden their standards; the Twelfth Doctor even implies that Time Lords are gender-blind as a result of their capacity for cross-gender regenerations.
• The third episode of Loki (2021) reveals that the titular Norse god is bisexual, answering "a bit of both" when asked if he's ever had any would-be princesses or princes that's caught his eye.
• Downplayed, but there seems to be some of this going on in Lost Girl. Human Kenzi explicitly says she's straight in the first episode, while there are quite a few bi fae ladies: Bo, the Morrigan, Tamsin... plus bi fae guy Vex, and human, seemingly-strictly-lesbian Lauren. In the fae world, no one raises an eyebrow at all the girls Bo kisses, but once — while undercover in the human world — Bo starts to mention her girlfriend Lauren, then awkwardly finishes saying "Lawrence." It seems fae are bi-er than humans.
• Dorian Gray in Penny Dreadful is immortal and attracted to men and women.
• Sanctuary has Helen Magnus, a woman who gained immortality during the reign of Queen Victoria, who is revealed to be bisexual when a woman whose life she just saved kisses her in gratitude. She returns the kiss, commenting that she hasn't been kissed that way in a long time.
• Magnus Bane in Shadowhunters. Supposedly he has had 17,000 relationships over the last few centuries, and he's openly a bisexual man.
• One of the spouses suing Mr Immortal for faking his death in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is a man.
• Trill in Star Trek, especially Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. A Trill symbiont is passed down from host to host in either a male or female body, but the Trill Symbiosis Commission forbids relations with a former lover. One episode Dax ignores this and kisses a woman, an issue because both the symbionts in each of them were once married together, but all her other relations on the show were straight.
• Subverted with Captain Jack Harkness, the protagonist of the spinoff series Torchwood: he was omnisexual even before becoming immortal, by virtue of coming from a Free-Love Future.
• True Blood: Word of God says that almost every vampire out there is bisexual, gender being only a footnote to them. This is in stark contrast to the book series True Blood is based on, The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries, where bisexuality is rare, outside of the occasional off-handed "I was bored" comments.
• It has been hinted heavily regarding most members of the original family of vampires on the The Originals and The Vampire Diaries world, but especially about Rebekah. While clearly bisexual, it's not clear if Isobel's started exploring relations with women after she turned, or she has always considered herself bi.
• All of the centuries-old vampires in What We Do In The Shadows are bi/pan.

Mythology

• Some of the gods in Classical Mythology, at least once, like Zeus, Apollo, and Heracles.
• Norse Mythology: In the Lokasenna one of the insults Loki hurls towards Odin accuses him of practicing seidhr, a form of magic based on having sex with men. Odin doesn’t deny it and replies that Loki does the same, referencing the time Loki gave birth to a horse. In some translations, it's related as Odin doing it for wisdom, but Loki having to do it because he was a fool to make the deal in the first place.

Tabletop Games

• Changeling: The Dreaming. As the kithain's reincarnation process isn't exactly tied down by things like gender, star-crossed lovers tend to be flexible just in case.
• In some Dungeons & Dragons supplements — those few that mention sex — elves are generally portrayed as being much more likely to be bisexual than humans and other "brief" races.
  • In Curse of Strahd, the players can encounter four of Strahd's earlier brides; Three women and a man, implying that he's bisexual with a preference toward women.
• The Exalted — if not everyone in Creation — are typically portrayed as this. The Dragon-Blooded often take homosexual lovers outside of marriage to avoid the risk of siring bastards, the Lunars have easy access to Gender Bender powers and massive fecundity, the Solars are god-kings who traverse Creation like a man walking down the block and occasionally go into states of utter debauchery, and the Sidereals live for millennia and have fate powers that allow them to assume any role they want.
• In the New World of Darkness sourcebook Immortals, exactly one of the sample NPCs is off-handedly described as sleeping with both sexes. She is also a serial killer, although the book doesn't imply that her sexuality has been influenced by her immortality or that her frequent murders are a natural outgrowth of her sexuality.
• Warhammer 40,000 mostly averts this trope, as the long-lived Space Marines are made asexual through transhuman augmentation and hypno-therapy administered during puberty. However, the Chaos God(dess) Slaanesh very much embodies this trope, being immortal and also the Chaos Deity of Sex and Perversion. Traitor Marines who worship Slaanesh can end up anywhere on the spectrum (many choosing to pursue another form of excess instead of developing an interest in sex).

Video Games

• The vampire love interest Lucius from the visual novel Ballads at Midnight asserts he is “attracted to men, women, and everyone in between.” Although the protagonist is female, he shares that he was once a loving relationship with a man named Gillian and talks a little about their time together. Both Gillian and the protagonist seem to be bi as well, though they're very much mortal.

• In Hades, sexuality or monogamy isn't an issue for most of the Greek gods. Zagreus, the son of Hades and the Player Character, is canonically bisexual and can romance Megaera, Thanatos, or even both of them with no issue.
• More pansexual in this case, but the asari from Mass Effect are a One-Gender Race (all female, in appearance, anyway) and can have children with any gender or species. They can live to be almost 1000. They do sometimes mate with their own species, but those who do are frowned upon by creating more pureblood asari, as it leads to genetic aberrations — the most dangerous being the ardat-yakshi. However, krogan live even longer and don't have this trait; the fact that having the same mate for life is an option probably contributes.

Webcomics

• The elf Alduin from the not-worksafe Alfie (2010) mentions that at some point during his long life, he'll undoubtedly take male lovers — but right now he's happy to be a woman's kinky submissive.
• Alucard in And Shine Heaven Now had sex with men twice, stating at that age, you've tried everything at least once.
• The Drow (and presumably other Fae) of Drowtales are The Ageless that live in an Everyone Is Bi society, with purely heterosexual and homosexual people existing as minorities.
• Applies to at least the highblooded trolls of Homestuck. It's normal for all trolls to be bisexual; monosexuality does exist, but it's not common or considered to be a big deal (it's kind of similar to how we'd view someone who's only attracted to redheads: not typical, but not remarkable enough to have a word for it or much of a stigma attached to it). However, the trope doesn't apply to all trolls because the lowest castes have shorter natural lifespans than humans, and somewhat higher up the hierarchy are trolls with humanlike lifespans, and so forth.
• Kathryn "SwordCat" Kennedy of SwordCat Princess professes to miss her dead male lovers, then displays her bisexuality by engaging in lesbian kissing and sex with Detective Erica Richards.

Web Video

• Alucard from Hellsing Ultimate Abridged is this on his lightest days. Played for laughs.

Web Original

• Sakiko on the forum roleplay Honorable Hogwarts. She's 2,800 years old and bisexual.
• In Tales of MU elves commonly use homosexuality as a form of birth control.

Western Animation

• The Avatar of Avatar: The Last Airbender (Or at least female Avatars) is strongly implied to be bisexual as a result of Resurrective Immortality. Korra and Kyoshi (in the books and comics) are confirmed bisexual, Aang is "very in touch with his feminine side", and this may well be part of the psyche of all Avatars considering the Avatar can be male or female with each rebirth and are closely connected enough to their previous identities to consult with them.
• Marceline Abadeer and Princess Bonnibel Bubblegum from Adventure Time. Being over 1,000 years old will do that, and while the fanbase and even their voice actors supported the theory that they were previously a couple, they were only made a couple in the series finale.

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