In a number of Hollywood films from 1985-1995, bisexual characters were represented as violent, drug-using murderers. With relatively few representations of bisexual men and women in mainstream cinema during this period, the near-uniformity with which such films as Basic Instinct, Blue Velvet, American Commandos, and Chained Heat II depicted bisexuals as killers suggests that a deeper ideological substitution was taking place. Tracing the particular history of this trope, this article finds that media constructions of bisexual men as vectors of HIV transmission in the mid-1980s played a decisive role in creating the image of the bisexual man as sexualized killer. This figure fused representations of unrestrained heterosexual-patriarchal power with queer subversion, as epitomized in Blue Velvet. In turn, in the early 1990s, these images were transposed onto bisexual women, most influentially in Basic Instinct, to form a new category of heterosexist representation modeled after depictions of bisexual men, rather than traditional images of lesbians. The construction of bisexual identity as a form of sadomasochistic, drug-linked criminality served as a public appeal for greater state repression of bisexual communities.
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