More Than He Knows

MORE THAN HE KNOWS Director’s Statement:
BY: Fiona Dawson, co-director of TRANSMILITARY, 2018 SXSW Audience Award Winner

As an openly bisexual woman and LGBTQ advocate, when Writer/Producer Chris McNeany approached me to direct MORE THAN HE KNOWS, although I loved the characters, concept and unique twist, my initial concern was with the portrayal of the bisexual characters in the narrative.

Bisexual people are often portrayed as disingenuous, immoral and promiscuous. We are painted as incapable of having a monogamous relationship; “needing” to have sex with people of more than one gender. Our sexuality is often used as a temporary plot line for drama and we are cast into harmful tropes. Further, in film and television our stories are drastically underrepresented with only 28% of LGBTQ characters on scripted broadcast, cable, and streaming programming counted as bisexual. (1)

However, bisexual people are the invisible majority. We make up 52% of the lesbian, gay and bisexual community (2) , and yet we are afraid to come out. A 2013 Pew Research Center report showed only 28% of bisexuals said most or all of the important people in their lives knew about their sexual orientation, compared to 71% of lesbians and 77% of gay men. (3)

Therefore, I felt it was important that this bisexual story came to life to help represent just one aspect of who we are. After a period of personal introspection I came to embrace and champion the story of MORE THAN HE KNOWS. “Taya,” the lead character & wife, is a powerful and self-aware black woman. The narrative for me became much more than a bisexual story, but also one that challenges the religious patriarchy and traditional models of marriage instilled in our society.

Taya demonstrates that it is possible to love with compersion. We feel jealousy rooted from a possessiveness of our partners. And yet, shouldn’t unconditional love include a desire for your partner’s joy that stems from their experience of exploring all aspects of their human being? When we stifle ourselves, we deny being truly self-actualized.

The term “compersion” is new to my vocabulary and isn’t even yet in the dictionary — unless you count the Urban Dictionary. It essentially means, “A feeling of joy when a loved one invests in and takes pleasure from another romantic or sexual relationship.” (4) This feeling does not come easily, but I wish to question if jealousy is innate or socialized — or maybe both. Through my own personal growth, I am becoming increasingly aware of people of all sexual orientations (including heterosexual) developing their relationships into open models.

My hope is that MORE THAN HE KNOWS will expand into series content sharing the stories of traditional and diverse models of relationships. Many bisexual people happily live in monogamous relationships, and many people of all sexual orientations joyously open up theirs to include other sexual partners. There shouldn’t be a moral judgment against any of these scenarios, as essential to achieving a happy life is to feel that we as mortal souls can live with the authenticity of who we are
emotionally, intellectually, spiritually and sexually.

(1) GLAAD “Where We Are on TV” (2017) http://www.glaad.org/sites/default/files/BiMediaResourceGuide.pdf

(2) Source: Gary J. Gates, “How Many People Are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender?” (The Williams Institute, April 2011), http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/research/census-lgbt-demographics-studies/how-many-people-are-lesbian-gay-bisexual-and-transgender

(3) http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/02/20/among-lgbt-americans-bisexuals-stand-out-when-it-comes-to-identity-acceptance/

(4) https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Compersion