As Bravo Dykes know, there has been a sharp increase in the number of queer women across Real Housewives and its many attendant spin-offs in recent years. Bisexual women in particular can be found all over Bravo, and it seems with the launch of every new show, there’s at least one! The newly relaunched Vanderpump Rules went ahead and satisfied its At Least One Bi Girl quota in its second episode this week, with young SURver Audrey Lingle talking about her history of dating both men and women.
She says this in a conversation with gay SURver Venus Binkley (gay men have long had a place in the Bravosphere, though I will say it wasn’t until very recently that they were presented as full, complex people rather than dressing for the straight women in their orbit). “I’ve dated women, I’ve dated men,” she says to Venus, who replies, “You’re bisexual?!”
“You can call it that,” Audrey says. She goes on to explain she dated a girl for four years in high school. After they broke up, she has pretty much only been dating men. She loves love and romance and is looking to fall in love. She is also, it should be noted, only 21-years-old!!! Well, she turns 22 in this episode. I had only just sort of begun to come out at her age, and her self-knowledge at such a young age is enviable.
This new version of Vanderpump Rules is a return to the original formula for the series, following the young, beautiful, and self-sabotaging employees of Lisa Vanderpump’s flagship restaurant SUR. It has been a long time since the days of a Vanderpump cast that actually works in restaurants while living in shitty apartments, the original cast eventually becoming too rich and too reality TV-ified to keep up the pretense of the shows premise anymore. Many were pulled into Vanderpump spin-off The Valley. But with this reboot, we have a whole new cast of young people making bad choices! It’s thrilling! And I quite liked the first two episodes, which are reminiscent not only of original recipe Vanderpump Rules but also one of my recent favorites on Bravo, Southern Hospitality, which is also very queer.
Bisexuality is certainly not new to Vanderpump, past cast member Ariana Madix coming out as bi in 2020 while she was on the show. Her relationship with Tom Scandoval and its eventual fallout sort of eclipsed any potential storytelling around Ariana’s bisexuality beyond her initial coming out, and she left Bravo altogether after the scandal known as Scandoval (though, not reality TV altogether, as she made appearances on Dancing With the Stars and Love Island). Original Vanderpump Rules cast member Katie Maloney also had a very bisexual season in 2024, when she ended up in a love triangle with her ex-husband and a girl.
Audrey is single and absolutely ready to mingle it seems. She has her eyes on one of the guys she works with, but perhaps we’ll see her pursuing women as the show unfolds, too. In any case, she seems like one of the more authentic and less delusional people in the cast so far. If anything majorly gay occurs, trust that I will keep you abreast. My wife referred to herself as a “connoisseur of the reality arts and sciences” the other day, and I think of myself more as a reality scholar-meets-investigative-journalist. (And on that note, the supposed Kyle Richards Comes Out as Bisexual moment teased in the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills trailer did not play out in the first episode, which aired last week. I’ll be tuning in to tonight’s episode to see if it does.)
