Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

by Julia Shaw

Bisexuality isn’t mysterious, threatening, or performative . . . or even cool, woke, or transcendental. It is a normal part of human sexuality.

How can conversations about identity, love, and sex ever be over?

Kinsey flipped around sexual norms; instead of heterosexuality being the default, he thought that bisexuality was.

it is not practical for most of us to get rid of labels entirely, but we must also not attribute too much power or elegance to them.

Bisexuality is] the potential to be attracted, romantically and/or sexually, to people of more than one [gender], not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree.”

I need to regularly remind myself that fewer people are bi than I intuitively guess, because my social media feeds make it easy to forget that bisexuality is not the default. We all live in bubbles, and mine is an adorable bi bubble.

I know it shouldn’t shock me, but at least a fifth of people in both groups didn’t believe that bisexuality existed—28 percent of heterosexuals and 20 percent of homosexuals indicated that “there is no middle ground” for sexuality.

One reason was probably because, as a bisexual person, it always felt like Pride, and identity flags, and fabulous queer communities weren’t for me. I had always felt like an ally, not a community member. Had I known about bi history I would have thought about this very differently. I would have known that there was space for me, that this wasn’t just an event that was inclusive of bisexual people, but that bisexual people are key to the event’s very existence.

This shift toward more exclusionary politics coincided with an increased visibility of bisexual women, and as more people (including people who previously identified as lesbian) started to identify as bisexual, some lesbian communities tightened their boundaries.31 Bisexual people were increasingly being stigmatized as being only there for the sexual experimentation.

This was hard for many, and led to an overall sense that I think persists to this day, that queer spaces and events aren’t for bisexual people.

Historians need to identify bisexual lives, or at least be open to their possibility, rather than misreading all homosexual desires in history as belonging to gay and lesbian people.

Shying away from the label “bisexual” within historical texts is an inherently biphobic practice that untethers bisexual people from their own history.

The reason the alliance between trans and bi people is so natural is that both represent a fluidity and a destruction of binaries that make people uncomfortable.