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

by Julia Shaw

A way that bisexual researchers often talk about this is that the bi in bisexual means two, but the two are not men and women, they are same and other.

I had always felt like an ally, not a community member.

‘bisexual,’ a more convenient term than ‘psycho-sexual hermaphrodite,’ which was formerly used.”

the Dutch organization COC, founded in 1946 and possibly the oldest existing LGBT+ organization in the world.

“When bisexuality was seen as ‘partially straight’, it could be associated with the problems that gay liberationists linked to heterosexuality.”

With the onset of the AIDS epidemic bisexual men were (and still are) stigmatized as AIDS bridges, or vectors.

Going from this to saying that 94 percent of giraffes are gay is not correct.

Homosexual sheep are losing farmers heaps of money, so there is much incentive to try and figure out how to de-gay them.

The researchers estimate that, globally, 83 percent of LGBT+ people are in the closet.

Fourth, bisexual people struggle with internalized biphobia. They are more likely than people from other sexual minorities to be unsure about their sexual identity and to perceive being bisexual as “not that important.

It felt a little like I was wearing a costume, but it also made me feel more “me” than anything I had ever worn.

Related to this, in a chapter aptly titled “What do they look like and are they among us?” a Canadian team of researchers interviewed 22 women who identified as bisexual.

Instead of heterosexuality as default, it is way more fun to assume that everyone is queer. Assuming that characters are heterosexual until proven otherwise is just as much of an assumption. So why not flip it around?

They’re bi shepherds, not gay cowboys.”

This means that there is a sense that, once people are married, the gender of their partner is indicative of their “real” sexuality.