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

by Julia Shaw

Sexual freedom is magnificent and fragile

I don’t think that everybody is bi, as is so often half-jokingly stated, rather I believe that it is time to queer our worldview by destabilizing our assumptions about sex and sexuality.

Kertbeny, who was probably gay himself, found the need to label and define the sexual norm so that he could explain how same-sex desires and sexual behaviors contrasted with it. This is why he came up with the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” This means that a gay rights activist coined the word heterosexual as a by-product of creating the word homosexual.

I knew nothing about LGBT+ history because no one ever taught me about it and I never thought to ask. Why didn’t I ask? 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.

We can never really know the past, we can only review the evidence and try as best as we can to piece together a plausible story and relate it to our present, to make it meaningful.

Did I already have this predisposition going into playtime, or did these positive early childhood experiences make me bisexual? In other words, was I born bisexual, or did my environment make me that way? Or maybe a bit of both?

These starfish are behaviorally bisexual. As a side note, I feel like starfish should be the mascots for queerness. They engage in homosexual and heterosexual behavior, they can reproduce asexually, and while most starfish are either male or female some species can switch their sex. Perhaps instead of bisexual behavior being a fluke, it is the baseline. Instead of searching for evolutionary reasons to justify the existence of homosexual behavior, we should be looking to justify the existence of exclusively heterosexual behavior.

Of course, no animal is thinking about their reproductive success. Most animals probably don’t even understand that sex leads to offspring. The drive is based on an instinct, or simply the search for enjoyment. Sometimes we all just want to play, not procreate.

First of all, why is it called “coming out”? In his 1994 book, Gay New York, George Chauncey explains, “The expression used to refer to the ritual of a debutante’s being formally introduced to, or ‘coming out’ into, the society of her cultural peers.”1 So “coming out” was a play on the language of upper-class women’s culture of the 1930s, with all the femininity and sophistication that debutantes embodied.

He goes on to explain that in the period before World War II, gay people “did not speak of coming out of what we call ‘the gay closet’ but rather of coming out into what they called homosexual society or the gay world, a world neither so small nor so isolated, nor, often, so hidden as closet implies.” Chauncey draws on an example from a 1931 headline in the newspaper the Baltimore Afro-American, which announced “the coming out of new debutantes into homosexual society” at a ball referred to as a “frolic of the pansies.”

Until recently I was not aware that some people are strongly opposed to the core concept of coming out and the narrative of “the closet.” It has been criticized as reinforcing heterosexist ideas, because the only people who are in society’s closet and therefore need to come out of it are queer people. Why is this a problem? Because it reinforces the idea of heterosexuality as natural and normal, while painting other sexualities as deviant and hidden. Perhaps this is why I’ve often felt that coming out can seem a bit like a religious confession, like telling the world your dirty little secret. It can also make not coming out seem like a moral failure wherein someone is seen as lying by omission about their sexuality, or a personal failure, of not being strong enough to be out and proud.

Additionally, in 2013 Pew had found big differences between men and women. About a third of bisexual women said they had told most of the important people in their lives that they were bisexual, but only 12 percent of bi men had done the same.

Given what we know about the bisexual closet, it seems likely that most bi parents aren’t out to their children. Like Adam, who told researchers: “I’m just trying to put the words together. Honestly I’m not really sure . . . I just hope that [my children are] supportive and that they’re not disgusted by [my bisexuality].” Adam took part in research on bi parents in the US that was published in 2017 by Jessamyn Bowling and colleagues. Adam voicing his fear that his children might be disgusted by his bisexuality ties in with what we often see when children, even adult children, express an exaggerated disgust at the mere mention of their parents having a sex life.

Adam was not the only bi dad worried about coming out. Haus found that there was a large gender disparity in their sample, with bisexual dads five times more likely than bisexual moms to say that they would never come out to their children. Widely held stereotypes about bisexual men can make it particularly difficult for bi dads to tell their children about their sexuality. Of course, bi moms can also experience challenges and prejudice. A number of studies on bi moms during and after pregnancy highlight the value of linking in with LGBT+ parent communities to mitigate the bi-erasure that moms in mixed-sex relationships often report.10 Still, overall, being a bi dad seems to be more taboo than being a bi mom.

“It’s important for bisexuality to remain visible. As a bisexual in a heteronormative relationship, my identity is invisible.”

Bisexual people need to regularly decide whether or not to come out, knowing that if they don’t, they will probably be mislabeled as straight or gay. And what should people do if they have been mislabeled because of who they are currently dating or married to? Do they correct the person or let it slide? If they don’t correct someone’s assumption does that mean they are lying about their sexuality? If they do correct the person, are they really prepared for that conversation? Such questions add a particularly tricky dimension to coming out as bisexual.

As the famous suffragette slogan goes, we need deeds not words. We also need allies, not just other bisexual people to be fighting in the bi corner, because the labor of creating an LGBT-inclusive workplace shouldn’t be an unpaid second job for queer people.

“Brokeback Mountain is routinely discussed as being about ‘gay’ cowboys, but its characters are clearly shown to be bisexual. The misframing of the film results from our culture’s ongoing tendency to polarize, dichotomize, and oversimplify issues of sexuality and sexual orientation. . . . This tendency should be critiqued and resisted. . . . They’re bi shepherds, not gay cowboys.”

Jane Ward writes about other settings where men having sex with other men is rationalized as meaningless, accidental, or necessary. 37 These contexts include single-sex boarding schools, fraternity and military hazing rituals, and among straight men who visit public restrooms or saunas for sexual encounters. She argues that, counterintuitively, “it’s possible for these homosexual sex practices to actually reinforce heterosexuality, because they provide an opportunity for straight men to show, I am so straight that I can do this without it actually having any consequence whatsoever for my daily sexual orientation, which is straight.”

We have a tendency to see women as always sexually available, and sexually flexible, but see men as having a “hardwired heterosexual impulse to spread their seed and that that’s relatively inflexible.” This leaves little room for the reality of many men’s sexual lives, which involves some behavioral bisexuality.

There seems to be an expansion of the cultural boundaries of heterosexuality which is “permitting more same-sex sexual contact without triggering the one-time rule of homosexuality.” The one-time rule is the idea that men are allowed to try “gay stuff” once to make sure they aren’t gay, but this “rule,” argues Scoats, is ignored in some MMF threesome situations.

But what we don’t know from these data is whether people identified as bisexual before the group sex, or whether the group sex made them identify as bi. What comes first, the identity or the sex?

Consensual non-monogamy refers to romantic relationships in which all partners agree to engage in sexual, romantic and/or emotional relationships with others. Within the general framework of consensual non-monogamy, subtypes of relationships differ in the extent to which partners intend for love and emotional involvement to be a part of their multiple relationships.

The experience of being in a monogamous relationship is, however, completely different for bisexual people, because it typically involves a great deal of bi-erasure. People particularly struggle to read people as bisexual if they are in a long-term relationship with one person. This means that there is a sense that, once people are married, the gender of their partner is indicative of their “real” sexuality.

Why do you want these things? Why do you have sex with the people you do? How can you know this is what you really want? Are you sure? How can you be sure? What if you change your mind? I dream of a world where people stop asking bisexual people these questions, and instead ask themselves these questions.

For those who are not ready to change their relationship status but want to have a little play, research also has good news about threesomes. According to Ryan Scoats, “rather than challenging the institution of monogamy, threesomes may actually support it, particularly when engaged in by romantic couples. Threesomes may offer couples a sexual ‘release’ . . . reaffirming the primacy of their committed relationship.” In other words, having a threesome can be both fun and good for your relationship.