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

by Julia Shaw

Commonly misunderstood, and at times willfully misconstrued, is the idea that bisexual people reinforce a strict gender binary. This is neither historically accurate, nor true today. Most bisexual activists and researchers define bisexuality as attraction to people of multiple genders. Notably this definition is inclusive of trans and nonbinary people.

I use the term bisexual throughout this book not because I think this is the term that everyone must use, but because it has the broadest application, longest history, and is the most readily recognizable. In this book I hope to unite the sexual family, no matter what term people feel most suits them, whether it’s bisexual, plurisexual, pan-sexual, omnisexual, polysexual, fluid, unlabeled, or any related label.

There have been suspicions that bisexuality is probably just a trend for almost fifty years. The US magazine Newsweek has even declared this boldly twice. In 1974 it published an article titled “Bisexual Chic: Anyone Goes.”1 Two decades later, in 1995, it ran a cover story with the headline “Bisexuality. Not gay. Not straight. A new sexual identity emerges.”2 New again?

In his book The Invention of Heterosexuality, gay history pioneer and activist Jonathan Ned Katz argues that “the idea of heterosexuality is a modern invention, dating to the late nineteenth century.”

Karl-Maria Kertbeny

This means that a gay rights activist coined the word heterosexual as a by-product of creating the word homosexual.

(Referring to Karl-Maria Kertbeny, in 1869)

In the etymology of Kertbeny’s “heterosexual,” “hetero” comes from the Greek heteros which means another, while homos means same, and both are melded with the Latin word sexus. Not long after this, bi, or two, started to be used to refer to people who had both homosexual and heterosexual desires. 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.

Before being adopted to describe human sexuality, the term bisexual was typically used to refer to creatures and plants which are hermaphroditic, so have both male and female reproductive parts. Even today, in the worlds of botany, entomology, and zoology the term bisexual is ...

The first use of the word bisexual in English, in the sense of being sexually attracted to people of multiple genders, was probably in 1892 when American neurologist Charles Gilbert Chaddock translated Psychopathia Sexualis, an influential book by the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in...

There were words to describe the kinds of sexual behavior people engaged in, but sex was mostly something that people did, not part of who they were.

in a paper published in 1941, Kinsey openly chastised other scientists about their assumptions and inherently judgmental language.15 In one such critique, Kinsey tore apart research which had concluded that the hormone levels of heterosexuals and homosexuals were significantly different. One of the best sections is where he writes: “More basic than any error brought out in the analysis . . . is the assumption that homosexuality and heterosexuality are two mutually exclusive phenomena emanating from fundamentally and, at least in some cases, inherently different types of individuals.” In other words, he thought it was ridiculous that people were thought to be either gay or straight. The heterosexual-homosexual binary doesn’t describe—in Kinsey’s words—“behavior as it actually occurs in the human being,” instead, “the picture is one of endless intergradation between every combination of homosexuality and heterosexuality.”

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

As gender and cultural studies scholar Jennifer Germon has written, Kinsey introduced “bisexuality as the foundational norm from which monosexuality derived.”

In other words, 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.

I like how American bisexual activist Robyn Ochs eloquently put it in 2009: “[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.”

It seems that younger generations are more likely to both identify as bi and to accept bisexuality as a thing.

I attended my first Pride when I was a teenager in Cologne, Germany, in the late 1990s.

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.

“Queer theory” is an academic term which, as queer theorist Annamarie Jagose has explained, is committed to “demonstrating the impossibility of any natural sexuality.” In other words, it challenges the idea that any sexuality, but most notably heterosexuality, is somehow better or more natural than any other.

The main thing that queer theory does is to help us queer things, to estrange them, and to look at issues like power and social dynamics that underlie our assumptions about the world.

Historians love to quote a line from L. P. Hartley’s 1953 novel, The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

But can there really be a history of sexuality? This is the question that historian David Halperin wrote about in 1989.7 His widely cited article includes one of the most repeated mantras about queer history: “Sex has no history . . . sexuality, by contrast, does.” What he means is that sexual activity is a biological fact, and people have been getting it on in as many ways as you can imagine since forever. But sexuality as an identity, sexual preferences being something that we are rather than something that we do, is a cultural construction, which is why Halperin, along with philosopher Michel Foucault,8 and historian and sociologist Jeffrey Weeks9 have all claimed that the history of sexuality is uniquely modern.

In the search for queer lives in the past, one way that academics have dealt with this is to assume that people who had any kind of same-sex desires or sex must have been gay or lesbian, even if they were also in heterosexual relationships. Partly because of this, the term bisexual is often entirely absent from historians’ writings. This is a huge problem—by doing this we are systematically mislabeling people who were attracted to multiple genders.

I was recently at a dinner where a discussion began about a family friend who had just divorced her husband. She is now dating a woman. An unquestioned and benevolent consensus around the table was, Well, she’s obviously a lesbian, and she can finally be herself. Unsurprisingly, my contribution to the discussion was that perhaps she is bisexual, and simply fell in love first with her husband, and later with a woman. Without having her in the room and asking her, we weren’t going to be able to find out. But you can see how quickly in such situations people erase, or never even consider, bisexuality.

This he credits to the “innately democratic attitude” of bisexual people to see beyond caste and social position.

Havelock Ellis

According to clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Esther Rapoport, he was mostly “conflating biological sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.”18 In other words, he believed that we are all born with both male and female bodies and brains, and this he hazily called bisexuality.

Freud

Freud considered bisexuality to be a primordial state of being that people should grow out of, as they resolve the push and pull of the male and female forces within themselves. This meant that he believed that we are all bisexual as children and so bisexuality is a childish, immature sexuality. Freud also considered bisexual desires in adulthood to be fantastic or impossible, and linked bisexuality with hysteria.

In Frankfurt, Germany, stands a gothic angel with large wings, holding a scroll. The sculpture is a dark gray, with bright green water damage that exposes its metallic foundation. It looks like a classic religious sculpture, so it is easy to think nothing of it. But that would be a mistake. Instead, you should get closer, look right at it. There’s something very unusual about this angel. This quietly shocking statue was created by artist Rosemarie Trockel and erected in 1994 to remind people of the murder and persecution of homosexuals under National Socialism.

There were also queer women and nonbinary people who were persecuted under Nazism, but these numbers pale in comparison to the men. They were often forced to wear a black triangle to symbolize that they were “asocial,” a category which also included beggars, alcoholics, sex workers, and pacifists.

the postwar period from 1946 to 1972 was fertile ground for the emergence of bisexual identity. Some queer historians see the war as a critical moment, when queer people evaded family and community surveillance to finally explore their sexualities.

Let’s take a look at a country that today is often treated as a shining beacon of LGBT+ liberation, the Netherlands. Homosexuality was decriminalized there in 1811, and it was the first country in the world to legalize gay marriage. When it comes to bisexuality it was also ahead of the game. Dutch scholar and coordinator of the Netherlands Transgender Network, Elise van Alphen, examined the emergence of bisexuality and found that bisexuality as an identity was already a core part of the Dutch homosexual movement in the postwar period.

Although this meant that bisexuality was visible, it was still met at times with tension. According to van Alphen, some queer activists accused bisexual people of “having their cake and eating it too—in other words, appearing heterosexual by day and homosexual by night.”23 Bisexual people were assumed to be able to take advantage of “sexual camouflage” (a term that bi researcher Samuel Lawton has used), blending into both homosexual and heterosexual spaces. For those in heterosexual-looking relationships, particularly in marriages, this morphed by the late 1960s from the idea of bisexual camouflage to that of a pitiful figure trapped in a heterosexual marriage.

Where did people get the idea that bisexual people are partly heterosexual? Well, two decades earlier Kinsey had published his Kinsey Scale, which encouraged exactly this kind of thinking. Telling people to choose a number between “0—Exclusively heterosexual” and “6—Exclusively homosexual” had a profound impact on how scholars, and queer people themselves, talked about sexuality.25 I presume Kinsey hadn’t considered that this might be politically weaponized against people who fell in the middle of the scale, but that’s exactly what happened.

With the onset of the AIDS epidemic bisexual men were (and still are) stigmatized as AIDS bridges, or vectors.27 There were widespread fears that bisexual men were catching AIDS in the kinky homosexual world and bringing it to the respectable heterosexual world. Bi men were seen as a threatening connection between the dirty and the clean, the bad and the good, the queer and the straight. As such, bi men were seen as a threat to heterosexuals everywhere.

Bisexual people were again socially sacrificed, this time not in the fight for gay rights but in the fight for women’s rights.

In academic terms, this taps into a long-standing debate between essentialists and social constructionists. Essentialists believe that sexuality is something that you fundamentally are, not something you can become. Essentialism is often tied in with the idea that people are born queer, that their sexuality cannot change, and that there is a true, authentic sexual self. In contrast, social constructionists believe that our sexuality is something that we create together with the world around us. They believe that how we perceive reality, and how we feel and behave sexually, are primarily influenced by our social environments. Social constructionist theories of sexuality often stress the importance of sexual life experiences, sexual identity labels, and education on how people live and label their sexual lives. Often, the debate becomes a fight of biology and genetics (essentialism) versus sociology and psychology (social constructionism).

They did however find a partial recipe which explained 8–25 percent of same-sex sexual behavior in their study. They found five genetic markers, called SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), related to sexual behavior. According to the team, “one of the markers we identified is also associated with balding, suggesting that sex hormone regulation may be involved in the biology of same-sex sexual behavior. Another is related to our sense of smell. This is interesting, because while odors are important for sexual attraction, we don’t yet understand how this might be related to sexual behavior.” They also found that the genes related to same-sex sexual behavior partly overlap with those for several other traits, including openness to new experiences and risk-taking behavior.

The complexity of these genetic findings calls into question the validity of single continuum measures like the Kinsey Scale, as the authors of the 2019 DNA study wrote. “The genetics suggest that it is an oversimplification to assume that the more someone is attracted to the same sex, the less they are attracted to the opposite sex.” In other words, being very attracted to men doesn’t preclude also being very attracted to women.

Next time Lady Gaga’s track comes on, I will probably still belt it out but add, “I’m on the right track, baby, I was 8–25 percent born this waaaay.”

if you can teach “gayness”—if that’s even a word—if you can teach gayness, who speaks giraffe? Because 90 percent of giraffes are gay. . . . So, if you can teach it, I want to know who the hell speaks giraffe?

UK member of parliament Dawn Butler

The claim that 90 percent of giraffes are gay is probably based on a statement made in the 1999 book by Canadian biologist Bruce Bagemihl, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity.9 This book provided evidence that “polysexual” behavior is common in the animal kingdom, and claimed that it had been found in more than 450 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, and other animals. For humans, the term polysexual means attraction to more than one gender and is under the bisexual umbrella. In animals, it refers to sexual behavior of animals toward more than one sex.

This idea that all same-sex behavior between animals, particularly between males, is a display of dominance is popular. When I’m out with my mom’s fluffy male sheltie and another male dog mounts him at the dog park, without hesitation people will state that the other dog is trying to dominate him. I accept that many animals, including humans, sometimes use sex and sexual behaviors instrumentally, as a tool to get something from others or to intimidate them. But to assume this is always the case is presumptuous.

How can different experts come to such different conclusions about the same animal behavior? According to some biologists, our understanding and interpretation of animal behavior is tainted by a heterosexual bias. It’s hard for researchers to ditch their socialized norms and expectations about behavior when they observe animals. Many people, researchers included, interpret behavior as sexual and normal if it is between a female and a male. That which doesn’t fit this narrative is seen as unnatural, deviant, inherently wrong or coercive, or invisible. We write it off as not sexual at all even though all the signs are there.

Since the publication of Biological Exuberance, even more species have been recorded as engaging in same-sex sexual behaviors, including animals as diverse as variegated sea urchins, flying foxes, squid, garter snakes, snow geese, damsel flies, the Laysan albatross, field crickets, and domestic cows.

It was in these classes that I was told that a minority of the human population being gay was potentially adaptive for ancestral tribes because these individuals could help support the overall community without spending energy on their own children. It was argued that they were a nonreproductive helping hand, if you will. In the same class we also discussed the potential usefulness of other nonreproductive community members, like women who have passed menopause or people who could never bear children. Such benefits are called indirect fitness benefits—they help the survival of their genetic relatives, which helps their family genes to survive overall. I have come to think of such ideas as deeply problematic, and at least partially incorrect. This is because it seems so obvious that these evolutionary arguments center heterosexuality.

Julia Monk and her colleagues have criticized the base assumption underlying the Darwinian paradox. They argue that it “implicitly assumes that ‘heterosexual’ or exclusive different-sex sexual behavior is the baseline condition for animals, from which same-sex sexual behavior has evolved.” The research includes unchecked assumptions about the costs, benefits, and origins of homosexual behavior. Specifically, they argue that the assumption that heterosexual behavior is the ancestral, natural state of animals has not been rigorously examined. It is an assumption which creates the need for complicated explanations and genetic mechanisms to explain the high prevalence of homosexual behavior across species.

When in 1953 Alfred Kinsey wrote about the mammalian nature of humans and how this affects our sexuality. He specifically criticized those who “assumed that heterosexual responses are part of an animal’s innate, instinctive equipment and that all other types of sexual activity represent perversions of the normal instincts.”15 He also wrote, “Biologists and psychologists who have accepted the doctrine that the only natural fu...

Julia Monk is passionate about combating bias in scientific research. Her work on homosexuality in animals is a great example of this. Monk and her colleagues propose a shift from asking “Why engage in homosexual behavior?” to “Why not?”. They propose that the most likely ancestral condition of animals involves “indiscriminate sexual behaviors directed to all sexes” which includes both same-sex and different-sex sexual behavior. This assumption means that behavioral bisexuality would be the foundational state of animals, and that environmental and other evolutionary pressures then changed the amount that this trait continued to exist in the population. Until I came across this research I spent a lifetime thinking that I was an outlier, probably a genetic or evolutionary anomaly. Now I’m not so sure.

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.