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

by Julia Shaw

particularly in species where it is more difficult to differentiate between males and females, being exclusively heterosexual might lead to missed opportunities for mating.

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.

According to neuroscientist Simon LeVay, “homosexuality in the sense of a durable preference for same-sex partners has not been widely described among nonhuman animals. In fact, there is only one species in which it has been shown to occur with any regularity, and that is the domestic sheep. About 8 percent of rams, when given the choice of rams or ewes as sex partners, mate preferentially with rams.”

Bonobos use sex as a form of conflict resolution and it works incredibly well: “Among wild bonobos there’s no deadly warfare, no male dominance, and enormous amounts of sex. They make love not war.”

Sociosexual behavior includes sexual activity that is not related directly to reproduction.34 In nonhuman primates, this can include behaviors like grooming, playing, mounting, genital sniffing, touching, and rubbing. For bonobos, sociosexual behavior can occur as often as thirty times a day. Sociosexuality is thought to strengthen relationships, to help establish dominance, to make amends after fighting, and overall to reduce tension.

For example, the Spartans in ancient Greece encouraged homosexuality among elite troops: “They had the not unreasonable belief that individuals would stick by and make all efforts to rescue other individuals if they had a lover relationship.”

Basically, the right question is why do we have any sex or sexual behavior that doesn’t create babies? And the answer seems to be rather obvious, actually. Because sexual behavior is a nice way to connect with each other, and because it is fun. And, again unsurprisingly, sexual behavior can be social and fun between people of all genders. It’s really not that hard to understand.

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.

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.”

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.

On average the recommended starting salary for bisexual applicants was $30,126.99, for gay applicants it was $33,183.10, and for those who made no mention of sexuality it was $35,555.19. This translates into a 15 percent salary penalty for the openly bisexual applicants.

As the researchers of the global closet study, Pachankis and Bränström, write, “Sexual orientation concealment can exact deep mental and physical health costs.”17 Given that bisexual people are more likely to be closeted it seems reasonable to expect these mental and physical health consequences to disproportionately affect bisexual people.

First, people who are bisexual experience double discrimination. This means that people experience biphobia not just from the heterosexual community but also from members of the queer community. Research on 745 bisexual-identified participants by Tangela Roberts and colleagues published in 2015 found that “bisexual people experience monosexism, the privileging of sexual attraction to one sex or gender, from heterosexual, gay, and lesbian communities.”

Second, as we have already discussed, bisexual people are less likely to be out. As we’ve seen, factors related to double discrimination mean that bisexual people manage the stigma that comes with a bi identity in a particularly complex manner, and this results in bisexual people being less likely to be out than other sexual minorities.

Third, bisexual people are more isolated compared to other sexual minorities. They are less likely to seek out, and belong to, queer communities.

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.”

At the age of eighty, Clive Davis came out as bisexual. Davis was the president of Columbia Records in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and played a key role in the success of many pop legends, including Janet Jackson and Lauryn Hill. The public knew that Davis had been married to two women but did not know that he had also had relationships with men.

The study found 11 positive aspects of being bisexual: “freedom from social labels, honesty and authenticity, having a unique perspective, increased levels of insight and awareness, freedom to love without regard for sex/gender, freedom to explore relationships, freedom of sexual expression, acceptance of diversity, belonging to a community, understanding privilege and oppression, and becoming an advocate/activist.”

The next step, I figured, was to finally look bi. Or as the queer community would say, I wanted people to “read” me as bi.

For bi 2.0, I went with less makep than I normally wear, flat black booties, ripped jeans, a black V-neck shirt, and an oversized camo jacket with big flowers on the back. I strutted rather than walked. I listened to music by queer artists. And you know what? It worked. It was much easier to flirt with women and have it register as flirting rather than just being nice. I was still seen as heterosexual by most people, but I looked just alternative enough that some people registered that I might not be. As a lesbian friend commented one day approvingly, I was channeling my big dyke energy.

It felt a little like I was wearing a costume, but it also made me feel more “me” than anything I had ever worn. It’s curious how those two feelings can coexist.

This is a confusing feeling. It is not literally feeling that you are another gender, at least not for me. It’s more that I feel like a mix of what society has decided are masculine and feminine characteristics. My sexual attraction and my gender expression both work this way, with fluctuating fondness, and not necessarily linked to one another. Some days I only have eyes for women and other feminine-looking humans, but I also feel and dress like an incredibly feminine woman . . . like our feminine softness could combine and become the most powerful thing in the universe. Other days I feel and dress masculine, and even though I’m partnered with a man the feeling is not one of homosexuality. Other days still, when I snuggle into my partner, I have a mental image of us as a stereotypical heteronormative couple from a romantic comedy.

On social media you see accounts with clear bi-visual styles: the telltale pink-purple-blue color combinations, either in the form of the bi flag, bi moons, or bi triangles; cartoon animals with bi flags, blushing Japanese manga-style characters, and the odd stuffed panda, presumably a mascot by virtue of being both black and white, a nod to bisexual people being seen as a combination of hetero- and homosexual, and because it references pansexuals. The best way I can describe the visual style of the bi community is “cute.”

The temporary nature of bi events might allow for them to be what the French philosopher Foucault has called “heterotopias,” “absolutely perfect other places” that are “a place without a place.”

In my class on the history of queer spaces, our instructor Benno Gammerl introduced us to the concept of the queer space as orgasm, where the body dissolves into the physical world around it and the individual succumbs to waves of pleasure.

That being said, not everyone is going to have a good time at bi events, never mind a transcendental one. Queer spaces like BiCon and Bi Pride may create a sensation of euphoria in some, but they can intentionally or unintentionally create barriers to such experiences for others. What to some people feels like a bisexual playground or a carnival, can feel to others oppressively middle-class, academic, ableist, and white. As both Clare Hemmings and Bowes-Catton have written, there is an artificial heterogeneity created when bisexual spaces are treated as inherently and joyfully inclusive and diverse, when in reality they typically center white experiences and concerns. This can also lead to the “deferral of issues of race and social class to a utopian bisexual future.”

Saying that there are no bi spaces falls prey to the monosexist views of bisexual spaces as inadequate or nonexistent. Similarly, the idea of bisexual people as mere tourists within homosexual spaces makes it feel, incorrectly, like such spaces are not for us. The reality is that bisexual people have their own spaces and are an integral and permanent part of the larger queer community.

In the quirky Netflix series The Politician almost every character seems to be sexually fluid, men and women, parents and their children. In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend we can find both a female and a male bisexual character, and a whole musical act with a song called “Gettin’ Bi.” There’s the ditzy bi blonde Eleanor Shellstrop in The Good Place, bi cheerleader Brittany Pierce in Glee, and bi medical doctor Callie Torres in Grey’s Anatomy. And then there is perhaps the most famous bi depiction on-screen, detective Rosa Diaz on Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

The prefix “para” in this context means “resembling.” Parasocial interaction is a popular field of communication science,24 and was originally conceived in 1956 by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl.

Parasocial contact has been shown to reduce stigma not just of sexual minorities, but also prejudice in other contexts; it has been shown to change racial attitudes,33 destigmatize mental illness,34 and decrease prejudice toward people with disabilities in sports.35 Parasocial relationships can also have real implications for how people think about human rights and equality, like increasing support for pro-transgender policies.36 And, especially for people who have no interpersonal relationships with openly gay individuals, there is a positive relationship between exposure to on-screen gay characters and endorsement of gay equality.

When we do see bi men on-screen they are often immediately labeled gay. Like in the Oscar-winning 2005 movie Brokeback Mountain. According to professor of sociology Harry Brod, “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.”

In 2021, almost half of the world’s population lived in the sixty-nine countries that have laws which criminalize homosexual behavior.

State violence often happens under the guise of protecting public order or social mores, or in connection with enforcing laws that criminalize same-sex relations. Russia, Korea, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Indonesia are named in the UN report as countries whose state agents are known perpetrators of violence.

According to the report, forced anal exams that amount to torture have also been reported in Cameroon, Egypt, Kenya, Lebanon, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia.

a study published in 2009 which analyzed refugee claims on the grounds of bisexuality in the US, Canada, and Australia, concluded that bisexual people are significantly less likely to obtain refugee status than other sexual minority groups. The author, Sean Rehaag at York University, found that bi-invisibility and negative stereotypes held by decision-makers in these cases play an important role. He also found that people were reluctant to give refugee status to sexual minorities who didn’t have traditional gay and lesbian identities.20 The strong undercurrent to this is the assumption that bisexual people can just choose to live heterosexual lives, choose to only be romantically involved with the “opposite” sex, so they aren’t actually in danger. Just blend in, just make your sexual identity invisible, is the message. You aren’t queer enough to deserve our protection.

My off-duty military friend spoke about the most morally troubling thing he encountered. During his stay in Afghanistan, he witnessed local men who passionately identified as heterosexual take young men and boys as lovers. This is a practice called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” also known as “beardless boys” or “dancing boys.” Bachi bazi has been widely criticized and is considered a form of child abuse and sexual slavery.

One place where no promo homo laws exist is Texas. In relation to public education about sexual conduct, Texas state law says: “The materials in the education programs intended for persons younger than 18 years of age must: (1) emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage . . . and (2) state that homosexual conduct is not an acceptable lifestyle and is a criminal offense.”

Some examples of recent openly bisexual elected officials include Libbie Davies from the NDP in Canada, Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Katie Hill in the US, Tobias Billström from the Moderate Party in Sweden, Marieke Koekkoek from Volt in the Netherlands, Chlöe Swarbrick from the Green Party in New Zealand, and Simon Emil Ammitzbøll-Bille from the Liberal Party in Denmark.

until 2014 Google didn’t autocomplete or suggest anything if people searched for “bisexual” or related terms. According to a representative of the company this was because “automatic filters detect a strong correlation on the (unfiltered) Internet between those terms [bisexual] and pornography.”1 It took a petition that called for the search giant to “unblock the word bisexual,” signed by 15,500 people, for this to change.2 A similar petition had been signed a year earlier because Apple had a warning that would pop up when people tried to include the term bisexual in app descriptions.

I think that for many people who engage in nonmonogamy it comes down to something that was summarized well by the late science-fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut: “I say that when couples fight, it isn’t about money or sex or power. What they’re really saying is, ‘You’re not enough people!’

According to sex researcher Ryan Scoats, who in his own words has “the world’s first PhD in threesomes,”8 the threesome imaginary involves “collective cultural understandings regarding threesomes that reflect and reproduce existing power relations and social privilege.”

I propose that you add a new term to your lexicon: “mixed-orientation relationships.” Recognizing mixed-orientation relationships creates more accurate representation and visibility of bisexual people, and such language allows us to move beyond the terminology of “gay” and “straight” relationships.

No matter what your sexual identity, you can be promiscuous or unfaithful or never want to settle down with only one person . . . or you can be sexually conservative or faithful or want to be married with a white picket fence. The difference, however, is that as a bisexual person you are constantly asked why. 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.

Having a single consensual same-sex relationship in prison, or kissing a girl and liking it, or having a threesome, doesn’t make people bisexual. But writing these off as meaningless, as an expression of dominance, or as performative, is likely to leave people unsatisfied or even resentful of an aspect of themselves that they haven’t really engaged with.

Related to the experience of bisexual discovery, I often think of a phrase from Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse’s 1943 book, The Glass Bead Game: “I gave myself up to the ecstasy of discovery.”