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

by Julia Shaw

Sexual freedom is magnificent and fragile

Bisexuality isn’t mysterious, threatening, or performative . . . or even cool, woke, or transcendental.

I believe that it is time to queer our worldview by destabilizing our assumptions about sex and sexuality.

How can conversations about identity, love, and sex ever be over? Humans obsess over these constructs.

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

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.

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.

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.

We all live in bubbles, and mine is an adorable bi bubble.

An adorable bi bubble 🥹❤️

Most of all I remember how extra it all was, an enormous party with glitter and bright colors and people kissing and hugging each other like it was the last—or first—day of their lives.

My first pride was like this

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.

Much like memory, history is an active rather than a passive process.

Queer history is particularly important because it can help to normalize queer identities and lives.

It can help us feel that we have always been here, or at least we have forebears who are like us in important ways, which is both affirming on a personal level and can help in the fight against discrimination.

Havelock Ellis

this fight can be won and a book can transcend time and influence people more than a century later.

Conceptualizations of sexuality never exist in a vacuum, and researchers just never really know how their ideas might one day be co-opted.

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

This is something that I love about science—it is often self-correcting.

“They are there, they just wouldn’t show their real face to you, because you don’t deserve it.”

Burn 🔥

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.”

Because of the liminality of bisexuality, in other words because it is often felt to be between heterosexual and homosexual worlds, it has some interesting overlaps with people who feel between social worlds in other contexts.

a feeling of a hyphenated identity itself being a radical act which came with feelings of empowerment and excitement. As