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

by Julia Shaw

Roses are an example of a popular bisexual plant.

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.

Brenda Howard is a case study in bisexual activism and history, easily positioned amongst a few key moments of recent queer history that many people will be familiar with. Stonewall and the AIDS crisis are well known, as is the fight for LGBT+ rights.

“Queer” has in the past been used as a slur against LGBT+ people. However, since at least the nineties many have worked to reclaim the term from the exile of profanity. Or, as the slogan popularized by the Queer Nation, an LGBT+ activist organization established in 1990, went: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!”

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.

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.

They found that 80 percent of bisexual people in their sample were not out to all of their family members, and 64 percent were not out to their friends.

You can see so many bi myths rear their ugly heads in this statement, including the myth that bisexuality is a trend, that bisexual people are lying, that girls who have only dated boys can’t be bisexual, all dripping with an undertone that people who say they are bisexual are attention-seeking. What’s sad is that the opinions of Anonymous Dad are not unusual, and these opinions are a major barrier to coming out.

I find that the most likely way that I learn that someone is bi at work is not from their spontaneous disclosure, or because a situation makes it clear that they are probably bi, but because I share my own sexual identity with them. It leads to a sort of disclosure reciprocation.

The researchers found that “Simply disclosing bisexuality can lead to a myriad of negative job-relevant outcomes.” Bisexual applicants were rated lower on various measures than the other applicants. Why? Because bisexual disclosure was seen as significantly less “appropriate” than gay disclosure. The letter of intent from the bi man was rated as more inappropriate than the letter from the gay man, and both were rated as less appropriate than the strong-willed man. This is probably because of all the things we have already discussed, including people seeing bisexuality as something sexual and personal, rather than an identity. Putting that you are bisexual in a cover letter might be read by some as saying, unprompted, that you like threesomes . . . which would be a brazen thing to put in a job application.

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.”