Bi Quotes

“To exclude bisexuality from discussions of history, culture, or science is to belittle the human capacity for love and attraction. It also means that people with bisexual desires are often left abandoned in their search for a place in the world.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“As a friend of mine, a Black gay man in his sixties, recently told me when we were discussing his life during the AIDS crisis, “I have whole phonebooks of people I lost.” He said it so matter-of-factly. Every time I think of this conversation a profound sadness overcomes me. The unfairness of it, the tragedy. When I meet gay people now, and specifically gay men who are old enough to have been teenagers or adults through the 1980s and the 1990s, I have an immediate sense of respect. It’s possible that this is a similar feeling that others get when they meet a war veteran. Many of our queer elders fought for their lives, and for our rights, and only some survived to tell the tale.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Rather than being 'this not that' I am this *and* that... I've felt like a blossoming flower. As I become more fully me and as I'm more comfortable with each petal of my identity, I open myself up and look into the sun... As someone who identifies as bisexual and does see the world on a multitude of plains, my intellect and creativity, my head and my heart, are just further parallels of how I am able to find myself attracted to and love both men and women.

[Participant quote from the study 'The positive aspects of a bisexual self-identification' in Psychology and Sexuality 1 (2) by S. Scales Rostosky, D. E. Riggle, and D. Pascale-Hague pp.131-44]”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“The reason the alliance between trans and bi people is so natural is that both represent a fluidity and a destruction of binaries that make people uncomfortable.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“The structures of sexual oppression run through everything, including legal systems, but most importantly they run straight through our minds. Let us burn our blindfolds and embrace the human capacity to love freely.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“we need deeds not words.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Valuing honesty impacts bisexuals differently than straight or gay parents—whereas all might uphold honesty as a family value, only bisexuals grapple with how living day-to-day in a monogamous relationship might be interpreted as deceitful unless they disclose their bisexuality to others.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“There are many excellent reasons to not want to reveal your sexual identity, and the idea that queer people need to bare their sexual soul publicly in order to be true to themselves is fraught with problems.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“This means that a gay rights activist coined the word heterosexual as a by-product of creating the word homosexual.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Specifically, participants said they cherished five types of freedom that came from being bisexual, including the freedom to love without regard for biological sex or gender, freedom from social labels and gender roles, freedom to explore diverse relationships and experiences like consensual nonmonogamy, and freedom of sexual expression. Finally, participants stated they experienced “freedom to live authentically and honestly.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Rather than being “this not that,” I am this and that. . . . I’ve felt like a blossoming flower. As I become more fully me and as I’m more comfortable with each petal of my identity, I open myself up and look into the sun . . . as someone who identifies as bisexual and does see the world on a multitude of planes, my intellect and creativity, my head and my heart, are just further parallels of how I am able to find myself attracted to and love both men and women.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Specifically, participants said they cherished five types of freedom that came from being bisexual, including the freedom to love without regard for biological sex or gender, freedom from social labels and gender roles, freedom to explore diverse relationships and experiences like consensual nonmonogamy, and freedom of sexual expression. Finally, participants stated they experienced “freedom to live authentically and honestly.” As”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Society’s biphobia runs through our veins from an early age, even if we don’t recognize it as such.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Your sexuality is political, whether you want it to be or not.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Appearing in neo noir, erotic thrillers, teen dramas, supernatural science fiction and horror and retro noir, the bisexually active femme fatale appears to be everywhere,”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Through this hypersexualization, a woman’s bisexual identity becomes a vehicle through which she is dehumanized and denied agency, diminished to a trope in the straight male sexual fantasy repertoire and, consequently, ensconced in the straight male psyche as a constantly willing sexual plaything.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Bisexual people of color live with a complex intersection of identities, facing binegativity, racism, and invisibility,”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Those who did were often placed in other prisons afterward because homosexual activity remained a crime in Germany until a partial repeal of the law in 1969, and its abolition in 1994.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“Kinsey flipped around sexual norms; instead of heterosexuality being the default, he thought that bisexuality was.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality

“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.”
― Julia Shaw, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality