Bisexuality

• 1. Introduction

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  Bisexuality, defined in multiple ways by researchers and communities alike, sits at one of the most contested intersections of science, identity, and culture. The word itself was coined in the 19th century, in German, by Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his landmark work Psychopathia Sexualis. Charles Gilbert Chaddock then carried it into English in his 1892 translation. Yet the phenomenon the word describes has been observed across recorded history, in human societies and in dozens of other animal species.

  What does it mean to be bisexual? That question sounds simple. The answers are not. Some researchers define bisexuality as romantic or sexual attraction to males and females. Others define it as attraction to more than one gender, or to people regardless of gender identity. The bisexual activist Robyn Ochs offers her own definition: "the potential to be attracted, romantically and/or sexually, to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree."

  Scientists do not know the exact determinants of sexual orientation. What they broadly agree on is that it is not a choice, and that it results from a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences. How bisexuality specifically develops, how common it is, whether it is stable or fluid, and how society has responded to it, are the questions this documentary sets out to explore.

• 2. Measuring Desire

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  Alfred Kinsey, a zoologist, built the most famous attempt to map human sexuality in the 1940s. His scale runs from 0, meaning exclusively heterosexual, to 6, meaning exclusively homosexual. People scoring from 2 to 4 are generally considered bisexual. The sociologists Martin S. Weinberg and Colin J. Williams suggested that in principle anyone from 1 to 5 on that scale could carry the label.

  Kinsey's 1948 work Sexual Behavior in the Human Male contained findings that shocked contemporary readers. He reported that nearly 46 percent of men engaged in both heterosexual and homosexual activities at some point in their adult lives, and that 37 percent had at least one homosexual experience to the point of orgasm since the onset of adolescence. More recent researchers believe Kinsey overestimated same-sex attraction rates, but his work remains among the most well-known sex research ever produced.

  Kinsey himself was skeptical of the word bisexual as applied to individuals. He preferred using the term in its original biological sense to mean hermaphroditic, and he warned against applying it to people who simply engaged in sexual activity with both sexes. That tension between the word and what it describes never fully resolved.

  The Kinsey scale drew criticism for a structural reason: it treats attraction to men and attraction to women as inversely related. A higher score implies less attraction to the opposite sex, which several studies do not support. Psychologist Jim McKnight noted that the implicit idea of bisexuality as a midpoint between homosexuality and heterosexuality has been "severely challenged" since Weinberg and Alan P. Bell published their work Homosexualities in 1978.

  Other researchers developed alternative tools. The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid accounts for sexual attraction, behavior, fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, lifestyle preference, and self-identification. The Shively Scale measures physical and affectional attraction on two separate scales. The Multidimensional Scale of Sexuality uses nine categories evaluated across behavior, attraction, arousal to erotic material, emotional factors, and sexual dreams. Each of these frameworks reflects the same underlying insight: desire is not a single dimension.

• 3. The Science of Cause

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  Magnus Hirschfeld proposed that adult sexual orientation could be traced to the bisexual nature of the developing fetus. He believed every embryo contains one rudimentary center for attraction to males and another for attraction to females. In most fetuses, he argued, the center for opposite-sex attraction developed while the same-sex center regressed. In fetuses that became homosexual, the reverse occurred. Simon LeVay later criticized this theory, saying Hirschfeld failed to distinguish between a brain that is sexually undifferentiated early in development and one that actually produces attraction to both sexes.

  Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, held that every human being is bisexual in the sense of incorporating attributes of both sexes, both anatomically and psychologically. He argued that masculine traits would normally become dominant in men and feminine ones in women, but that all adults retain desires rooted in both sides of their nature. Freud did not claim that everyone experiences equal attraction to men and women. His view of innate bisexuality was rejected by Sandor Rado in 1940, and many later psychoanalysts followed Rado's lead. Rado argued there is no biological bisexuality in humans.

  LeVay's own 1991 autopsy study of 18 homosexual men, 1 bisexual man, 16 presumably heterosexual men, and 6 presumably heterosexual women found that the INAH 3 nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus was smaller in homosexual men than in heterosexual men, and closer in size to that of heterosexual women. The single bisexual subject's INAH 3 size was similar to that of the heterosexual men, though LeVay was careful not to overinterpret a sample of one.

  Prenatal hormone research has offered another line of investigation. The prenatal hormonal theory holds that exposure to excess sex hormones masculinizes the developing brain and increases the likelihood of homosexuality or bisexuality. Studies of congenital adrenal hyperplasia and exposure to diethylstilbestrol found that prenatal exposure to excess testosterone and estrogen respectively is associated with female-female sex fantasies in adults. Both effects are associated with bisexuality rather than exclusive homosexuality. Research on finger-length ratios, specifically the ratio of the index finger to the ring finger, also found a statistically significant skew toward homosexuality, with an even lower ratio in bisexuals, suggesting a link to high prenatal testosterone exposure.

  Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg, and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith reported in their 1981 work Sexual Preference that sexual preference was less strongly linked to pre-adult sexual feelings among bisexuals than among heterosexuals and homosexuals. They suggested this means bisexuality is more influenced by social and sexual learning than exclusive homosexuality. Letitia Anne Peplau and colleagues later described that conclusion as plausible but untested, and at odds with available evidence at the time.

• 4. Identity, Fluidity, and Community

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  Research by Rosario, Schrimshaw, Hunter, and Braun, published in 2006, tracked sexual identity development among lesbian, gay, and bisexual youths over time. Among youths who had identified as bisexual at earlier assessments, 60 to 70 percent continued to identify as bisexual. Approximately 30 to 40 percent shifted to a gay or lesbian identity. The researchers concluded that for some youths, a bisexual identity served as a transitional identity, while for others it was stable.

  Lisa M. Diamond's longitudinal study of women, followed over a ten-year period, reached different conclusions. She found that more women adopted bisexual or unlabeled identities than relinquished them over that span. Bisexual and unlabeled women showed stable overall distributions of same-sex and other-sex attractions. Diamond also studied male bisexuality and found through survey research that almost as many men transitioned at some point from a gay identity to a bisexual, queer, or unlabeled identity as did from a bisexual identity to a gay one.

  A 2013 Pew survey in the United States found that 28 percent of bisexuals said all or most of the important people in their lives knew they were LGBT, compared to 77 percent of gay men and 71 percent of lesbians. When broken down by gender, only 12 percent of bisexual men said they were out, compared to 33 percent of bisexual women. Psychologist Beth Firestein writes that bisexuals tend to internalize social tensions related to partner choice and feel pressured to label themselves as homosexual rather than occupy a middle ground where attraction to more than one sex would conflict with society's expectations around monogamy.

  A YouGov survey found that the proportion of young adults in the United Kingdom identifying as bisexual surged 14 percentage points between 2015 and 2019. Scientific estimates of bisexuality's prevalence have varied widely, from 0.7 to 8 percent. The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior, published in 1993, found that 5 percent of men and 3 percent of women considered themselves bisexual. The first large-scale government survey of Americans' sexual orientation, conducted by the National Health Interview Survey and reported in July 2014, found that 0.7 percent of Americans identified as bisexual, suggesting that many bisexual people remain uncounted in official data.

• 5. Discrimination and Erasure

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  In 2005, researchers Gerulf Rieger, Meredith L. Chivers, and J. Michael Bailey used penile plethysmography to measure the arousal of self-identified bisexual men to pornography involving only men and to pornography involving only women. They concluded that the bisexual men in their sample had arousal patterns similar to either homosexual or heterosexual men, not to both, leading them to state that male bisexuality had not been demonstrated with respect to arousal. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force called both the study and press coverage of it flawed and biphobic.

  The American Institute of Bisexuality stated that Bailey's study was misinterpreted and misreported. In 2011, Bailey and other researchers published a follow-up, this time recruiting from a Craigslist group for men seeking intimacy with both members of a heterosexual couple. They found high levels of arousal to both male and female sexual imagery among men with histories of romantic and sexual relationships with both sexes. The authors acknowledged the recruitment approach may not have produced a representative sample, and they could not establish whether such arousal patterns are typical of bisexual-identified men generally.

  Bisexual erasure refers to the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or explain away evidence of bisexuality in culture, history, academia, and news media. In its most extreme form, it amounts to denying that bisexuality exists at all. It often stems from two competing frameworks: a heterosexist view that assumes people are naturally attracted to the opposite sex and reads bisexuality as experimentation, and a monosexist view that insists attraction can only be genuinely directed at one sex at a time.

  Sociologist Richard N. Pitt Jr., analyzing more than 170 articles published between 2001 and 2006, found that media coverage pathologized black bisexual men's behavior while ignoring or sympathizing with white bisexual men's similar actions. He argued that the black bisexual man was typically depicted as a duplicitous heterosexual spreading HIV, while the white bisexual man was more often portrayed as a victim of heterosexist society. American psychologist Beth Firestone, writing about developments since her first book on bisexuality in 1996, noted that bisexuality has gained visibility, though progress has been uneven and awareness remains minimal in many regions.

• 6. Symbols and History

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  The bisexual flag was designed by Michael Page and unveiled in 1998. Its deep pink stripe represents homosexuality, its blue stripe represents heterosexuality, and a purple stripe blending the two sits in the middle to represent bisexuality. A second common symbol, the biangles, consists of overlapping pink and blue triangles that form a lavender intersection. Artist Liz Nania designed it as she co-organized a bisexual contingent for the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1987.

  Some bisexual individuals object to the use of a pink triangle within that design, as the pink triangle was used in Nazi Germany to identify and persecute homosexuals. In response, Vivian Wagner devised a double crescent moon symbol in 1998, which became common in Germany and surrounding countries.

  Celebrate Bisexuality Day, also known as Bi Visibility Day and observed under several other names, falls annually on September 23. The day recognizes bisexual people, the bisexual community, and the history of bisexuality.

  In early modern times, John Hoyle was an Englishman documented for his bisexuality. Ancient Greeks and Romans did not associate sexual relations with the kinds of defined labels modern Western society uses. Ancient Greek religious texts incorporated bisexual themes ranging from the mystical to the didactic. Among Spartans, erotic relationships between experienced and novice soldiers were thought to build combat loyalty and unit cohesion. The relationship was supposed to become non-sexual once the younger soldier reached maturity, though how consistently that norm held is not clear. Aristophanes used the term euryprôktoi, meaning wide arses, to describe men who continued such relationships into adulthood, depicting them as feminine.

  In the first large-scale American surveys of homosexual behavior, conducted in the 1940s, Alfred Kinsey found that same-sex behavior was far more common than readers expected. His findings contributed to a slow shift in how Western societies understood the range of human sexuality, a shift that continues in the communities, courtrooms, and research institutions that still debate bisexuality today.

• 7. Bisexuality in Art and Media

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  Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography is one of the earliest documented examples of bisexuality in literature. The story of a man who changes into a woman was based on the life of Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West. Woolf used the gender switch as a way to avoid the book being banned for homosexual content. Her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway focused on a bisexual man and a bisexual woman in sexually unfulfilled heterosexual marriages. Following Sackville-West's death, her son Nigel Nicolson published Portrait of a Marriage, one of her diaries recounting an affair with a woman during her marriage to Harold Nicolson.

  In film, the first documented appearance of bisexual characters in an American motion picture occurred in the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment, directed by Sidney Drew. Under the Hays Code, the word bisexual could not be mentioned in American films, and bisexual characters were nearly absent from American cinema between 1934 and 1968.

  Rock musician David Bowie declared himself bisexual in an interview with Melody Maker in January 1972, a move that coincided with the launch of his Ziggy Stardust persona. In a September 1976 interview with Playboy, Bowie said: "It's true, I am a bisexual. But I can't deny that I've used that fact very well. I suppose it's the best thing that ever happened to me." By 1983 he called it "the biggest mistake I ever made," and in 2002 he elaborated: "I don't think it was a mistake in Europe, but it was a lot tougher in America. I had no inclination to hold any banners or be a representative of any group of people. I knew what I wanted to be, which was a songwriter and a performer. America is a very puritanical place, and I think it stood in the way of so much I wanted to do."

  Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong discussed his bisexual identity in a 1995 interview with The Advocate, saying: "I think I've always been bisexual. I mean, it's something that I've always been interested in. I think people are born bisexual, and it's just that our parents and society kind of veer us off into this feeling of 'Oh, I can't.' They say it's taboo. It's ingrained in our heads that it's bad, when it's not bad at all. It's a very beautiful thing."

  R&B artist Frank Ocean came out as bisexual in a Tumblr post in 2012, describing feelings toward a man he had spent his summer with four years earlier. Sex educator Amy Andre, writing about films, observed that bisexual characters are most often depicted as deceptive, over-sexed, unfaithful, and fickle. In other words, as she put it, the bisexual character is nearly always the cause of conflict in the film, a pattern traceable from Basic Instinct through the movies of the early 2000s.