Most people eagerly, and happily, embrace a sexual identity. Whether gay, lesbian, or straight, these identities, to a large degree, clear up a lot of confusion and often bring understanding, acceptance, and comfort to the people who claim them and to those around them. Everybody knows where they are on the map of who wants whom. But one sexual identity seems to lead to confusion: bisexual. This term is often—but not always—claimed by men and women who desire both men and women.
In the popular imagination, people are presumed to desire either men or women. This method of sorting people’s desires controls and manages sexuality by eliminating gray areas. In reality, sexuality overflows such specific categories. It often refuses to be contained by social conventions and cultural certainties. Many people who identify as bisexual may desire one sex more than another. Others would say they desire men and women about equally. A bisexual person might desire both men and women, or desire men for a period of time and then women. Bisexuality offers a language for describing the fluidity of desire.
However, this ambiguity generates anxiety and condescension, often directed at bisexual people. We suppose, and often insist, that we know exactly what we do and do not want sexually. No wonder that bisexuals pose a problem. The two statements in this myth regarding bisexuality—that bisexual men are actually gay, and bisexual women are actually straight—are really saying the same thing: bisexuals can’t seem to make up their minds about whether they like men or women.
Popular understandings and representations of bisexuality operate firmly within a system of two distinct genders. Because this gender binary quickly becomes a gender hierarchy, there are very different social rules and cultural expectations for bisexual men and bisexual women. When a woman is sexually available to at least one man, no matter how many women she has sex with, she gets placed back into the category of heterosexuality. Her sexual relationships with other women are not taken seriously (see myth 13, “Lesbians Do Not Have Real Sex”). Women are typically seen as sexual objects rather than as subjects capable of exercising agency and autonomy in their sexual choices. This leads to the cultural delusion that any woman who is attractive to a man must be, at some level, straight because she has incited his desire.
On the other hand, men who are attracted to men suffer a status loss by challenging the sexual supremacy of all men who desire women. In a culture that identifies male homosexuality with the feminine, sex with another man could contaminate all masculinity unless it is quarantined in some way. For bisexual men, the assumption is one gay strike and you’re out. This serves to preserve the fiction of a secure and stable male heterosexuality (see myth 5, “Most Homophobes Are Repressed Homosexuals”).
Self-identified bisexuals have been trapped in this two-sided myth since “bisexual” was first widely claimed as an identity during the sexual liberation movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. Since that time, the idea of bisexuality has had a complicated journey through American culture. A 1974 article in Time magazine, “The New Bisexuals,” listed factors other than women’s desire itself as causes of female bisexuality. These included the revelations of the Kinsey studies, feminism, and “the emphasis by [sex therapists] Masters and Johnson, among others, on the clitoral orgasm that has led to more sexual experimentation.” In the 1970s, the concept of bisexuality was touted by the media as an edgy new lifestyle personified by glam rock superstars, nightclubbing at trendy discos, and a let-it-all-hang-out ethos.1
Numerous celebrities were associated with bisexuality, with some openly claiming the identity, such as Janis Joplin. Other celebrities became associated with bisexuality because they represented a kind of omnivorous sexuality: everybody wanted them. Whether their devoted fans wanted to be them or have them sexually was an open question. Performers such as Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Grace Jones presented themselves as open to any sexual stimulus. Suspecting or even knowing a particular celebrity was bisexual was not the same thing as knowing whom and how she or he actually loved, desired, and organized a life. These celebrities were mirrors of their fans’ desires and fantasies, not the truth of bisexuality.
The era of 1970s bisexual chic may have faded, but it’s still with us today in less flamboyant ways. In recent years, many Hollywood celebrities and pop stars, such as Madonna, Sandra Bernhard, Angelina Jolie, Drew Barrymore, Alan Cumming, Anna Paquin, and Lady Gaga, have either come out as bisexual or been labeled as such by the media. Many men’s magazines, such as Complex and COED, feature lists and photos of the hottest female bisexual celebrities, meant to inspire fantasies of lesbian sex for the magazines’ readers. And think of the titillating covers of the National Enquirer “exposing” the bisexual history of stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Tila Tequila. Tequila built an entire reality show around the drama of her bisexuality: would she choose a woman or a man from the suitors vying for her hand? Celebrity culture simultaneously popularizes bisexual identity and perpetuates clouds of confusion as to its meaning.
Bisexuality can mean so many different things to so many different people that it can lead to the idea that it is a sexuality out of control. This is a common stereotype all bisexuals confront. If they desire both men and women, they could never be monogamous with anyone. This thinking imagines bisexuals as sexually immature, unable or unwilling to commit to any one person because they cannot commit to one, stable sexual desire.
There are echoes of this accusation of immaturity in the claim that bisexuality is just a phase. The presumption is that eventually all bisexuals will grow into a more mature sexuality, gay or straight. This same infantilization of bisexual people also helps shape the popular perception, and fear, that their desires are dangerously selfish. As the AIDS epidemic grew in the United States during the 1980s, both gay and straight people distanced themselves from bisexual men, accusing them of spreading HIV from gay men to straight women. This is still true today in uninformed and fear-driven public discussions about men on the “down low” who have sex with men but don’t identify as gay. These panicked and judgmental discussions about the down low are frequently featured on television talk shows and in many women’s magazines. The message here is clearly that men who can’t decide on their sexual desires are not to be trusted.
In lived experience, bisexuality comprises the complexity of any person’s sexuality, independent of the outside perceptions of others. When it comes to the actual life of desire—what people do, versus what they say—there is certainly a lot more bisexual experience of some kind than is reflected in the number of people who identify as bisexual. Many straight people have a history of bisexual activity but do not identify as “bi.” Sexologist Alfred Kinsey demonstrated this in the 1940s and 1950s. His studies indicate that the huge, exclusively heterosexual majority was a lie. Almost half of all people in the United States were aroused by both sexes or had engaged in both homosexual and heterosexual behavior at some point in their lives (see myth 2, “About 10 Percent of People Are Gay or Lesbian”).
Our memories confirm this. Many straight men and women first learn to love, open up, and let go in the context of passionate same-sex friendships, and even erotic same-sex crushes. These early same-sex passions may or may not have involved sex, but they can and do help us learn what we find pleasurable and why we are attracted to people. Sometimes desire can be stirred by seeing and wanting people who are like us in gender or sexual expression. Sometimes we desire people who are very different from us. People can also be attractive to others for how their gender combines masculinity and femininity. There are masculine men who are attracted to more-masculine-looking women and others who are attracted to more-feminine-looking men. Is this being attracted to a mix of male and female qualities in one person a form of bisexuality? One early and influential understanding of bisexuality—advanced by Sigmund Freud—focused on the co-presence of male and female characteristics in one person. Everyone, Freud argued, was in this sense bisexual. Whom they desired—men or women—reflected the particular balance of this mix in them and the other person.
All too often, though, early same-sex relationships do not fit with later experiences and self-identifications. The formative role they play in the later loves of straight people gets written out. Consider the different kind of pressure experienced by many gay people, who may feel constrained never to mention their childhood cross-sex crushes lest that somehow make people think they are not really gay—a risk for gay men and lesbians in a culture that prefers everybody be straight. Does this mean that the straight person with a same-sex crush or friendship in his or her past is really bisexual? Or that the gay person with a history of cross-sex crushes is as well? You would have to ask those people. Identities mean different things to different people, and they do not explain any person’s entire sexuality. For example, a woman who identifies as lesbian may have slept with men in her past. She might even do so occasionally in her present. Does this history trump how she self-identifies? If so, who decides?
People may edit out such passionate bisexual lessons in how to love from their histories of desire for much the same reason others may claim their bisexuality. This is due to changing social and cultural circumstances. One half of a heterosexual couple might be same-sex-attracted or curious to erotically explore with someone of the same sex. The opposite might be true within same-sex couples. People in these situations may explain their feelings, to themselves and others, by saying they are bisexual. But they might not say that to everyone for fear of embarrassment or of being judged. Alternatively, identifying as bisexual is sometimes a transitional stage to claiming a heterosexual or homosexual identity. Many gay men identify as bisexual for fear of being stigmatized as gay and as a way to ease their transition into a gay identity. They are not simply confused about what they really want and really are. Many bisexuals might even identify as gay for political reasons when in the company of straight people, but might identify as bi when talking to bi-phobic gay people.
Bisexual men and women continue to organize on college campuses, form support groups, and argue—sometimes in the face of openly hostile lesbians and gay men—that they are not undecided, but people with a clearly defined identity. This does not settle the question of what bisexuality is. How bisexuals think, feel, desire, and act is different for every bisexual—just as it is for everyone else. Bisexuality is no messier than other forms of sexual identity or desire.
Bisexual identity brings into the open features common to all sexual desire and identities. That erotic life is far more varied and variable than the tidy identity boxes we check off does not mean that everyone is really bisexual. The ongoing social resonance and currency of bisexuality in our culture, whether we are resistant to it or comfortable with it, demonstrate that none of us, no matter how we self-identify, wants to lose out on where our desires might lead us. Perhaps allowing for the multiple realities of bisexual identity and experience can teach us something about the rich surprises sexual desire can offer over the course of a lifetime.