* *NOTE: Last year BiNet USA: The National Network of Bisexuals
did a press kit for local groups to use and to be used as a national resource.
This piece was used in that press kit in a shorter form.
* * *
"Homosexuality was invented by a straight world
dealing with its own bisexuality." - Kate Millett
"I do not in the least underestimate bisexuality...
I expect it to provide all further enlightenment."
- Sigmund Freud
"Even a superficial look at other societies and some groups in our own
society should be enough to convince us that a very large number of human
beings, probably a majority -- are bisexual in their potential capacity for
love... - Margaret Mead
STUDYING BISEXUALITY
Bisexuality is simply sexual, emotional and social attraction to individuals of
both biological sexes. However, as long as everyone is viewed as either
heterosexual or homosexual, bisexuality will be treated as a myth, a
developmental phase, and/or a pathology. Whereas, in 1951 Ford and Beach's
Patterns of Sexual Behavior found socially accepted, normal homosexual
behavior in 64% of the societies they studied.
Modern sex research is further limited by its monosexual framework; the
assumption that everyone is EITHER straight, OR gay -- that attraction for one
gender excludes the other. Such research ignores human diversity. It also
subsumes bisexuality under a discussion of homosexuality. When bisexuality is
lumped with homosexuality it both minimizes bisexuality and keeps the emphasis
on the homosexual side of the equation. For instance, Kinsey found a larger
percentage of bisexuals than homosexuals but this usually goes unrecognized
while people focus on where the (supposedly clear) line is between gay and
straight.
"Given the diversity of human sexual responsiveness, it may be as artificial
to use a three-category system to describe individuals as it is to employ a
two-category system. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize the bisexual
option as an identity because sexual orientation (with the myths that surround
it) is a powerful determinant of social roles and social stigmatization," says
psychologist Jay Paul, urging that "we reexamine our culture's myths and
theories of sexuality in light of existing evidence."
Usually not much distinction is made between bisexuality and homosexuality, or
between how people self-label (identity) versus how they act (behavior). This
confuses things, when looking at percentages, particularly. In the past several
years we have seen media-quoted estimates of the prevalence of
homosexuality/bisexuality ranging all the way from 1% to 20%, -- depending upon
how the study was done and what questions were asked.
Numbers would not be important if love for both genders was regarded as natural.
Numbers will not be accurate as long as people are afraid, for reasons of social
ostracism, to identify as someone who is attracted to their own sex, or to both.
Forty years ago Dr. Alfred Kinsey's Homosexual/Heterosexual Rating Scale
recognized sexual orientation as a continuum of graduations from exclusively
heterosexual to exclusively homosexual -- with most of us falling somewhere in
between. Yet, most of us STILL think in either/or ways. Old habits die hard.
In the 80s Dr. Fritz Klein developed the much improved Klein Sexual
Orientation Grid. It expands on the behavior-focused Kinsey scale by including
attraction, fantasy, social and emotional preference, self identification and
lifestyle factors; all measured along axes of past, present and ideal. This
scale allows us to see sexual orientation as a dynamic multivariable process in
time.
Newer Kinsey Institute studies found both more evidence of bisexuality, and
more denial. A late 80s study, for instance, showed 46 percent of (self-labeled)
lesbians, not bisexuals, reporting having sex with men since in the 80s.
In 1994, three sociologists associated with the Kinsey Institute published
Dual Attraction: Understanding Bisexuality, the first major scientific study
to look seriously at bisexual identity and to challenge the construct of an
innate sexual orientation. It focuses on 100 interviews conducted at the
Bisexual Center in San Francisco in 1983. The researchers returned to the city
in 84-85 to circulate 400 questionnaires to members of three organizations
concerned with sexuality, as a means of comparing the responses of the
self-identified bisexuals (from the Bisexual Center), with responses from
self-identified homosexuals and heterosexuals. In 1988 they returned again and
re-interviewed 61 of the original Bi Center members.
The study concludes that bisexuality, unlike heterosexuality or
homosexuality, is an "add-on" identity. They say that the bisexuals studied
appear to "add" their bisexual identity "on" to an already-developed
heterosexual interest. However they missed many more gay and lesbian identified
biseuxals. And a significant number of bisexuals say adamantly that they do not
see themselves as "half gay/half straight" or even "between gay and straight,"
but have had a sense of themselves as bi from their earliest memories.
As Dr. Maggi Rubenstein, one of the founders of the Bi Center, whose 1982
Ph.D. thesis found self-identified bisexuals ranging, behaviorally, from 1-5
along the Kinsey scale, puts it, "Weinberg did his best. But he didn't quite get
it at times." Interviewed in the bisexual magazine, Anything That Moves,
Weinberg acknowledges "We did not set out to take this and generalize for all
bisexuals. This study showed how bisexuality is formed by opportunities and
support available to bisexuals in a particular time and place. Bis in Kansas
today are not the same as bis in San Francisco then. Even if bisexuality has a
biological basis, bisexuality is formed by context." As, we might add, all
sexuality is.
"GENERAL POPULATION" STUDIES LEAVE US OUT
"AIDS has not spread to the general population yet,
and may never do so..." - Sex in America
For bis, it's often confusing what is meant by the term "general population."
Presumably it doesn't include us, as the majority of people are
heterosexually-identified; and that is usually what the code-word "general
population," implies.
On the other hand, if many, perhaps the majority, of people have the capacity
to behave bisexually, and may choose to do so openly if given encouragement,
then the "general population" does include bisexuals.
The Janus Report on Sexual Behavior,(1993) startled the public with a
reported incidence of same-sex attraction in the general population as at least
20%.
Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (1994) found only 2.8% of men and
1.4% of women who called themselves homosexual or bisexual. They found, however,
that 4% of ALL women and 9% of ALL men reported same-gender experiences. (Still,
it was behavior measured, not fantasies or desires.)
Sex in America's strength is that it is the first to question a large
(3,432 Americans age 13-59) random sample of adults about many aspects of
sexuality. However the authors admit they didn't have a big enough sample of
gays/bis to say anything accurate about America's overall same-gender
experience, much less identity. Therefore, it's hard to take their "less than 3%
of Americans identify as gay or bi" conclusion, in and of itself, as
"definitive."
What about brain studies? None of them have yet studied bisexuals. In The
Sexual Brain Simon LeVay doesn't speak directly of connections of his
research with bisexuality -- just from time to time adds `and bisexual,' as an
afterthought, or as if he wants to cover himself if, as is the case of most
biological phenomena, the biology of sexual orientation is continuous rather
than binary (e.g., a relatively smaller or larger hypothalamic region, a
somewhat different mix of estrogen and testosterone, etc.) Hamer, on the other
hand, in his new book, says that he excludes bi-behavioral people from his
populations in order to get purer, less ambiguous results. Only extremes are
pure, clear?
How is it really possible to separate out identity versus fantasy/attraction
versus actual behavior in such studies? Also, there's a danger that when studies
are done on exclusive heterosexuals and homosexuals it will just be assumed that
bisexuals fall somewhere "in between," while this may not be the case at all.
Those who are attracted to both genders or those who don't care about gender,
may be qualitatively different somehow from those for whom gender is a
determining factor in their attractions.
THE NEW BISEXUALITY RESEARCHERS
While Dual Attraction is the most important document to date, other
emerging research is going further, surveying more diverse groups of bisexuals
from different geographic areas, and drawing less negative conclusions. Also
because of the organized bisexual movement, which has burgeoned since 1987,
researchers now have access to more information on bisexuals' relationships and
on the various routes by which bisexuals arrive at their identities, including
via lesbian and gay identities. This research, which is just beginning to be
reported in professional journals, explores connections between orientation,
gender, and perception of choice. One finding: (gay) men are more likely than
(lesbian) women to view their orientation as determined (rather than chosen or a
combination of determined and chosen).
In the last several years gay scholarship has become noticeably more open to
bisexuality. OUT/LOOK: National Lesbian & Gay Quarterly (Spring 1991) surveyed
638 readers: while 54 percent women and 46 percent men, (using the Kinsey
scale), reported almost exclusively homosexual experiences, more women (14
percent) than men (9 percent) identified themselves as bisexual, and women had
slightly more heterosexual fantasies than men.
A recent survey of bisexuals backs the view that acknowledgement of sexual
orientation is a developmental process. Dr. Ron C. Fox, a San Francisco
psychotherapist who conducted a survey of 835 self-identified bisexual women and
men, found 35% of bisexuals considered themselves gay or lesbian earlier in
their lives. (This population is exactly the population Dual Attraction
virtually ignored.)
"Theories of lesbian and gay development have typically regarded establishing
a lesbian or gay identity as the end point of the coming out process," Fox says.
"Bisexuality was thought to be a transitional experience and identification,"
whereas, in reality, it can be endpoint, phase, or place of recurrent
visitation." Fox's chapter in the new 1995 Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual
Identities Over the Lifespan points out that the common view of bisexuals as
confused is more the result of society's polarization into gay and straight than
anything inherent in the bisexual identity. He mentions that though the American
Psychiatric Association's removal of homosexuality as a diagnostic category
"contributed to a more affirmative view of homosexuality, the dichotomization of
sexual orientation into heterosexuality and homosexuality remained, and
supported the belief that bisexuals were psychologically maladjusted..."
whereas, in fact, no research on non-clinical samples of bisexuals has found any
evidence of psychopathology or psychological maladjustment due to bisexuality.
In fact, some researchers have found that self identified bisexuals are
"characterized by high self-esteem, self confidence and autonomy...and cognitive
flexibility."
Sociologist Paula C. Rust studys attitudes of non-bisexuals towards
bisexuals, as well as bisexuality. She compared lesbian and bisexual women's
self-perceptions of identity, examining data from 365 women - lesbian and
bisexually-identified. She found that self-labelling was at least as much a
result of political views as of actual behavior or experience and that "... the
tension which characterizes relations between lesbian and bisexual-identified
women is not the result of failure to recognize these similarities in
experience. Instead, historical circumstances have led to a situation in which
bisexuality poses a personal and political threat to lesbians and lesbian
politics; the similiarity between lesbians' and bisexuals' experiences
aggravates rather than mitigates this threat." She concludes, "Ironically, the
conceptual changes that produced modern lesbian identity, community, and
politics also began a dialectical process now undermining the basis of lesbian
identity politics and producing the conditions for its transformation."
In Gender and Society Rust compares 60 bi women to 346 lesbians,
mentioning that the bis came out later than the lesbians but that ... coming out
is not linear, that sexual identity formation must be reconceptualized as a
process of describing one's social location within a changing social context."
Changes in sexual identity, she says, "... are therefore expected of mature
individuals as they maintain an accurate description of their position vis-a-vis
other individuals, groups and institutions." In her Journal of Sex Research
article, "Neutralizing the Political Threat of the Marginal Woman: Lesbians
Beliefs about Bisexual Women" Rust further reports that lesbians' beliefs about
bisexual women are changing due to the growing strength of the nascent bisexual
political movement.
As Rust says in her chapter of a forthcoming anthology for counselors of bi
clients, bisexuals are often the pioneers in new forms of relationships and
deserve support for that courage, not condemnation. She points out that there is
a lack of cultural models for polyamorous relationships and that both
polyamorous and same-sex relationships are not given the legal status of
marriage by any state in the U.S. "It is therefore important for mental health
professionals to examine their own stereotypes about bisexuality, question
cultural beliefs about relational maturity and morality, and familiarize
themselves with the issues that arise in polyamorous relationships so that they
can provide bisexuals with the kinds of support and guidance that they generally
do not find elsewhere."
