Bi

already in the fifties people realized that not all animal sexual contacts had to do with reproduction, and that this focus was—as Kinsey wrote—“a distortion of the fact which appears to have originated in a man-made philosophy.”

The genetics suggest that it is an oversimplification to assume that the more someone is attracted to the same sex, the less they are attracted to the opposite sex.”

Bisexual women were seen as failed lesbians at best and sexual predators at worst.

prejudicial views that bisexual women are “fence sitters” who are “dangerously untrustworthy because of their associations with men.”30 Again, bisexuals were seen to be sleeping with the enemy. But in this case the enemy wasn’t straight people, the enemy was men.

This meant that in the 1980s bisexual women were not welcomed in many lesbian spaces because they were perceived as a threat to the feminist cause.

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.”

Why didn’t I 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. Had I known about bi history I would have thought about this very differently.

more young people than ever are identifying as bisexual, and it seems that many people are open to falling in love with someone regardless of their gender.

When we asked 18 to 24 year olds to choose what best described their sexuality in 2015 just one in fifty (2 percent) said they were bisexual. Our latest data . . . shows that one in six (16 percent) now choose this option—an eight-fold increase.”

I like how American bisexual activist Robyn Ochs eloquently put it in 2009: “[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.”