I’m glad I met a guy who encouraged me to be me. Otherwise I might never have had the experience with women that I’ve had. I was afraid. I never felt that I was “abnormal” sexually, but I was afraid that other people would think so if they knew. Now I know different. I dig making love with women. I dig making love with men. It’s nice to groove.
Another woman responded this way:
Philosophically, I see bisexuality as the best of all possible worlds in terms of freedom and humanism. Personally I am bisexual and I feel I have always been and could not be any other way. I will have my preferences but will never deny myself the pleasure of feeling arousal toward men and women. I feel badly for people who have shut this fact out of their lives, much less those who have not even the slightest notion of its existence.
So the majority of people at the Forum had positive feelings about their own bisexuality but felt the pressures of the heterosexual and homosexual communities, which tended to create confusion, doubt, and fear about themselves and their sexual inclinations.
If and when a large bisexual community emerges, it will probably change the bisexual’s image of him/herself and change society’s image too. As one young man wrote, tersely but eloquently, “Should be no big deal, but is.”
NOTES
Note 1
Some of the major findings on bisexuality are presented here, starting with Kinsey et al., whose monumental survey is in some respects still the most exhaustive ever undertaken. Kinsey found that 50 percent of the male population had never had an overt homosexual experience, nor reacted erotically on a psychological level toward another man. So 50 percent of white American males were at 0 on the Kinsey scale. Four percent were found to be completely homosexual. That leaves 46 percent in bisexual categories 1-5. Of course one must keep in mind that this 46 percent includes all men beyond puberty and might reflect only one sexual experience with the same gender or minimal psychological or erotic feeling toward it.
Looking at men who had erotic reactions or actual experiences over a three-year period in their lives between the ages of 16 and 55, Kinsey found that:
70% of his sample were 0 (completely heterosexual) on the 0-6 heterosexual-homosexual scale
5% were 1 (incidentally homosexual)
7% were 2 (more than incidentally homosexual)
5% were 3 (equally heterosexual and homosexual)
3% were 4 (more than incidentally heterosexual)
2% were 5 (incidentally heterosexual)
8% were 6 (completely homosexual)
Combining categories 1-5, we see that 22 percent of the population can be considered bisexual if the above three-year experience is used as a basis for determination. (This three-year standard is arbitrary, and in my opinion not in any way really significant.) If we eliminate incidental experiences, this leaves 15 percent of the male population (categories 2, 3, and 4) as bisexual.
The ability to eroticize both genders is one dimension of bisexuality. Forty-six percent of the male population possesses this capability. If we consider only the ability to carry this capability into actual practice, the percentage of bisexuals in the population is 33 percent (Kinsey having found that 13 percent of the men had erotic reactions to other men without having had any actual experience).
For women, Kinsey found the incidence of homosexuality and bisexuality to be much lower than for men. For the 20 to 35 age group the following figures were established:
Categories 0 to 6 have been defined before. Category X applies to women who did not respond erotically to either heterosexual or homosexual stimuli, and did not have overt physical contacts with individuals of either sex.
To quote Kinsey:
Among the females, the accumulative incidences of homosexual responses had ultimately reached 28 per cent; they had reached 50 per cent in the males. The accumulative incidences of overt contacts to the point of orgasm among the females had reached 13 per cent; among the males they had reached 37 per cent. This means that homosexual responses had occurred in about half as many females as males, and contacts which had proceeded to orgasm had occurred in about a third as many females as males.
Kinsey published his figures for men in 1948 and his figures for women in 1953. How do his statistics hold up after a quarter of a century? In the main they have not changed to any great degree.
Morton Hunt surveyed sexual behavior in the 1970s and published his findings in 1974 in Sexual Behavior in the Seventies. He found no increase in homosexual behavior on the part of his respondents. In fact, he felt that Kinsey’s figures for males were somewhat too high, while his were too low. In general, they weren’t far apart.
Two magazine surveys are of interest. (Though both had a very large response, care needs to be taken in their interpretation– voluntary responses to a magazine survey aren’t representative of the total population.) In 1975, 100,000 women answered a Redbook survey on sexual pleasure. The responses were similar to Kinsey’s: 10 percent of the separated or divorced women had sexual experience with other women; 4 percent of all who responded did so, with college-educated women having more overt lesbian activity than high school graduates.
In January 1977 Psychology Today published a survey on masculinity in which 68 percent of the male respondents considered themselves heterosexual and 6 percent homosexual, while 29 percent had some bisexual experience, of which 6 percent defined themselves as bisexual. These percentages are remarkably close to Kinsey’s original statistics.
As mentioned above, in his major 1991 study of self-defined bisexuals, Ron Fox discussed when they first used the word “bisexual” to define themselves and to whom they disclosed this information.
Note 2
Using some of the statistics from Kinsey, there are 11 times as many bisexuals as homosexuals if capability of erotic feelings toward both sexes is the criterion used. If one defines a bisexual in Kinsey’s survey of men between the ages of 16 and 55 as someone who had sexual experiences with both sexes during the three-year period preceding being interviewed, then there are twice as many bisexual males as homosexual males (defining homosexual as fitting into categories 5 and 6 on Kinsey’s scale).
The 1993 study by John Billy et al as well as some of the international surveys in the early 1990s indicated that the bisexual population is between 2 and 3 times as large as the homosexual population.
Note 3
There have been a number of studies on homosexuals both in their subculture and in the population in general. Some of these have asked respondents questions about heterosexual activity–in other words, bisexuality. The studies quite consistently found that 50 percent of male homosexuals, whether they are self-defined as such or part of the homosexual subculture (bars, dances, or gay organizations), have in their histories experienced heterosexual activity. This figure was constant in the 1973 Saghir and Robins survey, a survey by Rick Shur of male homosexuals at New York City gay dances in 1974, and even a large 1974 German survey by Dannecker and Reiche. For female homosexuals the figure is higher, with over 75 percent of the “lesbian” respondents having had heterosexual experiences.
Dividing people for purposes of study into only two groups, “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” which is done most of the time, and defining all people at gay dances or all men found in gay bars as “homosexual,” has the effect of lumping bisexuals into these groups and makes interpretation of the results extremely difficult. For example, 96 percent of the respondents in the Dannecker and Reiche survey were considered to be homosexuals in that at the time of the survey 83 percent had no heterosexual activity at all, while another 13 percent had only incidental heterosexual activity.
The authors eliminate the bisexual category altogether, explaining it as a way station to homosexuality or as a social subterfuge. But how then should we interpret the fact that 56 percent of the men had previous sexual experience with women while another 10 percent were or had previously been married? Or consider this: in Shur’s survey of men at gay dances the respon
dents were asked if they had a strong preference for their own sex. This question was asked “in order to establish that the respondents were gay.” Ninety-six percent answered yes to this question. But then what do the following responses mean: 30 percent were attracted to women enough to consider having sexual relations with them, and 60 percent had defined themselves as bisexual at one time or another.
There seems to be no doubt that a large percentage of those considered homosexual in sociological studies would more properly be considered bisexuals–including many of those who have defined themselves as homosexuals. This would seem to be a fact of long standing. In a study of gay couples who had been living together at least one year, Drs. McWhirter and Mattison found that only 15 percent could be considered to be in the 6 category on the Kinsey scale; 25 percent had previously lived with a woman from six months to a year, and 65 percent had had at least one heterosexual experience after puberty, most having had many. Though at the time of the study few respondents had any concurrent heterosexual activity, 75 percent had occasional heterosexual fantasies and only 25 percent exclusively homosexual fantasies.
Note 4
Kinsey found that 2 percent of the older men and close to 10 percent of the younger ones (ages 16-25) had homosexual experience while married in the previous five years. He stated that for a number of reasons the figures for older men were probably in reality higher. Hunt found a 1 percent bisexual experience rate in the previous year, the same percentage as in the 1991 Dutch study of van Zessen and Sandford. The three figures correspond in the sense that a lower figure has to be expected for one year’s activity compared to activity spread over five years. There are no statistics on cumulative numbers. For women the number is lower. Kinsey found that 8 to 10 percent of married women between the ages of 20 and 35 had bisexual experience each year. For active incidence the figure would be around 1 percent (Hunt). The figures for separated and divorced men and women are of course higher. When one looks at the statistics for homosexual groups, the following marriage figures apply: anywhere from 1 to 5 percent of self-identified homosexuals are presently married. As for previously married homosexuals, the figures are 5 to 24 percent. Self-defined female homosexuals were more often previously married than male ones. In her survey of self-identified bisexual women, Janet Bode found that 17 percent were married at the time of the survey.
CHAPTER 9
The Bisexual in History and the Arts
THE BISEXUAL IN HISTORY
All too frequently, people fail or refuse to recount, or even remember, the past–the good and the bad–the way it really was. Instead, we revise and misrepresent it to serve current needs, wishes, fantasies, or political purposes, or to shore up cherished values. History becomes a tool, a weapon to control the present and mold the future. For a long time, for example, the Battle of Little Big Horn was served up to white American as a story of American soldiers who “died with their boots on,” bathed in glory, instead of in stupidity, cruelty, and pointless bloodshed. By such historical sleight of hand, the descendants of Sitting Bull, right down to the present generation of displaced Indians, are more easily dismissed and forgotten.
Men’s age-old denial of women’s achievements is another glaring example of history used as a weapon. Even though most historians agree that Elizabeth I was the finest monarch England ever had, women’s fitness to rule a nation is still often challenged–and not only by men but even by women who have come to believe in the lie.
In the country that produced the Magna Carta and the parliamentary system of government, Oscar Wilde was put on trial in the 1890s for homosexuality, which exposed a homosexual London underground that included stable boys, clerks, domestic servants and the like. Wilde was convicted and sent to prison. He was branded a homosexual in his time. But he is also exploited as a homosexual in our time. Oscar Wilde was not a homosexual. He was a bisexual. In Oscar Wilde, H. Montgomery Hyde writes:
…we know that at the outset of their married life Wilde was deeply in love with his wife and that they experienced normal sexual intercourse, which resulted in the birth of their two sons. Indeed, he seems to have been an enthusiastic lover. To Sherard, whom he chanced to meet during the honeymoon in Paris, he spontaneously expatiated upon the physical joys of wedlock. And on the occasion of his first separation from his wife, some months later, when he was lecturing in Edinburgh, he wrote to her:
“Here I am; and you at the Antipodes: O execrable fates that keep our lips from kissing, though our souls are one…. The messages of the gods to each other travel not by pen and ink, and indeed your bodily presence here would not make you more real: for I feel your fingers in my hair and your cheek brushing mine. The air is full of the music of your voice, my soul and body seem no longer mine, but mingled in some exquisite ecstasy with yours. I feel incomplete without you.”*
* * *
*See note on permission page.
Before he married, Wilde had developed a reputation at Oxford as a man not only interested in women but highly enamored of them. His casual affairs were many and his love affairs were deeply felt. Montgomery Hyde continues:
His first serious love affair during this early period…was with Florence Balcombe, a girl four years younger than himself. Oscar’s passion for Florrie lasted two years–”the sweetest of all the years of my youth,” so he told her afterwards–and no doubt he wished to marry her.
Before his interest in male sexual partners developed, Wilde had already achieved a reputation as a writer and lecturer not only in England but also in the United States. Had he died during this time we would remember him as a “normal” if somewhat flamboyant heterosexual male. To some, he might have been considered a bisexual because an interest in male physical beauty can be seen in some of his early poems. “He may well have been unaware of its significance at the same time,” Hyde writes, “as his inclinations gradually became bisexual.”
The highly regarded contemporary writer, Gore Vidal, has for years been the target of homosexual gossip. One gets the impression that this bothers him only to the degree that it is not true. He has publicly defended his bisexuality. In 1974, in the afterward to The City and the Pillar, he wrote:
... All human beings are bisexual. Conditioning, opportunity and habit account finally (and mysteriously) for sexual preference, and homosexualists are quite as difficult to generalize about as heterosexualists. They range from the transvestite who believes himself to be Bette Davis to the perfectly ordinary citizen who regards boys with the same uncomplicated lust that his brother regards girls.
When legal and social pressures against homosexuality are particularly severe, homosexualists can become neurotic, in much the same way that Jews and Negroes do in a hostile environment. Yet a man who enjoys sensual relations with his own sex is not, by definition, neurotic. In any event, categorizing is impossible. Particularly when one considers that most homosexualists marry and become fathers, which makes them, technically, bisexuals, a condition whose existence is firmly denied by at least one school of psychiatry on the odd ground that a man must be one thing or the other, which is demonstrably untrue. Admittedly, no two things are equal, and so a man is bound to prefer one specific to another, but that does not mean that under the right stimulus, and at another time, he might not accommodate himself to both.
... In any case, sex of any sort is neither right nor wrong. It is.
We’ve had Kinsey’s heterosexual-homosexual scale for over 40 years now, the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid for over ten. We should use them more often. They could help us clear up the matter of who is and who is not heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Every human being has a right to be judged intelligently for what he or she really is–in all its breadth and complexity–and not be chopped down by society’s clumsy ax to fit its procrustean bed. What follows is a list of notable people, both past and present, whose sexual identities have either been distorted or obscured by our stubborn insistence on the theory of either-or.
Historical
ly, these people tend to be labeled homosexual; in some few cases, heterosexual. In truth they were, and are, most assuredly bisexual. This ongoing propagation of the either-or standard at the expense of the truth is another example of the manipulation of history–an enforcement, in a sense, of the people’s right not to know. When Galileo in the seventeenth century was offered torture and death as the alternative to renouncing his endorsement of the Copernican cosmology, he chose to live–and the people’s “right” not to know that the earth revolves around the sun was carried forward. The theory of the nonexistence of bisexuality is likewise an historical distortion of the truth.
Bisexuals-Past and Present
The history of bisexuality has gone mostly unrecorded. Its records are sparse. To find material I had to search through homosexual history. From there I teased out those people who were actually bisexual rather than homosexual. Historical knowledge of bisexuality will not emerge from the shadows until people at least admit to its reality.
If the reader senses a somewhat strident tone here, the writer pleads guilty; in mitigation, I will say that the stridency is only the companion of the excitement I feel that the bisexual idea’s time has perhaps come at last, that our culture is ready at last to recognize bisexuality’s existence.
A way to begin demonstrating the reality of bisexuality is to encourage a focus on the homosexual or heterosexual act as opposed to the homosexual or heterosexual person. If, for instance, an English businessman travels to France to do business and while there uses what he knows of the French language, we do not therefore call him a Frenchman. The act of speaking French may make him bilingual, but he remains an Englishman. Crossing the language barrier is an act that in no way defines the person except to say that he speaks more than one language. An example more to the point is that of the playwright Tennessee Williams, who was “homosexual” all of his life. In his autobiography, Memoirs, he described having had at least one sexual encounter with a woman. His action (quite successful by his account) was most decidedly heterosexual, but from his autobiography he appears to be almost every level homosexual despite it. Yet there is also some room for him on the bisexual list, because he has a capacity for heterosexual action.
The Bisexual Option Page 15