Bisexuality

Historical Background

Bisexuality is best understood through the labeling theory of deviance. As a social construction, the term has limited historical usage. The label and the concept of one having a sexual identity date to the explosion of sexual studies that began in the late 19th century (e.g., by authors such as Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, & Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs). Prior to the scientific study of sexualities, same-sex eroticism was conceived of in terms of individual sexual acts. For example, it would be inaccurate to describe pederasts in ancient Greece as homosexual or bisexual. Those relationships between an adolescent boy and an older male were acknowledged in society as rites of passage into either the military [Page 62]or religious life (see Bertosa, 2009; Koehl, 1986) or as part of a pedagogical relationship (see Percy, 1996). Nicholas Edsall (2003) reports that in the 19th century, Great Britain, France, and Germany, some men, even some involved in heterosexual relationships, engaged in same-sex erotic acts with other males. The best extant records for the prevalence of such activity are criminal justice records (although these are inconsistent and contingent on the level of social and criminal repression of homosexual acts). Regardless, H. G. Cocks (2003) reports that convictions for “unnatural acts” in England during the period 1806–1896 never rose above 1 per 100,000 population. Relationships between men were experienced in terms of age, class, and social standing: The role of the recipient male was reserved for the young, underclass. While not entirely socially acceptable, as long as the man with higher social standing was in the active rather than passive role in the male-to-male sexual exchange, less stigma was attached to the practice. The history of female bisexuality has been lost to the ages as men have been the subject of historical documentation much longer than females and women's sexuality is commonly repressed in patriarchal societies. It was not until the second wave of feminism, lasting from the early 1960s through the 1980s, that female sexuality began to be taken seriously; however, even then, bisexual and homosexual women were marginalized early in the movement. Bisexuality has long been associated with the artistic and intellectual communities of the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Bloomsbury Circle of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and others, and the “Pansy Craze” that grew out of the emergence of the homosexual communities of Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York.

Bisexuality and Identity

There is a distinction between bisexual behavior and the relatively recent emergence of the bisexual identity. The sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956) posited from his data that the majority of people he and his colleagues interviewed were bisexual on the basis that they at some time or another either fantasized about or engaged in same-sex acts even though they may have identified as heterosexual. In the 1970s, researchers such as Vivienne Cass (1979; see Fox, 2004, for an annotated bibliography; see Klein, 1993, for commentary) put forth that bisexuality was an immature sexual phase one moves to on the way to true homosexuality. Such conceptions are now under question and sexual labels are viewed with greater degrees of fluidity. In response to the sexual phase concept, others have written that changes in sexual label are associated with changes in friendship and family members and the introduction of vocabulary that allows for this fluid, less determinant sexual identity. As such, researchers are today much less likely to apply a sexual label to study participants than was the Kinsey team. Modern sexuality researchers allow their participants to define their sexuality themselves without imposition of a label based strictly on behavior. Such modern studies find that people identify as bisexual with much less frequency than Kinsey (1948/1998) reported, although they may have same- and opposite-sex sexual and romantic attractions. What remains of bisexuality from Kinsey is that sexuality is now viewed along a continuum from exclusive different-sex attraction to exclusive same-sex attraction with bisexuals being understood to have sexual and romantic attractions to both males and females.

...