Bisexual/Bicurious

Bisexuality refers to one of four main classifications of sexual orientation—homosexual, heterosexual, asexual, and bisexual. The term homosexual describes people who are sexually attracted to members of the same sex, heterosexual describes people attracted sexually to the opposite sex, asexual describes those who do not experience [Page 65]sexual attraction, and bisexual refers to people who have sexual attraction to people of both sexes. Each of these categories (with the exception of asexual) relies on sexual dualism (the belief that there are two and only two sexes from which two genders flow). In response to this critique, some people who might have been defined as bisexual in previous times have adopted the term polysexual.

Bicurious is a term used to refer to someone who has not taken on a bisexual identity but has some interest or sexual desire for someone of the same sex. It usually implies that the person in question has had limited experience or opportunity to explore such interests and therefore may not be ready to adopt and commit to a bisexual identity. Social stigma may also add to a person's reluctance to adopt a bisexual identity.

Although bisexuality is often stigmatized in Western culture, there are waves of bisexual chic, when bisexuality almost seems fashionable. The term bisexual chic was coined in the 1970s, with the emergence of gender ambiguous (so-called glam rock) stars who publicly identified as bisexual. However, this period of bisexual chic was short-lived. With the emergence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, attitudes about bisexuals shifted dramatically. AIDS and HIV became inextricably linked to homosexuality in the United States, and bisexuals (particularly male bisexuals) were stigmatized as vectors of disease, or a conduit through which HIV was spread from the “gay” community to unsuspecting heterosexuals.

What emerges from this discussion is that bisexuality is a contentious and contested issue. There is ambiguity over its definition, there are questions about the stability of bisexuality as a discrete category throughout the life cycle, and some researchers and activists doubt its very existence. This entry lays out the history of the term, paying attention to the roles that scholarship (particularly the social sciences) has played in its codification as well as the debates that surround it.

Bisexuality (like the three other major orientations) was first codified in the 19th century. The first use of the term was by the German sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886. For Krafft-Ebing, bisexual was a type of person. The term was taken up by Sigmund Freud, who was really the first to argue that bisexuality was an inherent universal condition. For Freud and others, human beings were all constitutionally bisexual. The popularity of psychoanalysis in the United States arguably led to an era of bisexual chic in the 1920s, despite the Freudian position that with proper psychosexual development, the healthy person would emerge heterosexual.

With the publication of the Kinsey Reports, sexologist Alfred Kinsey reignited cultural awareness of sexual orientation in general and bisexuality in particular. In both volumes known as the Kinsey Reports, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), Kinsey argued that bisexuality was in fact far more common than previously thought. Kinsey further articulated a nuanced conceptualization of sexual orientation with the development of his sexual-orientation scale. The Kinsey model is a 7-point scale, which ranges from exclusive heterosexuality, represented as a 0 (zero) at one extreme, and exclusive homosexuality, represented as a 6 on the other end of the scale—bisexuality is regarded as a 3, when a person is equally attracted to both sexes. Depending on where the lines are drawn on the continuum, bisexuality becomes difficult to define. In some sense, anyone placing themselves between 1 and 5 on the Kinsey scale could be considered bisexual as they do not define as either 0 (exclusively heterosexual) or 6 (exclusively heterosexual). A bisexual designation does not require a person to be equally attracted or active with both sexes.

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