Bisexuality

Bisexuality, the sexual attraction to both men and women, has long been considered incompatible with masculinity. While a few early experts on sexuality, such as Havelock Ellis and Alfred Kinsey, acknowledged bisexuality as an important facet of human sexuality, most distinguished male bisexuality from a secure heterosexual masculine identity. Most writers also identified bisexuality as a form of homosexuality, which they likewise defined as being in opposition to normative heterosexual masculinity. When bisexuals began to organize in the 1970s, they challenged the conventional binaries of masculinefeminine and heterosexual-homosexual that had long been used to define dominant American concepts of manhood.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization, and immigration generated among many American men a sense that masculinity, and therefore the social order itself, was in crisis, psychologists and other social scientists interested in sexuality and its relation to society created the category of bisexuality. Most experts, using emerging evolutionary theories of human society, interpreted bisexuality (like homosexuality) as a form of psychological and social deviance—or as a stage preceding the formation of mature heterosexual identity. The bisexual male was thus stigmatized as an incomplete man and a potential threat to social order. This attitude prevailed through the mid-twentieth century, as two world wars and an extended economic depression in the 1930s reinforced beliefs linking heterosexual manhood to national strength.

American perceptions of bisexuality and its relation to masculinity began to change in 1948, when the publication of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male prompted scholars to acknowledge and discuss bisexuality as a common phenomenon among adult men, and to rethink the notion of normative heterosexual manhood. Yet most of the literature on male sexuality continued to categorize bisexuality as a variety of homosexuality, thus retaining the heterosexual-homosexual dyad that structures U.S. understandings of sexual identity, and also leaving bisexual men without a clear theoretical basis for conceptualizing bisexual maleness.

Attempts by bisexual men to develop bisexual male identities received a new impetus and visibility with the emergence of the modern gay rights and liberation movement in the late 1960s. Many bisexuals were active in New York's early Gay Liberation Front (GLF), founded in 1969 to “free the homosexual in everyone.” Like contemporary womanist and feminist organizations, the GLF challenged traditional gender concepts, a stance that allowed for the inclusion of bisexual men. But as gay activism turned to rights-based strategies during the early 1970s and embraced the dominant culture's heterosexual-homosexual binary, bisexual activists founded their own organizations, including the National Bisexual Liberation Group, founded in 1972. That same year the Quaker Committee of Friends on Bisexuality issued its “Ithaca Statement on Bisexuality,” which distinguished bisexual from homosexual identity (the statement was published in the Advocate, a national gay news magazine). Other bisexual [Page 54]organizations followed, including the Bisexual Center, founded in San Francisco in 1976, and BiWays, established in Chicago in 1978. Except for the Bisexual Center, most of these early organizations were dominated by men and heavily concerned with challenging prevailing paradigms of male sexuality and masculine gender roles. Early activism by homosexual and bisexual men helped produce some major successes, including the decision by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) to remove homosexuality as an illness from its diagnostic manual in 1973.

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