Julia Shaw on Bisexuality

 



There have been suspicions that bisexuality is probably just a trend for almost fifty years. Newsweek has even declared this boldly twice. In 1974 it published an article titled “Bisexual Chic: Anyone Goes.” Two decades later, in 1995, it ran a cover story with the headline “Bisexuality. Not gay. Not straight. A new sexual identity emerges.” New again?
 
These two articles have been widely mocked in bisexual forums. This is particularly true of the 1995 cover, which includes bright white lettering atop a photo of a woman with short hair wearing an oversized black suit and with her arms crossed. She has a guarded expression on her face and is positioned in front of two men in casual gray T-shirts who stare with emotionless expressions into the camera. The photo is so weird, and so over-the-top nineties that it seems almost satirical.
 
The article itself proclaims things like “bisexuality is the hidden wild card of our erotic culture,” suggests there is “an independent bisexual movement,” and allows a fifteen-year-old to debunk the myth of the hypersexual bisexual while simultaneously reinforcing it with the bizarre quote, “A bisexual… doesn’t have any more sex than the captain of the football team.”
 
Given that a key benefit of being the captain of the (American) football team is having lots of sex, I guess this kid is trying to make it clear that he is promiscuous, but not sexually excessive. The article also in various ways conflates polyamory, promiscuity, and gender fluidity with bisexuality. And it taps into the idea that bisexuality is on the rise with the sentence “Many college students, particularly women, talk about a new sexual ‘fluidity’ on campus,” and quotes a bisexual person saying, “It’s not us-versus-them anymore. There’s just more and more of us.”
 
What I find astonishing is that this article could have been written today, with the exact same misconceptions, uneasy feeling of change, and echoes of optimism. Particularly, this idea that there are just more and more bisexual people is still popular today. But is it true? Before I try to answer that, I need to define what bisexuality is. To do that we are going to head back in time to see where the term came from, and three men with alliterative names who were fundamental in establishing bisexuality as an academic and popular concept: Krafft-Ebing, Kinsey, and Klein.
 
It may surprise you that the use of the term bisexual to refer to human sexuality is almost as old as the term heterosexual. In his book The Invention of Heterosexuality, gay history pioneer and activist Jonathan Ned Katz argues that “the idea of heterosexuality is a modern invention, dating to the late nineteenth century.” The first recorded use of the term was in an anonymous pamphlet in 1869, of which it was later established that Karl-Maria Kertbeny was the author.
 
Kertbeny lived a colorful life. He spent time in many major European cities, where he hung out with celebrities like George Sand and the Grimm brothers, hid from authorities by living in a botanic garden in Leipzig, was briefly a police spy, and was in and out of debtors’ prisons because of a series of failed attempts at being a journalist. In his letters, pamphlets, and books he wrote extensively about his view that sodomy laws violated human rights, and that such consensual sexual acts in private should not be subject to criminal law.
 
While writing, Kertbeny, who was probably gay himself, found the need to label and define the sexual norm so that he could explain how same-sex desires and sexual behaviors contrasted with it. This is why he came up with the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual.” This means that a gay rights activist coined the word heterosexual as a by-product of creating the word homosexual.
 
In the etymology of Kertbeny’s “heterosexual,” “hetero” comes from the Greek heteros which means another, while homos means same, and both are melded with the Latin word sexus. Not long after this, bi, or two, started to be used to refer to people who had both homosexual and heterosexual desires. A way that bisexual researchers often talk about this is that the bi in bisexual means two, but the two are not men and women, they are same and other.

 
Before being adopted to describe human sexuality, the term bisexual was typically used to refer to creatures and plants which are hermaphroditic, so have both male and female reproductive parts. Even today, in the worlds of botany, entomology, and zoology the term bisexual is often used in this way. Roses are an example of a popular bisexual plant.
 
The first use of the word bisexual in English, in the sense of being sexually attracted to people of multiple genders, was probably in 1892 when American neurologist Charles Gilbert Chaddock translated Psychopathia Sexualis, an influential book by the German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in which he detailed what he considered to be sexual disorders in male prisoners. The book was intended for clinical-forensic settings, and Krafft-Ebing wrote it in intentionally difficult language and with parts in Latin so that laypeople couldn’t read it. The book played an important and controversial role in the discussion among psychiatrists at the time who were trying to understand why people have homosexual desires.
 
Why didn’t these terms exist earlier? As sexuality historian Hanne Blank has argued, people in English-speaking countries didn’t really think about sexuality as an identity before this. They didn’t consider they should be “differentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced.” There were words to describe the kinds of sexual behavior people engaged in, but sex was mostly something that people did, not part of who they were.
 
Once sexuality became a hotly political part of identity, people wanted ways to define these new sexual labels. The problem quickly became that what one person meant when they used a label like bisexual was very different from what someone else meant, which is a problem that continues to pose a major obstacle for researchers today.
 
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How many people do you think identify as bisexual today? Depending on who you ask, and how they spend their time, you will probably get very different answers. I need to regularly remind myself that fewer people are bi than I intuitively guess, because my social media feeds make it easy to forget that bisexuality is not the default. We all live in bubbles, and mine is an adorable bi bubble.
 
It is very difficult to get accurate or regular estimates of LGBT+ populations from most countries, especially from countries where homosexual behavior is criminalized. It’s even harder to get information specifically about bisexuality. Still, there are a few studies we can look at. In a summary of eleven studies conducted between 2004 and 2010, including samples from the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Norway, between 0.5 percent and 3.1 percent of participants identified as bisexual. The summary found that among adults who identify as LGBT, bisexual people are the slight majority. It also found that far more people acknowledge at least some same-sex attraction, between 1.8 percent and 11 percent across the studies. This is one of few studies that gives us a sense of international comparison.
 
Other studies can give us some sense as to whether identifying as bi has increased over time. The Office for National Statistics in the UK estimated in 2017 that 2.3 percent of 16-to-24-year-olds identify as bisexual, while a national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US in 2016 placed the rate at 5.5 percent of women and 2 percent of men. Both of these surveys reported increases in the rates of people who identified as bisexual, and that in the youngest age groups more people identified as bisexual than gay or lesbian. The findings are also consistent with research which has found that more young women of color are identifying as bisexual today than in the past. However, these studies only capture people who identify as bisexual.
 
Studies have sought to address this shortcoming by asking people in the UK about their sexuality using the Kinsey Scale, and a series of follow-up questions. Using this scale is clever, because if we ask people directly if they are bisexual or homosexual, many say no either because they identify as heterosexual or because they identify outside of these labels (e.g., pansexual, fluid, or unlabeled).
 
According to the researchers of one study published by YouGov in 2015, “with each generation, people see their sexuality as less fixed in stone. The results for 18–24-year-olds are particularly striking, as 43 percent place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5… classed as bisexual in varying degrees by Kinsey.” Note that “non-binary” here means not entirely homosexual or heterosexual, rather than people whose gender identity is nonbinary. This change toward more flexible conceptualizations of sexuality is exemplified by a follow-up study of people who identify as bisexual conducted by YouGov in 2019.
 
In a summary of the results the researcher writes: “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.” She continues, “More people than ever identify as somewhere between the extremes of the sexuality spectrum.”
 
Replications of the 2015 YouGov survey were conducted in Germany, Israel, and the US. In all three, at least a third of young people identified as neither exclusively homosexual nor exclusively heterosexual, landing them somewhere on the bisexual spectrum. In all three, young people were far more likely than older people to fall on the bi spectrum and to explicitly identify as bisexual. And, in all three, some of the people who placed themselves on a sexual spectrum denied that such a spectrum exists.
 
This I find a particularly fascinating aspect of these studies. In a summary of the 2015 results the researchers wrote, “People of all generations now accept the idea that sexual orientation exists along a continuum rather than a binary choice,” because 60 percent of heterosexuals and 73 percent of homosexuals in their study supported the idea that sexuality is not binary. Although most of their 1,632 participants agreed that “sexuality is a scale—it is possible to be somewhere near the middle,” 12 percent of heterosexuals and 7 percent of homosexuals chose the “don’t know” option. There was also a third option: “There is no middle ground—you are either heterosexual or homosexual.” I know it shouldn’t shock me, but at least a fifth of people in both groups didn’t believe that bisexuality existed—28 percent of heterosexuals and 20 percent of homosexuals indicated that “there is no middle ground” for sexuality.
 
What’s even more amazing to me is that a substantial minority of these individuals were not entirely homosexual or heterosexual themselves: 11 percent of those who identified as a 3 on the Kinsey Scale, and 27 percent of those who identified as a 4 chose this third option. How do you put yourself in the middle of a sexuality scale, and simultaneously deny that people can be in the middle of a sexuality scale?
 
While I cannot tell you why these participants engaged in such dissonance, I can tell you who they were more likely to be. While 32 percent of those over 50 agreed with this statement, this fell to 22 percent of those aged 25 to 35, and 18 percent of those aged 18 to 24. It seems that younger generations are more likely to both identify as bi and to accept bisexuality as a thing.
 
Enjoyably, further supporting the idea that people are becoming more bi-supportive, the 2019 study found that “if the right person came along at the right time,” about 35 percent of those who identified as heterosexual indicated that they could be (i) attracted to a person of the same sex, (ii) have a sexual experience with them, and (iii) have a relationship with them. Many people today in the UK seem to be open to the idea that they could be attracted to people of multiple genders, which is a beautiful thing.
 
While it is unclear whether bisexual behavior is on the rise, 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. Bisexuality is not a fad, or “chic,” or “new”; rather this sexuality label appears to be more accessible and empowering today than it has been in the past.
 
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Excerpted from the new book Bi: The Hidden Culture, Science, and History of Bisexuality by Julia Shaw, PhD, Abrams Press,  2022.
 
  
Nope, Not a Trend: On the Modern Origins and Evolution of Bisexual Identity. By Julia Shaw. LitHub, June 29, 2022.

The number of people who identify as queer in the UK Census has increased over the past few years. This trend is in particular driven by the rising number of LGBT+ identities among people aged 16 to 24 years. The most popular sexual identity within this emerging group is bisexual – the romantic and/or sexual attraction to more than one gender. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) shows an increase from 0.7 per cent in 2015 to 1.1 per cent in 2019. Rather than a sudden new surge of bisexual desires, increased acceptance, legal protection and visibility are likely to be the cause of this increase.
 
But why should we count how many people are bi, or study what their experiences are? Research is young in this field, but we’re already seeing that tossing all queer identities into one research bucket renders the unique struggles of being bisexual invisible. For a start, it’s hard to even get an accurate sense of the exact number of British people who are bisexual. Many people who are attracted to people beyond one gender, shy away from the identity label ‘bisexual’. When it comes to research, this reluctance has led scientists to come up with alternative ways to capture and categorise sexuality.
 
One of the most common tools used is The Kinsey Scale. First published in 1948 by biologist Dr Alfred Kinsey, it is used to place people on a spectrum of sexual attraction between entirely heterosexual and entirely homosexual, using a scale from 0 to 6. It also includes ‘X’ for those who are asexual. It was so successful that it is still the single most popular scale for classifying sexuality. It’s often what people are indirectly referring to when they say, “Aren’t we all a bit bi?”
 
When YouGov surveys conducted in 2019 used questions that mimicked The Kinsey Scale, researchers found at least a third of people aged 18 to 24 say that they are attracted to multiple genders. A startling figure compared to the 1 per cent reporting to the ONS. Only with research can we cut through the reluctance people have to say “I am bisexual”, and find out whether those attracted to multiple genders need more support than those who aren’t.
 
Since social scientists and other researchers have started to analyse the B, we have begun to understand the struggles that uniquely endanger bi people. Research shows us that bi women are hypersexualised, and stereotypes that see bi women as promiscuous sexual playthings feed into people’s existing rape myths.
 
Accordingly, studies have found that bisexual women are significantly more likely to be raped, repeatedly sexually assaulted, and to be the victims of intimate partner abuse than lesbian and heterosexual women. Had this research homogenised all women into one group, we might never have known that the stereotypes affecting bi women specifically place them at far greater risk of sexual victimisation.
 
A different cluster of toxic assumptions awaits bi men. Bisexual men are seen as lying, to themselves and others, because they are thought to be gay. And, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, bi men were also seen as murderers in disguise, catching AIDS when having sex with men and giving it their female partners. This left many bisexual men isolated and alone, failed by educational campaigns that rarely moved beyond gay spaces.
 
We need to acknowledge the unique needs of bi people, including a specific focus on bi men. If we don’t, we fail a huge amount of the population. Armed with bi-specific research, we stand a better chance of winning the fight back against the societal biases and misconceptions that hold bisexual people down.
 
As a young researcher, I didn’t know anyone else who was bisexual in my field, or, for that matter, in any field. It was rarely mentioned, not even in lectures specifically on sex and sexuality. When I graduated with my PhD in 2012, I had no idea how useful my background in criminal psychology would come to be when I turned my gaze to studying bisexuality. For my new book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History And Science Of Bisexuality, I have found and spoken to researchers across the globe and in various disciplines who are all fighting for change.
 
I want the world to be a safer place for people like me. The best way that we can achieve that is to visibly support bi people. Let’s not allow the ‘B’ slip into the shadows of its colourful siblings.
 
 
Why does researching bisexuality matter? By Julia Shaw. Science Focus, May 20, 2022.

Julia Shaw is a psychologist at University College London and part of Queer Politics at Princeton University, a thinktank engaged in the research of LGBTQ+ equality and rights. Her new book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality, draws on her experiences of being bisexual and her background in the psychological sciences to explore and celebrate a sexual identity she says remains marginalised and forgotten.
 
What led you to begin researching bisexuality and write this book?
I was writing my second book, Making Evil, which is about criminal psychology and what we associate with the word “evil”. I was writing about the villainisation of LGBTQ+ individuals as evil around the world and how important visibility is. I realised I was still invisible myself, so I came out as bi in that book, because I felt like a hypocrite for telling other people to be out and not being out myself in public.
 
I had so many questions about bisexuality. I figured I’d read a couple of books and I’d be done. But those books with the answers that I wanted didn’t exist, so I decided to write a book instead. I figured if I was struggling to find those answers, other people were as well.
 
Your book discusses one of the first measures of bisexuality, the Kinsey scale, first published in 1948 by the biologist Dr Alfred Kinsey. How did that tool change the field of study?
 
 
The Kinsey scale is a way to see sexuality on a spectrum from 100% heterosexual desires to 100% homosexual desires. Kinsey found that about half of men and about a quarter of women allocated themselves as not 100% heterosexual, which effectively meant that a lot of people were queer. When people talk about sexuality as a spectrum, they’re usually indirectly referencing the Kinsey scale.
 
The book refers to the invisibility of bi people in research on sexuality; why is that?
 
The default is still to ask people their identity, which is a problem for bisexual people. Most people who would fall in the middle of the Kinsey scale aren’t captured by labels – they often refer to themselves as gay or straight. Asking questions about how people behave, and who they find attractive, is going to get you a much more accurate picture than asking people what their labels are most of the time. Research, for some reason, is really reluctant to accept that. Probably because it introduces complexity and complexity is bad for data analysis.
 
 
A fascinating section of the book examines bisexuality in the animal kingdom and the struggle of evolutionary biologists to explain the “Darwinian paradox”: why animals engage in homosexual behaviour if it doesn’t lead to reproduction. You propose the idea that bisexuality is perhaps “the originary state in the evolution of sexuality” – how did you reach this conclusion?
 
 
There’s this assumption that heterosexuality is the norm, because heterosexual sex results in offspring. But looking at the literature on animal behaviour and sexual interactions, I found there are a number of researchers, including in the evolutionary sciences, saying we’ve misinterpreted animal behaviour for a very long time by imposing our sense of decency and our heterosexual bias on to animals, rather than observing and describing what animals actually do.
 
Research has found there’s a lot of sexual behaviour between animals of multiple sexes in the animal kingdom. The explanation for that is: as long as you’re also at least occasionally having sex with the other sex and you’re able to reproduce, then it doesn’t really matter if you also have sex with the same sex. I found it really interesting, because I assumed that I was a deviation, rather than that most animals seem to behave this way.
 
 
You contrast this positive reading of the “original state” of sexuality with Freud’s negative view that everyone starts off bisexual as a child and matures into monosexuality as an adult. Why do associations between bisexuality and immaturity persist?
I get told a lot that Freud thought everyone was bi and I have to correct this so often. Freud did say that, but he didn’t mean it in a good way. He very much saw it as a negative thing to be bisexual as an adult.
 
There are a couple of assumptions that are thrown at you when you say you’re bisexual. One is that you’re greedy; the other is that you want to be the centre of attention, that it’s some sort of performance, especially as a woman, the expectation is that it’s performative for men. Then there’s the idea that it’s a phase. This idea isn’t just held by heterosexual people; it’s also very much held by homosexual and queer people and that is a huge problem. It has led to many bi people feeling excluded or pushed out of queer spaces.
 
We’ve seen people become more comfortable talking about a range of sexual identities in recent years, with the word “queer” gaining particular prominence. You’re saying that due to negative connotations, the term “bisexual” hasn’t been embraced in the same way?
 
 
It hasn’t. People cringe when they say it, or don’t say it, about themselves, because they’re worried about the reaction, including me. There have been many occasions where I’ve used the word “queer” instead of “bi”, because I don’t want the reaction that comes with saying “bi” and “queer” is a bit more vague, frankly. It’s fascinating that because of internalised biphobia in so many people, we shy away from that word. I mean, it’s LGBT and it has been since the 90s. Yet the “B” has been invisible or berated. Lesbian and gay people, I think, need to make space and be more inclusive and conscious of bi people.
 
You discuss how bisexual people are more likely to experience sexual violence, poor mental health and substance abuse than other sexual minorities. What explains this?
 
Bisexual women, compared with lesbian and heterosexual women, are the most likely to be raped and to experience various forms of sexual assault. There’s a layering of stigma that happens with bi women in particular, where there’s the sexualisation of women and the hypersexualisation of bisexuality on top. It makes people take more liberties with how they touch you, how they talk to you, how they sexualise you and whether they’re likely to assault you. This is something we see in research on the treatment of bisexual kids in schools and universities. Until we break down the stereotypes about bisexuality, we are not going to tackle this problem.

 
What can the study of history tell us about the evolution of attitudes towards sexuality?
 
Sexual desires and behaviours have only really been seen as identities since the 1800s. The idea that it’s something you are rather than something you do – that is a relatively new concept. If you look at how historians try to make queer people visible in history, they often jump too far. If there’s any evidence of homosexual attractions, they say: “Look, there’s a gay person.” I can see why that’s something people want to do. But what it does, in effect, is erase bi people. Because most of those people will also have had wives, or husbands, and heterosexual interactions. That makes it really hard, and often inaccurate, to say that they are exclusively homosexual.
 
 
You discuss the relationship between “compulsory heterosexuality” and “compulsory monogamy”. How could more acceptance and understanding of bisexuality help challenge norms around both?
 
One of the most toxic stereotypes is that bisexual people can’t be monogamous and that bisexual people can’t be trusted in relationships. If you think about it for more than 10 seconds, you understand why that’s an absurd thing to say. I wanted to end the book on the relationship between bisexuality and consensual non-monogamy, because it’s something a lot of bisexual people think about a lot and they get asked about often. If heterosexual people and monosexual people ask themselves the questions they often put to bi people – “How can you be monogamous? Why is one person enough for you?” – the world would be a better place. Having that conversation in a way that is more about deconstructing heterosexual norms and expectations is a really useful thing to do.
 
Julia Shaw: ‘I had so many questions about bisexuality’ By  Laurie Clarke. The Guardian June 4, 2022. 

Discover the hidden culture, history, and science of bisexuality.   Dr Julia Shaw and Ben Hunte discuss her new book “Bi” at the British Library.  June 7, 2022.  Dr. Julia Shaw  BiBook

The hidden science of bisexuality with Julia Shaw – podcast
 
Presented and produced by Madeleine Finlay, additional production by Anand Jagatia, sound design by Tony Onuchukwu, the executive producer was Isabelle Roughol
 
Bisexuality is the largest sexual minority in the world – but according to psychologist Dr Julia Shaw, it’s the least well understood. She talks to Madeleine Finlay about her new book, Bi, which challenges us to think more deeply about who we are and how we love. She discusses the history of trying to define and measure bisexuality, sexual behaviour in the animal kingdom, and how we can improve health outcomes for bi people.
 
The Guardian, June 2, 2022.

For over a century, society has struggled to understand who, why, what and how bisexual and pansexual people are what they are. We’ve tried Venn diagrams, adopted animal mascots, developed TV tropes and launched awareness campaigns. But even now, more than a century after the terms “bisexual” and “pansexual” were coined, people are still confused.
 
Through my years running the Bi Pan Library, a U.S.-based private queer literature archive, I’ve read stacks of nonfiction about fluid sexuality from the past century, and it’s no wonder we can’t get out of this cycle of confusion. If you’re looking for dusty old books by psychiatrists who believed bisexual people are not quite right in the head, you’ll be spoiled for choice. But if you’re looking for something positive, a Bisexual 101 perhaps, your options are limited to just a handful of titles that are still in print. There is certainly supportive, world-shifting bisexual and pansexual writing available if you know where to look, but it has not landed on the shelf without a fight.
 
In the introduction to her hotly anticipated upcoming book, Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality, Dr. Julia Shaw shares the story of a publisher rejecting the pitch for her book because “we’ve already had that conversation,” despite that same publishing house never having signed a single book about bisexuality, much less anything like Shaw’s unique spin. While Bi does touch on all three things the title suggests—culture, history and science—at its core what Shaw has created is a whirlwind tour of bisexual research, from Alfred Kinsey’s notorious scale, to the life-or-death legal struggles of queer asylum seekers today. (Disclosure: Shaw has made donations toward the resources of Bi Pan Library, which I founded.)
 
That publisher isn’t completely wrong: we’ve certainly had conversations about bisexual identity. But who was speaking during those conversations? And were they enough?
 
Attraction beyond gender is not new, but the first books to focus on the subject didn’t come around until the 1920s, when psychological texts first cast plural attraction as deviant behaviour in need of curing. In Bi, Shaw (whose previous works include 2019’s Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side and 2017’s The Memory Illusion: Remembering, Forgetting and the Science of False Memory), profiles several psychologists and researchers involved in the early evolution of science’s narrative about bisexuality, a problematic cast entirely made up of white men. Physician Havelock Ellis, author of Sexual Inversion, enjoyed an open marriage with his queer wife—and was also an outspoken eugenicist. Sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s work forever changed how the Western world perceives sexuality, but his methods may have blurred ethical lines. Beyond-famous neurologist Sigmund Freud believed children start out with a hazy mingled sexuality—until they grow out of it (and let’s be clear, there’s a long list of other Freudian trash to take out).
 
These white-and-Western ideas trickled down to the English-speaking public through news coverage, and very quickly into pornography (of course). Erotic bisexual novels from the 1960s and ’70s were often thinly veiled as nonfiction case studies of “depraved” sexual fluidity. The back cover of 1966 pulp release Confessions of a Married Man claimed “the secret world of the bisexual has never before been revealed with such stark detail—its deceptions and duplicities, its anguish and its furtive pleasures.” The graphically sexual text presents a “true story” complete with an introduction written by a psychoanalyst. But if you flip to the title page you’ll find a bolded-caps disclaimer: “All of the characters in this book are fictitious …”
 
You can draw a clear line between these early salacious visions of plural attraction in literature and the ugly stereotypes Shaw explores in later chapters of Bi: bisexual people are “slutty,” homewreckers and dangerous, but somehow, at the same time, we don’t exist at all. Although English-speaking bi and pan people in the ’60s were already beginning to gather through the sexual liberation movement and queer organizing, our own perspectives weren’t broadly published or accepted. The story of who we were was still being written by others.
 
Glimmers of hope appeared in the ’70s, with books such as Janet Bode’s View from Another Closet, which allowed queer women to describe their experiences using whatever words they felt comfortable with (including words many people mistakenly think are internet-age inventions, like pansexual and omnisexual). In Bi, Shaw profiles sex researcher Fritz Klein, a bisexual man who in 1978 released his iconic book The Bisexual Option: A Concept of One Hundred Percent Intimacy. If you’ve ever googled “am I bisexual?” you may have come across the Klein Grid, which he presented in The Bisexual Option as a more three-dimensional response to Kinsey’s one-to-six scale. By bringing his personal experiences into his work (much like Shaw has) Klein called for a new generation of scientific research that he hoped would investigate the true challenges and needs of his community without treating us as diseased, or focusing entirely on our sex lives.
 
But speaking of disease—the world’s growing curiosity turned poisonous in the 1980s as HIV/AIDS sunk its teeth in. As Shaw put it, “bi men were seen as a threatening connection between the dirty and the clean … a threat to heterosexuals everywhere.” The literature was nasty. Authors like Ivan Hill profiled bisexual people with straight partners, whipping up fear of inevitable illicit affairs or “unhealthy” open relationships. Hill frames his interviews in The Bisexual Spouse with a nationwide survey measuring psychiatrists’ opinions on sexual orientation; the study asked questions like “can homosexuality be modified toward heterosexuality, and if so, what therapy do you most often prescribe?” It’s nauseating stuff, but when I read my own yellowing copy of The Bisexual Spouse, I was struck by how sadly relatable the stories of his interviewees felt. These were queer people born between the 1920s and 1940s who didn’t have words for themselves, who were afraid they wouldn’t be believed, who faced prejudice in straight and gay communities alike, who felt there were very few resources to help them build a happy, balanced life.
 
It was amidst the fear and judgment of the ’80s that bisexual and pansexual people fighting for control over our own narrative developed a new strategy. The Off Pink Collective in the U.K. independently published Bisexual Lives, a slim book of essays and personal accounts written by and for bisexual people. As far as I know, Bisexual Lives marked the first time a group of bisexual people were able to tell their own stories in a book without being filtered through the lens of psychiatric analysis or pop-nonfiction appeal. Personal essay collections have since become a grand bisexual tradition in resistance to the idea that there is only one way to be bisexual, or even a single definition or word we all agree on. Instead, these writers described bisexuality as our stories, together.
 
Shaw follows this tradition in Bi, illustrating cold, hard, queer statistics with her personal stories of realization, heartbreak and joy. In Chapter five, titled “Invisi-bi-lity,” she describes how she was worried that looking bi would be problematic for her career as an academic. “I was already so used to being sexualized as a young woman that I was worried that the label bisexual would lead to me being hypersexualized and that no one would take me seriously.” She contextualizes this raw vulnerability with sexuality researcher Julie Hartman’s study of what—if anything—it means to “look bi,” and how bisexual people often combat their invisibility with clothing, hairstyles and body language.
 
As bisexuals were increasingly acknowledged in broader queer activism and pop culture in the 1990s, more critical books also sprung up to address the unease many people felt toward “strict” labels. Feminist psychologist Lisa M. Diamond argued in Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire that sexuality could not be measured or described without acknowledging how self-perception can change across a lifetime, praising Klein’s incorporation of past, present and future self-concept in the development of the Klein grid, even though according to Diamond, it “did not take hold.”
 
Speaking of Klein, our researcher friend kept himself extraordinarily busy in the ’90s. He released two more books, founded the American Institute of Bisexuality and in the early 2000s headed up the Journal of Bisexuality, the first academic journal to specialize in bisexual and fluid issues. Many of the queer researchers Shaw references in Bi first presented their work in the Journal of Bisexuality, climbing through the window Klein had propped open for them. At last, scientific research and literature about bisexuality was being wrestled into our custody.
 
Research and academic writing about plural attraction has become increasingly queer-led and destigmatized ever since. Because of this, we’ve begun to better understand the specific challenges our community experiences. Shaw explores much of this new ground in Bi, walking through very recent research into the harrassment bisexual people face in the workplace, our disturbingly high rates of mental illness and intimate partner violence and how sexually fluid asylum seekers slip through inhumane cracks in the legal system. Thanks to queer researchers, being studied may finally begin to work toward our benefit.
 
The 2010–2020 section of the Bi Pan Library collection glows as a bold and unapologetic era of fluid literature; it gave us Shiri Eisner’s radical modern classic (perhaps the most recognizable bisexual book ever published) Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, a masterful balance of actionable bisexual theory and accessible writing that welcomes people who are new to the ideas. Kate Harrad’s anthology Claiming the B in LGBT: Illuminating the Bisexual Narrative covered vast ground with chapters on race, disability, gender and non-monogomy. Books that enthusiastically embraced the variety of words people use for plural attraction also began cropping up more frequently, like Karen Morgaine’s artful Pansexuality: A Panoply of Co-Constructed Narratives and Faith Beauchemin’s very tiny anthology with a very large name, How Queer! Personal Narratives from Bisexual, Pansexual, Polysexual, Sexually-Fluid, and Other Non-Monosexual Perspectives. The diversity of language Janet Bode first spotlighted in the ’70s blossomed with the ability to connect with like-minded people and to learn about a universe of queer language via the internet.
 
This is an aspect of Shaw’s Bi that may not age well, in the way many books about sexuality, gender and identity naturally fade in relevance over time. Shaw commits to using the term “bisexual” or “behaviorally-bisexual” through the whole book, simplifying the language of plural attraction in the way of a researcher establishing clear vocabulary for a study. But condensing queer language can come at the cost of erasure. In nearly all the books I’ve mentioned so far, people who use words like pansexual, omnisexual, fluid, etc., have had their experiences included in research or storytelling, but their identities painted over, in the end, with the word bisexual. In the future, we might look back on concepts like “the bisexual umbrella” or “bi+” the same way we look back on titles like Bisexuality and Transgenderism, which was the first book about fluid sexuality in the trans community. The phrasing made sense to us at the time, but give it another decade and it would never go to print. Queer language is an ongoing process of building and balancing; rebuilding and rebalancing.
 
We are gearing up for an exciting new decade of sexually fluid literature in the 2020s. Just last year, psychologist Ritch C. Savin-Williams published the first book to focus on bisexual, pansexual and fluid youth, and fellow U.K. author and bisexual activist Lo Shearing released Bi the Way: The Bisexual Guide to Life. At first, Bi the Way looks like it might cover the same ground as Bi, but between the two pink-purple-and-blue covers are very different books. Shaw’s book lays out the story of how fluid sexuality has been perceived scientifically and socially, with a bit of personal storytelling for flair, while Shearing filled Bi the Way with advice about the everyday ins and outs of being bisexual, with a bit of history and social science woven in between. These are complimentary conversations that serve different purposes. Shearing also announced in 2021 they are editing a bisexual anthology with fellow bisexual activist Vaneet Mehta, ensuring the tradition of bisexual storytelling will live on.
 
What the publishers who rejected Bi didn’t understand is that sexuality and gender are ever-shifting, ever-expanding topics. We will never be done talking about being bisexual, or pansexual, or omnisexual, or fluid or whatever brand-new words we embrace in the future. When Bi hits bookstores (June 2 in the U.K., June 28 in the U.S.), it will provide a Bisexual Research 101 course for a fresh audience of international readers (her book is already making publishing history in Germany, where it was published in translation in May) and my library shelves will be one book richer.
 
Julia Shaw’s new book continues the conversation about bisexuality, but is it the one we need right now? By Bren Frederick. Xtra Magazine,  June 2, 2022. 

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