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- Gov. Davis says he’ll sign historic domestic partners legislation
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- ‘AIDS czar’ shifts government positions
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- Minn. rep. who denied antigay persecution views Holocaust exhibit
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feature
Everything in between: Understanding bisexuality
San Diego gears up for annual bisexual conference, Aug. 21-24
Published Thursday, 21-Aug-2003 in issue 817
The Bisexual Foundation’s North American Conference on Bisexuality takes place this weekend, Aug. 21-24, at the Radisson Hotel Mission Valley. With one of the largest gatherings of bisexuals, supporters and affiliated organizations, approximately 700 people are expected to participate in the annual conference. There will be 68 workshops, panels and discussion groups, addressing a wide range of issues surrounding sexual and gender diversity.
Organizers of the conference hope to bring visibility to the bisexual movement, which frequently endures double-barrel marginalization from both the heterosexual and gay and lesbian communities. “There is a biphobia, which is different than homophobia,” says Fritz Klein, MD, president of the Bisexual Foundation. “Homophobia is the fear of same-sex liaisons, whereas biphobia is both straights and gays afraid of bisexuals.”
The Bisexual Resource Center examines biphobia as a result of the heterosexist framework — the notion that there are two sexual orientations, heterosexuality and homosexuality, with heterosexuality being “good” and homosexuality being “evil.” A line is drawn between an “us” and “them,” with the irony being that both sides find a degree of security and identity in being the “other” to each other. The dichotomy inherently displaces bisexuality — to both the “us” and “them” groups, bisexuals become the “other,” and from this source springs the majority of bisexual stereotypes.
Examples of biphobic views are the belief that bisexuals are confused fence-sitters, nymphomaniacs, polyamours incapable of monogamy, or people who are really gay and afraid to admit it. Other myths are that bisexuals must have a male and a female lover concurrently to be truly satisfied, that bisexuality is a transitional phase between heterosexuality and homosexuality — implying that everyone ultimately prefers one gender — or that bisexuals are really heterosexual and just being trendy about sexual experimentation. The list goes on.
“In North American society, bisexuality is hidden, and for many people it does not exist,” says Klein. “There seems to be a contract within the heterosexual and gay and lesbian communities to hide or eliminate bisexuality, because it is a threatening identity; it makes the line between who is bi, gay and straight very murky.”
One of the most challenging aspects to a bisexual identity is that bisexual women and men cannot be defined by the gender of the person they are with. Even if they are out as bisexual, their bisexuality is hidden because most societies classify members using gender and sexual polarities.
How prevalent is bisexuality? The data is almost impossible to gather, for a variety of reasons. A bisexual does not have to act upon their desires to consider themselves bisexual, and a heterosexual or gay individual may not identify as bisexual even if they have relationships with both men and women. Many people will not identify as bisexual because they fear discrimination or rejection. Rough approximations based on limited studies over the past 50 years estimate that 13-20 percent of the population has bisexual tendencies. In the United States, that translates into about 40-60 million people. Sexuality research, already poorly funded, has focused primarily on homosexuality in sexual orientation studies. Very little research on bisexual behavior has been done, and no studies so far have attempted to quantify bisexual tendencies not acted upon.
Bisexuals as scapegoats
Jan Hansen, former co-chair of the Bisexual Forum and the first out bisexual to officially address the United Nations, has led workshops and discussions deconstructing bisexuality at various international conferences. “Inevitably, the North American media portrays bisexuality as always entailing three people. Newsweek did an article on bisexuality in the late ’90s, and they had three people pictured on the cover. Within the straight community, it can also be seen as a ‘swinger’-type lifestyle. There is nothing ever really positive portrayed.”
An either/or representation of bisexuality propagates the belief that bisexuals are interlopers who disturb the sacred boundary between gay and straight, destroying relationships and even creating health risks. The assumptions can be vicious: “There was a very negative conception in the late ’80s and early ’90s,” says Hansen, “that it was and is bisexuals who are spreading HIV/AIDS from the gay community to the straight community. It still surfaces from time to time. I still read stuff that talks only about bisexual men [spreading HIV/AIDS], never talking about men who are engaging in unsafe sex. It’s the behavior that needs to be addressed, not the orientation.”
“Bisexual men became the media scapegoat,” remembers Lani Ka’ahumanu, a founding organizer of BiNet USA. “Newsweek, in 1987, named bisexuals the ‘typhoid Marys’ for spreading what later became known as the AIDS pandemic.”
As an example of the current status of bisexuals in the U.S., Luigi Ferrer, executive director of the Bisexual Foundation, points to a U.S. survey done earlier this year by University of California Davis Professor Gregory Herek. In the survey, published in the Journal of Sex Research, Herek interviewed 1,335 self-identified heterosexuals by telephone and asked them to rate their tolerance of various marginalized groups. “The U.S. public rated bisexuals at the bottom of the barrel, just a hair above injection drug users,” said Ferrer. “Public opinion of bisexuality in our society is generally dismal.”
What is bisexual?
So what is an accurate definition of bisexual orientation that will encourage positive representation? Hansen and her colleagues have been working on just that, and define bisexuality as “a distinct sexual orientation that can be defined as the capacity for physical, romantic, emotional attraction to and/or involvement with people of any gender.”
However, there are complex politics that occur within the bisexual community itself that make even this definition difficult. “What is usually said is ‘both genders,’” Hansen explains. “I disagree with that, because with the transgender community, there aren’t just two genders. There is gender fluidity. There is intersex; there are people in transition; there are not just male and female people. I understand that the bi in bisexuality comes from the duality, from the notion of two genders. But with gender fluidity, that doesn’t fly.”
Many models have been developed in an effort to legitimize bisexuality as a distinct orientation. The well-known Kinsey scale, developed in the 1940s and ’50s, asks an individual to rate themselves on a seven-point scale, from zero to six, with zero being exclusively homosexual and six being exclusively heterosexual. Bisexuality is rated in five varying degrees between the two poles.
The Multidimensional Scale of Sexuality was developed in the 1980s to validate and contrast the Kinsey Scale, rating individuals according to both behavioral and cognitive components of their sexual identity. The MSS proposes varying categories of homosexuality, heterosexuality and asexuality, along with six categories of bisexuality.
Another method, postulated by J.R. Little in the unpublished doctoral dissertation “Contemporary Female Bisexuality: A Psychosocial Phenomenon,”. asks the individual to choose between 13 categories of bisexuality and find the one that is most fitting.
In The Bisexual Option, Fritz Klein rates human sexuality according to the Klein Grid of Sexual Orientation, which is composed of seven variables, each of which is rated by the individual as applying to the past, present and ideal. The variables describe a variety of emotional, social and behavioral aspects. The individual ends up with 21 numbers, as opposed to one Kinsey number. Klein believes that the grid gives a more accurate idea of a person’s sexual orientation, taking sexuality into the dimension of fluidity. “For example, there are some heterosexual men who don’t really love women, they just have sex with them. They really only love their male friends — they have a very close bond with these male friends emotionally, but not sexually. There are all of these different dimensions. When you are looking at a person’s orientation, you have to take that into consideration.”
Many bisexuals would prefer not to be placed on a scale, plotted on a grid, or given a label at all. “Sexuality is an individual spectrum and some people don’t label themselves,” says singer/songwriter and bisexual activist Skott Freedmen. “It’s all about personal comfort and identity. Some people feel safer with a label.”
Loraine Hutchins, Ph.D., author of Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out, agrees that it is a matter of individual choice. “A lot of bis say that they don’t identify as bi — that they don’t want to be binary — they want to be ambi-sexual, omni-sexual, pan-sexual. Sure, I understand all that. But [the bisexual label] is just a useful tool for trying to talk about being attracted to more than one gender.” In the quest to quantify bisexual tendencies, many scales and models reinforce the “otherness” of bisexuality, simply by establishing heterosexual and homosexual end points. According to the Kinsey Scale, for example, a heterosexual or a homosexual has a solid 100 percent rating, yet a bisexual must rate themselves according to percentages that fall between heterosexuality and homosexuality. The built-in duality denies the bisexual an identity of their own.
How to avoid marginalizing bisexuals
So how does one practice inclusion of bisexuality? By avoiding assumptions. “If you saw two women with their arms around each other, two men kissing, or a man and a woman hot for each other, how would you know by looking at them what their orientations are at all?” Hansen challenges. “Everyone makes assumptions based on the genders of the individuals involved.”
Another way bisexuality is marginalized is by rejecting duality and taking the other extreme, saying that all people are bisexual to some degree — effectively erasing the possibility of an independent bisexual identity.
Hansen observes that the GLBT media is responsible for a considerable amount of this erasure. “The queer media does a terrific job glossing over, leaving out, erasing bisexuality as a viable and oppressed orientation. The very people who were discriminated against turn around and do the same thing to another group. The oppressed becomes the oppressor.”
Bisexuals have worked in the gay and lesbian community for decades, but often feel isolated and underrepresented. “Many gays and lesbians feel threatened that bisexuality is a ‘cop-out’ and will hurt their [political] struggle,” explains Freedman. “They fail to see that the bisexual is right there with them in the same struggle, working for the same equal rights.”
Case in point: after receiving San Diego Pride’s Community Service Award in 1998, Hansen was booed while riding in the Pride parade. She has also had lesbians she has been dancing with walk off the dance floor when they find out she is bi. “The idea of non-acceptance of one group by the very group that is not being accepted for who they love ... the irony always just gets me.” This sense of alienation has led to the creation of many independent bisexual political and social groups. BiNet USA was the first national network started in the U.S., and has chapters throughout the country. The Bisexual Foundation, another national organization, operates a website that links numerous regional, state and local bisexual organizations in an effort to build a web-based community. They also sponsor conferences, including the North American Conference on Bisexuality, to provide physical gathering spaces for the bisexual community.
The struggle for recognition
The struggle for bisexual recognition mirrors the struggle lesbians faced in the 1970s and ’80s to be included in the term ‘gay rights,’ and continues in the transgender community as well. In the 1990s, Hansen took on the challenge to have bisexuals and transgenders included in the International Lesbian and Gay Association’s mission statement. “That was a real struggle,” she recounts. “It was argued that there weren’t enough bisexuals out there to make it an issue, or that it wasn’t ‘our’ battle.” The terms were finally added in 1999 at ILGA’s World Conference in South Africa.
Bisexuals continue to see the B in GLBT ignored, even in major GLBT organizations. In November 2002, a census document was released which assembled data on same-sex households. In the Creating Change Conference held in Portland, Oregon, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force significantly reduced the data concerning bisexuals. “Lani [Ka’ahumanu] and a couple of others really confronted the Task Force, saying that they needed to revise the document before they put it out again,” Hutchins relates, “and they didn’t. Where’s the progress? When it came down to serious policy issues, they wimped.” The politics of inclusion demand the equal advancement of all letters of the GLBT acronym, yet with recent gains in GLBT rights, some GLBT activists are backing away from bisexual issues — not wanting to push too hard for fear of losing the ground that has been gained. “Nobody wants to talk about bisexuality when we’re fighting against the possibility of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage,” says Hutchins. “The whole ghost behind the scenes is that [conservatives] want to do that so they can eliminate group marriage or things that are much more threatening to the institution of marriage than same-sex marriage. People don’t want to talk about some of the issues that bisexuality brings up politically.”
GLAAD recently held a press advisory in response to Canada’s same-sex marriage legislation, where they consistently substituted “gay and lesbian marriage” for “same-sex marriage.” In a section of the meeting that educated the press on proper language and terminology to use when discussing the case, the terms bisexual and transgender were left out. Richard Woulfe, vice chair of the Bisexual Foundation, and Fritz Klein responded with a letter to GLAAD Executive Director Joan Garry, asking her to address the slight in her keynote speech at the North American Conference on Bisexuality. “I thought that was a neat way to do it,” remarks Hutchins, “because she knows it is going to be brought up, so it’s not like blind-siding her. But she is also put on notice that GLAAD says they are bi-inclusive, yet talks about same-sex marriage as if bi-marriage is not a part of that.... She is going to have to take some risks and make some promises, I hope.”
Conference activities
A variety of music and performances will be open to the public on Friday and Saturday nights as part of this weekend’s conference (Aug. 21 and 22). Local blues singer Candye Kane will perform, along with singer/songwriter Skott Freedmen, Asian pioneer singer/songwriter Magdalen Hsu-Li, comedian Rob Yaeger and local pop/rock musician Nicole Kristal. The keynote speakers are comprised of longtime bisexual activists, researchers and advocates, including California Congressmember Susan Davis, Joan M. Garry, executive director of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and Dr. Ava Cadell, a popular television love and relationship expert. Individuals connected to the bisexual movement through gender studies, transgender activism and sexuality education will also be speaking.
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