If you think of the history of Pride marches, one of the key organizers of the very first Pride march was an openly bisexual woman in the United States. From the beginning, bi people weren't just sort of around, but they were actively involved in queer liberation, in the fight for gay rights, even though it took till the '90s to include the B in LGBT.
Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. I'm Jason Goodger, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. In today's episode, we're joined by Dr. Julia Shaw, a broadcaster, best-selling author, and psychologist based at University College London, to talk all about the history and science of bisexuality.
So, Dr. Julia Shaw, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining us.
So, today we're talking about bisexuality. So perhaps you're best known, amongst other things anyway, as a criminal psychologist, but over the last several years you've become a prominent voice in bisexuality research. So what led you to take this on, as it's quite a shift from studying crime and criminals?
It is. I am bisexual and I wanted to know about whether or not bisexuality had been studied empirically because I wanted to know what it was like for people like me and whether there are some issues that I have or concerns, thoughts that I have that are shared with other people. And so I initially was hoping that I'd just sort of go to the bookstore and buy a book. And I realized quickly that that book didn't exist, and that there are anthologies and there's some excellent anthologies, there's some excellent general research and writing on queer identities and queer people, but there wasn't anything specific to bisexuality. And so I decided I wanted it to exist.
And so I went back to university and did a master's in queer history at Goldsmiths University, and I founded the Bisexual Research Group, which is now an organization that has an annual international conference, and there's about 500 people who usually come to the conference to share their ideas and research from various fields on bisexuality.
So let's first make it clear exactly what we mean by bisexual. So rather than simply meaning a person that's attracted romantically or sexually to a cis man or a cis woman both, it's actually more of an umbrella term, right?
Yeah. So, by the way it was originally used, and this is where having that foundation in history has become really useful for me, going back and reading up on some of the earliest scholars who wrote about bisexuality and used the term. And if you trace the term back to people like Havelock Ellis, who was one of the first people to use the term in writing, he used it to describe people who are both, as in bisexual, both homo and heterosexual. And so these terms, homo and heterosexual, had come up earlier when a—and this is one of my favorite, one of my favorite facts—is that the term homosexual, as in attraction to the same gender, was coined by a gay scholar who wanted to fight for the rights of gay people, of gay men in particular. And he needed to create a word for homosexuality, but then he also needed to create a word for not homosexuality, right? And so he called people who were straight heterosexual. So people attracted to others, so hetero being other than. And I think it's really funny that a gay man created heterosexuality. I think it's one of my favorite facts about queer history that I don't know why this isn't on slogans everywhere. But the other thing that happened then is because we had these two terms, quickly researchers were like, wait, but there's people who obviously are interested in men and women who are both homosexual and heterosexual. And so we are going to call these people bisexual.
And just to be clear, it was both homo. So both same and other.
And this is where it was never actually men and women technically. It was always same and other genders. And so as our concept of what gender means and how, you know, things like cis male, like that wasn't a term at the time, right? And so how that has now changed, I think a lot of bisexual people find that that definition embraces that as well. So it's just, I'm attracted to people of multiple genders rather than I'm attracted to men and women.
Yeah. So I think one of the things with bisexuality is that often people are—they're not necessarily hiding in plain sight, but they're not visible in a way that a lot of other queer people are. So do we have a sort of rough idea of the number of people that are bisexual? You know, maybe from census data or things like that.
Yeah. So bisexuality has an invisibility problem in the sense that there is less of what's called a visual language. And so there's fewer ways to show that you're bisexual than being queer in other ways often. And so when you ask bi people, you know, how do you make yourself visible and like seen as a bisexual person? They kind of go, well, I kind of like integrate elements of sort of what lesbian people might wear or what gay men might wear. Maybe I add a rainbow. Maybe I add a bisexual flag. But there isn't quite the same sort of obvious language. There can be. So I mean, septum piercings for a while became for me like, ah, there's one, there's one of us. Before that it was cuffed jeans was a classic. Not being able to sit in chairs was a stereotype for a while. I mean, there's been, there's definitely also lots of jokes and bi culture jokes, but even with me, like unless I say I'm bi, especially because my primary partner is a man, it reads as a straight relationship and I read as straight, and that's partly just because of who I happen to be in a relationship with. And of course, I continue to be bi no matter who I date or if I'm not dating anyone. And so that's something that a lot of bi people say they face, is that they constantly need to be that person who either says it out loud, which feels annoying and you're like coming out over and over and over again, or you need to lean in and then you might still get miscategorized as lesbian in my case as a woman, and so you're still not seen as bi. And so that bi erasure can be an issue also psychologically because we know that bi people are less likely to seek communities, queer communities, partly because they don't feel like they're queer enough, but then they also don't feel straight enough for the straight communities. So you find that bi people are compared to others least likely to be plugged into groups and so have more mental health concerns that come with being isolated from those communities.
Yeah. So there's a lot of sort of certain stereotypes surrounding bisexuality which I think we need to get out of the way to be honest. So it's like some common ones are bisexual women are easy or kinky, bisexual men are just actually homosexual, they just don't admit it to themselves, etc. So, you know, how can we get rid of these?
Well, and that trans people can't be bi.
There's a lot of trans bi people where it's like you can destabilize both gender and sexuality, like you can, right? There's lots of mixes of things. Or that you can be—I mean, obviously there's people who are non-binary who are bisexual. So, I mean, there's lots of versions of that. And so I think to destabilize the stereotypes, one of the things is visibility. That's why it's so important to, I think, to say that you're bisexual and to almost face what still happens disproportionately compared to other sexualities, is that bi people still get asked stupid questions like, is one person ever enough for you? Or can you be monogamous? Are you going to be cheating? Are you going to want threesomes all the time? Are you going—right? Like almost this like hypersexualized element. And as you say, for men it's more of a—there's a bit of that hypersexualization potentially, but there's more of the, no, it's probably a stepping stone to gay, like you're probably actually gay. And so making it visible and talking about it more and just making it more normal, I think is going to be quite a lot of the success that comes from visibility. But we're seeing that already. I mean, even since my book came out in 2021, there's been so many TV shows now that have a bi character, and I think that will make a huge difference coming forward, sort of going forward.
Yeah. So that would sort of queue in my next question quite nicely, that sort of a lot of people will use the narrative that it just doesn't seem to go away, which is that bisexuality is a trend or, you know, perhaps even worse, a phase. So why do these myths persist?
The myths are, I think, mostly because we have in our minds something from childhood and beyond that, the idea of the nuclear family really, and it's a man and a woman and some kids. And at some point some people accepted that, okay, maybe it can be a man and a man or a man and a woman, but the idea that it could be any other constellation continues to evade people. And so bisexuality is—and if you look at the history of this again and like how bisexuality has sat in various political movements, you see that we've been seen as the enemy from all sides. And so even queer people in the fight for equal marriage, for example, and for gay rights, have at various points—there's some really interesting correspondence in archives that I was going through as part of my master's, and you can see how the correspondence is like, we need the bisexuals to leave, especially out of women's spaces actually. And so there was this—the political lesbians, and there were lesbians and women-loving-women spaces, and the idea was that if the bi women are here, they are the traitors, they will go home and tell the—which I think is really funny. Like even if they're dating one of us right now, they will leave and they could be traitors. And that—it is a thing that I think still sort of sticks a bit, where it continues to be a bit of a like, iffy, I don't really date bi women. I mean, I've met people recently who still say I don't really do bi women. And I go, well, that's a horrible thing to say, especially in a queer space. And so I think until those stereotypes continue to soften, I think we still have quite a long way to go.
So sort of another idea that you often hear, which is not quite as pervasive as those other ones, is that—and I don't know where this comes from—is that we're all born bisexual and then somehow we sort of develop or grow out of it. You know, where does that idea come from?
Comes from Sigmund Freud.
Yeah, the source of most of the things I don't like about psychology. They're basically always back to Freud. Yeah, no, Freud said that everyone's born bisexual and that you mature out of it into usually homosexuality first and then you're straight. And so obviously straight is the final goal, the goal, and that is again a horrible way of thinking about it, even though sometimes it's misquoted as sort of Freud was a friend of the bis—and it's like, I mean, that's not how he saw it, as a regressive sexuality. I'm not sure I would see that as positive. But if you look at the animal kingdom and you look at queerness and bisexuality specifically in the animal kingdom, there has been a real destabilizing of the idea that sort of animals have sex to reproduce. And that is sort of that biological imperative, that main thing that animals are using sex for is reproduction. And that is a thing that most animals use sex for. But lots of them also, just like humans, use it for other things. And those other things can be joy, affection, they can be making a nest together, sharing responsibilities over, for example, child rearing. And there already in the 1940s and 1950s a scholar called Alfred Kinsey, who famously wrote about human sexuality as well, he said that all of these people who are going into nature—so he was a biologist and he was saying people who are going into nature and saying that all they can see is heterosexual behavior and everything else is dominance or something else—are wrong. They're just imposing society's human values onto animals rather than actually describing what they're seeing in nature. And he was saying that in the '40s and '50s. Now, fast forward to today, and if you speak to anyone who works in a zoo and you say, 'Are there bi animals?' they're like, 'Well, obviously.' And the idea behind that, if you then go even deeper, is that well, you could say that actually bisexuality is the most flexible strategy. Like, if you were to choose a sexuality that is the most likely to sort of lead to reproductive success, if that's what you're aiming for, then bisexuality is pretty great because actually you're flexible. And so if there's a lot of men one year, a lot of women one year, a lot of boys or girls if we're talking about like other species, then you can adjust and survive and hopefully your species can better survive as well. So I think—I'm not saying that this means that bisexuality is better than heterosexuality. It's just that I think we need to decenter heterosexuality and ask the same questions that we ask of queer lives and queer ways of living. And we need to ask the same questions of heterosexuality. And I think that changes a great deal about how we think we understand the world.
