Bisexual Visibility

September 23rd marks Bi Visibility Day. Apparently the day has several names, but this is the one I have heard most. The day is primarily to recognize and celebrate bisexual people, community, and history.

While I was publicly out last year, that was less than a month old, so in a sense this feels like the first one where I am out. That feels a bit weird, to be honest. I can publicly acknowledge today without worrying about a conversation I haven’t had with one person or another. Huh.

I have known that I can be attracted to men and women and just about every other constellation of gender identities since early puberty. I fought it for years, trying to just be gay or straight. Then I just didn’t think about it for a while. I was and am in a committed relationship, after all. Until it all crystallized one day a few short months before COVID.

I’ve written about some of this before.

Today felt like a good opportunity to revisit a paper I wrote for one of my grad school classes. See what needs updating, add some things, refine it a bit. So below, please see that refined paper. It may be a bit less celebratory, but talking about justice is no less important today.

The bisexual community faces personal and systemic injustices. Our authority to know about our own experience is undermined, we face discrimination from both the homosexual and the heterosexual communities, and we have worse health and socioeconomic outcomes compared to either the heterosexual and homosexual communities. Further, bisexuality has been undertheorized and erased in both queer theory and in research concerning the larger LGBTQ2S+ community. This paper hopes to explore these injustices.

In this paper, I will focus first on the definitional challenges faced when examining bisexuality, and then examine issues the bi+ community faces and how potential strategies have been confounded. I will conclude with a brief examination of which disciplines may have frameworks to offer, while reiterating the importance of maintaining the community in the proverbial drivers seat.

First I have to clarify who I am talking about. For many the term “bisexual” will be the most familiar, but this is not the only term people use to describe themselves. While there are countless words to describe individual’s sexual and romantic identities, especially in connection to the MOGAI movement, there are broadly four identities that are most common, and briefly examining those will clarify what I mean.

The term bisexual has a history dating back to the early 19th century. Originally, the term referred to flower anatomy, referring to the presence of sexual organs from both sexes. By the end of that century the term came to refer to attraction to both sexes. Early researchers such as Magnus Hirschfeld and Sigmund Freud connected bisexuality to embryonic development, tying gender identity and sexual identity together. Alfred Kinsey published research conducted in the 1940s, where he found a little over a third of men have some homosexual experience. Kinsey did not like the use of bisexual to refer to attraction, believing it should retain the anatomical use. In 1978, Fritz Klein published “The Bisexual Option” which refined much of Kinsey’s earlier frameworks, and offers an early examination of the problems facing bisexuality. 1991 gives a more radical, attention-grabbing definition with the publication of the first volume of “Anything That Moves” in what is now sometimes called the Bisexual Manifesto—in a move where the bisexual community is explicitly defining themselves, the authors emphasize individuality and diversity in how bisexuals describe ourselves, while emphasizing an expansive definition. The authors go on to describe the bisexual community more than offer a single definition:

“We support relationships among people regardless of gender, which can include relating intellectually, emotionally, spiritually, sensually, and sexually. We support celibacy, monogamy, and nonmonogamy as equally valid lifestyle choices. We support open expression of affection and touch among people without such expression necessarily having sexual implications.”

Anything That Moves, #1, Winter 1991.

Educator and grassroots advocate Robin Ochys offers a fairly broadly accepted definition in saying "I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted—romantically and/or sexually—to people of more than one gender, not necessarily at the same time, in the same way, or to the same degree." Others in the community describe their sexuality as attraction to “same and different” or attraction all genders.

Pansexual likewise has a long history. Pansexual was coined by critics of Freud in response to a perception the sexuality plays too central a role in his models. It is less clear when the term came to be used by people to describe themselves, but it is documented in 1970s. Specific definitions are likewise deeply personal, but there are two formulations of pansexual that I will consider here. The first begins with the mistaken belief that bisexuality is inherently limited to the gender binary. Sometimes this will be communicated along the lines of “pansexual includes trans people”. This approach is deeply flawed, both in defining bisexual in a way that is not the norm in the community and by suggesting a separate term is necessary to describe attraction to trans people; the idea that trans women are not women but are actually a separate category, and likewise for trans men, is built into this definition. The other formulation takes “pan” to mean all genders, with people describing themselves as “genderblind” or saying gender doesn’t play a role in their attraction. Here I will reject the first definition and continue based on the second.

Omnisexual shares origins with pansexual, using the Latin rather than the Ancient Greek. Many take this to mean omnisexuality includes all genders, with gender playing a role in attraction. Often this means that the person experiences a preference in some way. Some others emphasize a difference in the experience of attraction, with how they feel being shaped by gender. I personally found this framing helpful when I was first accepting my bisexuality; I cannot explain the difference, but while I am more or less equally attracted to people across the gender spectrum, there is some intangible difference in how that feels.

Polysexual emphasizes attraction to several but not necessarily all genders. I knew someone who used this term to explain how they are attracted to men, nonbinary people, and more masculine or androgynous women, but not really feminine women.

For community building purposes, many such as Eisner (2013) point toward an umbrella model, with the term “bi” in particular being seen as a catch-all, covering historical, behavioural, attraction, and self-identification models as well as including pansexual, omnisexual, and polysexual identities. Further, it has been noted that while bi identities may be disparate and fluid, for purposes of both community building and engagement they can be considered fixed (Voss et al., 2014). There is also a concept of a multiple-attraction spectrum (or M-SPEC) which acts as a catch-all, but I will stick with the likely more familiar term. The issues that face all of various bi identities are consistent with each other, and the experiences are generally similar; how one chooses to define bisexual will shape what sorts of solutions and strategies are to be considered. For the purposes of this essay, I will assume “bi” and “bisexual” as an umbrella term for all of these identites.

Academically, bisexuality is a topic that seems straightforward to define, but closer analysis proves the challenge. Yoshino (2000) considers a behavioural model to define bisexuality before discarding it. A behavioural model requiring an individual to have active relationships with both men and women to be considered bisexual. This model has some limited use. Where this definition sees utility is in medical settings; the behavioural model would be useful for examining the spread of HIV for example. This approach makes assumptions about bisexuality requiring multiple sexual partners. Yoshino points to limitations in the behavioural model, and then adopts an attraction model, focusing on the attractions experienced by the individual. Another common model is to rely on self-identification, to rely on who describes themselves as bisexual. This is greatly useful in many contexts, but like the behavioural model runs into limitations. Many of the mental and physical health and the socioeconomic outcomes are not limited to people who are “out”, but impact people who are in the closet, sometimes more. As Stewart (2021) points out, bisexual erasure means that bisexual people face microaggressions on a regular basis, including suggestions about bisexualities (in)validity, which acts to prevent self-identification. Erasure causes real mental harm, and can be seen reflected in the worse mental health outcomes for bisexual people. Bisexual people report higher rates of suicidal ideation than their gay/lesbian counterparts, which are are in turn higher than the heterosexual population (Salway et al., 2019).

The bi community faces worse mental health outcomes compared to both the gay and lesbian community and the heterosexual community. Much of the mental health impacts can be understood through the lens of minority stress disorder (Meyer, 2003) with Salway et al. presenting this as a hypothesis for the higher suicidal ideation and attempt rate among bi people (2019). Much of this is connected to bisexual invisibility, a phenomenon in which bisexuality is either entirely ignored with the focus instead being on the two dichotomies of homosexual and heterosexual (collectively, monosexual) or assumed to be sufficiently considered in a catch-all term such as LGBTQ2S+ or queer. Yoshino (2000) examines three broad strategies to bisexual erasure focusing on a broader systemic level, while Stewart (2021) points to three specifically epistemological strategies that create erasure at an individual level. For Yoshino, erasure can be the result of class erasure (denying bisexuality’s existence in the first place), individual erasure, and delegitimization. Stewart points to testimonial injustice, testimonial smothering, and epistemic microaggressions as the three strategies of erasure, in effect denying bisexual people the ability to be keepers of knowledge about themselves and undermining their confidence in their identity. As a consequence of erasure under Stewart’s individual model, bisexual people—regardless of their expressed or internal identities—face higher mental health challenges, with their marginalized status extending to their ability to know basic facts about themselves.1 Gormley (2018) strives to examine a framework through which psychotherapists can approach bisexual individuals, and concludes that it is not therapy that is needed, but systemic change toward accepting people as they truly are. Without systemic cultural change, there cannot be substantial improvements to bi mental health.

Bisexual communities face a structural deficit in health care and support services—including health treatments and community supports. Bi people are more likely to report poor health, poor mental health, mood disorders, and impairments in vision, mobility, concentration, and memory compared to their monosexual counterparts (Rauh, 2023); bisexuals report higher rights of financial insecurity, lower job security, and higher housing insecurity than their heterosexual and homosexual counterparts (Glassman, undated).2 Some of this has been noted across the literature to be related to invisibility. Service providers are largely unaware of bisexuality or are unequipped to recognize and address issues facing bisexual individuals.

Addressing invisibility is not a straightforward task. Strategies intended to increase the visibility of an individuals bi+ identity are correlated with both a decrease in internalized binegativity and an increase in negative mental health outcomes (Feinstein et al., 2021). Further, acceptance of these strategies is never a guarantee. Bisexuality is seen as disruptive to both heterosexual and homosexual identities (Yoshino, 2000), and efforts to make bisexuality more visible has been noted to be met with hostility by both monosexual groups (Feinstein et al., 2021). In depictions in which bisexuality was openly accepted on screen, it has been noted that these instances are already othered, with their bisexuality being part of their exotic nature, while in others bisexuality is intended to be seen as tragic or as immoral, feeding negative stereotypes rather than addressing them (San Filippo, 2013). More recently, analysis has shown that bisexuality on screen is treated as temporary, with characters settling into their “true” sexuality, following from the behavioural model (Verity, 2026). Destigmatization along the lines expressed by the Bisexual Manifesto, but this is a complicated proposal when also considering the negative consequences visibility is associated with.

It may be tempting to assume that queer theory offers a natural home for solving bisexual issues, but it has been noted that queer theory is often so abstracted that it offers little value to communities (Voss et al., 2014). As outlined by Callis, queer theory is also rooted in frameworks that have not considered bisexuality (2009). Judith Butler conceptualizes gender, sex, and attraction as positioning each other through performance, but does not consider what opportunities or challenges this model faces if attraction can go toward both masculinity and femininity, nor how one can perform bisexuality in an intelligible manner3. Foucault conceptualizes the development of the homosexual community as growing out of a medicalization and speciation of deviant sexual behaviour, while Callis points out the bisexual community grew out of the lesbian and gay communities, not as a response to medicalization. As such theories of identity formulation and community formation are necessary, and need to follow a specific bisexual framework. Media and communications research need to play a role in addressing challenges in visibility and negative discourses surrounding bi+ identities. Given the disparities in socioeconomic markers, policy change is necessary. In the UK, bisexual activists—generally without professionalized lobbyists in contrast to the lesbian and gay communities—have been noted to focus primarily on temporal social and economic interests, with little interaction with public policy and development (Voss et al., 2014). In the US, President Obama met with a roundtable of bisexual activists to discuss issues facing the community (Madhani, 2013), which had not occurred before or since. However, it is unclear what changes precipitated from this meeting; more and broader engagement is likely necessary. Future policy engagement is likely required to create outcomes in public policy, community services, mental and physical health, and in public narratives. All of this requires the community to be centred and empowered to shape the narratives, research, and discussions around bisexuality.

Bisexuality continues to be undermined and excluded. This does real mental and physical harm to bisexual people, including those whose attractions fit a bisexual description but do not accept the label. The bi community receives less resources and support than our gay, lesbian, and trans counterparts. Fewer bi people report being out, and more report being shunned by the larger LGBTQIA+ community when they are. We need to destigmatize bisexuality; visibility is only a piece of that.

1Invisibility and erasure also impact the asexual and nonbinary communities. However, this paper focuses on bisexuality for brevity, and it should be noted that those communities should be offered similar consideration with their own voices being centred in those discourses. Epistemological injustice also affects the transgender community, however that is outside the scope of this paper.

2The same measures are all worse for the transgender and nonbinary communities. exotic nature, while in others bisexuality is intended to be seen as tragic or as immoral, feeding negative stereotypes rather than addressing them (San Filippo, 2013).

3To say nothing about the challenges Butler’s framework faces from identity itself—someone can be bisexual without action.